Migrant Invasion in Spain Sparked by Court Ruling

A total of 60,000 tough young men from Morocco suddenly arrived in a small town of Spain in northern Africa, many carrying their cell phones in plastic bags to protect them from the water they crossed by inner tubes and swimming. This migration is greater than the population of 95 percent of American cities and towns.

A recent pro-immigration ruling by the Tribunal Supremo, the Supreme Court of Spain, sparked this invasion, creating a lesson for our crisis of illegal aliens in the United States. A week after our own Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in favor of illegals getting birthright citizenship, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants captured at sea cannot be immediately returned to their native country, known as a “pushback.”

Spanish Territorial Policy Minister Ángel Víctor Torres specifically referred to the ruling as a factor contributing to unlawful invasion. He also said that legal experts think the decision will allow eventual deportation of these illegal aliens, but only after time-consuming due process is provided to each of the invading migrants.

The language of Morocco is Arabic. But Spanish is the language of the two Spanish territories in northern Africa, named Ceuta and Melilla, such that many of the migrants cannot communicate with local officials.

Ceuta is located on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea, and residents receive their food as transported by trucks carried by the 30-60 minute hourly ferry ride from Spain. Melilla is located 250 miles eastward on the Mediterranean coast.

These migrants have overwhelmed the local facilities, and are sleeping on beaches with limited access to food or drinking water. Due to the court ruling, they must be admitted for processing in compliance with Spanish immigration rules, which takes time.

If released during this process, as many illegal aliens in America have been, they may not show up for court hearings or appointments with immigration authorities. They can roam about for years, and have rights to migrate further into any European Union country once they are lawfully in Spain.

Social media are being blamed for spreading the word that if migrants swam or boated to Ceuta or Melilla, they would then have a right to stay. This has been criticized as a misinterpretation of the court ruling, but the court did grant special due process rights to those who came by sea rather than by land.

This fiasco gives new meaning to the famous Longfellow poem which exclaimed about the signal to be sent by one or two lanterns in the belfry of Boston’s Old North Church: “One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm.” Spread the alarm, indeed.

The most common water route is a three-mile swim or hanging on to an inner tube while paddling through treacherous waters. Only some young men are fit enough to do that, and reportedly more than 50 have died during this invasion with many dead bodies seen floating in the water now.

CBS News interviewed migrants after arriving in Ceuta, and they explained that they spontaneously jumped in the water and swam the three miles. Crossing the Rio Grande River at our southern border is much easier than that, and President Trump pointed out that it will happen here if Democrats take control again.

No jobs awaited these rugged men upon their arrival, and it is inevitable that local laws will be violated as they look desperately for food, clothing, entertainment, and shelter. Thousands of these men roam the streets, and frightened residents sheltered inside while shops closed up, afraid of vandalism and looting.

One Ceuta resident, Rocío Gil, said on Spanish television that “as a woman, you have to live this to understand what it’s like. It’s an invasion … and there is no law.”

Sound familiar? Judicial rulings in the United States against sovereignty and border security here have caused similar travesties, including the admission of at least a million illegal migrants during each year of the Biden Administration.

President Trump has been trying hard to return migrants who have been here on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as brought in primarily by Democrat presidents. But repeatedly lower federal judges have been blocking President Trump’s orders to deport illegal aliens, and to detain them for deportation without releasing them on bond. 

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a victory for Trump in late June by authorizing him to deport Haitians and others on TPS status without interference by lower court judges. The High Court said that these presidential decisions to deport are largely unreviewable and yet, not long after this decision was rendered, another federal district court judge blocked Trump again on this issue concerning Somalis.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

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