MADRID, September 11 — Spain’s National Intelligence Center issued multiple warnings before the Ceuta border crisis, according to a trove of declassified documents released by the Spanish government on Wednesday, appearing to undermine Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s account of how much his government knew before the sudden influx of migrants into the Spanish exclave. The documents — alerts, intelligence reports, charts and communications drawn from multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies — point to a campaign that was visible on social media well before the crossing began.
On July 29, a day before more than 72,000 people began pouring into Ceuta, the CNI sent an alert via WhatsApp to the Spanish government’s delegation in the city, warning of calls on social media “for an assault on the fence and by sea tomorrow at 8 p.m.” The declassified WhatsApp message added: “There are two different groups with a total of 180,000 followers, just to give you an idea of its scale.” That same day, the CNI sent a report to Moroccan intelligence services warning of plans on social media for migrants to enter Ceuta on July 30 by climbing the border fence separating the exclave from Morocco, or by swimming around it.
The report noted that migrants might take advantage of Morocco’s national Throne Day, celebrated on July 30. The CNI also issued similar warnings about “several groups on Facebook and WhatsApp encouraging these attempts” in messages to Spain’s Civil Guard police force.
The technical reality of the warnings
Under the hood, the picture the documents paint is not of a single alert but of a multi-channel warning system that lit up across several agencies in the hours before the crossing. The CNI’s WhatsApp alert went to the government delegation in Ceuta; its report went to Moroccan intelligence; its messages went to the Civil Guard. The detail that matters is the timing — all of it landed on July 29, the day before the influx began.
Once thousands of people were streaming across the border on July 30, a Defense Ministry intelligence report issued that day stated that Moroccan forces were passive and acted negligently to stop migrants. It added: “It cannot be ruled out that Morocco may attempt to exploit the situation that has arisen in Ceuta to further its strategic interests.” Morocco’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press about the documents.
Sánchez rejects the interpretation
Sánchez rejected the idea that the declassified documents revealed prior warning of a border crisis of the scale that took place between July 30 and 31.
Writing on X, he said: “The existence of this campaign was known … and was being monitored, but in no way did it constitute or could it be interpreted as an indicator of the scale, nature, or probability of what happened afterward.” The prime minister has defended his government’s handling of the crisis and said last week there was no evidence that Morocco’s government orchestrated the incident — a position that drew further criticism, particularly after a leaked police report alleged the involvement of Moroccan police in the episode.
Several weeks after the initial border rush, Ceuta is dealing with a prolonged humanitarian crisis because of some 5,000 migrants who remain in the small city, according to the national government. Local officials cite a higher figure of up to 10,000 people. They include unaccompanied minors, and migrants are living in makeshift camps or on Ceuta’s streets and beaches, according to local authorities.
Sánchez pledged last week to release documents related to Spain’s deadliest mass crossing, in which NGOs reported that more than 140 migrants died.
In the days immediately before the mass crossing, hundreds of migrants had swum from Morocco to reach Ceuta — a development Spain’s Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska acknowledged at the time, saying authorities were facing “an extraordinary, exceptional situation” and that the Spanish government was “dealing with it with the means that we already have deployed there permanently.” Wednesday’s document trove includes reports from multiple agencies detailing the increasing number of arrivals, a surge that overwhelmed authorities beginning July 30.
There have been major protests in Spain in response to the migrant arrivals, with critics blaming the Sánchez government for its handling of the crisis and his political opponents accusing him of pandering to Morocco. What to watch next is whether the release of the documents shifts the political argument in Madrid, and whether the promised disclosure on the deadliest crossing follows. As ever, the detail that matters is not the existence of the warnings but what the government did with them.
