Thousands of migrants stormed the border into the small Spanish territory of Cueta from Morocco, leading authorities to order the military to restore order.
Videos on social media show the migrants streaming across the border in the territory located in the northernmost tip of Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain.
‘It’s not possible to give precise numbers, but there are thousands of migrants crossing.’
Rachid Sbihi, a representative of Cueta border officers, told the Associated Press that the border had “totally collapsed” under the onslaught.
“The situation is absolute chaos,” he added. “It’s not possible to give precise numbers, but there are thousands of migrants crossing.”
The government indicated that nine bodies of people who died trying to make the crossing were recovered. Local authorities said that dozens have died this year trying to reach Cueta.
Spain’s Interior Ministry said that Moroccan officials were “closely cooperating” with Spain to bring order to the border and to secure “the return, as soon as possible, of all the people who entered Ceuta illegally.”
The mass invasion might be due to a recent Spanish Supreme Court decision that found migrants who arrived in Spain by sea could not be immediately deported without due process — unlike those who crossed by land.
Juan Jesús Vivas, the head of the regional government in Ceuta, had warned Spanish authorities that they were being overwhelmed with migrants and called for a national emergency to be declared.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni decried the breach and threatened to shut down an immigration agreement with Spain in order to defend her country’s sovereignty.
“The images coming from Ceuta are shocking and demonstrate, once again, that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders,” she said in a post on social media translated from Italian.
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“Italy will not stand idly by. We are convening the relevant bodies, and following these meetings, we are prepared to take action,” she added. “We will not yield an inch on the issue of illegal immigration.”
BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre put the invasion into historical perspective.
“After a brutal civil war and decades of rule under Francisco Franco, the communists still managed to remerge and open the floodgates to destroy Spain,” he told Blaze News. “This is why they banned ‘Camp of the Saints,’ because it accurately portrayed the future communists wanted for the West.”
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