One. Two. As many as three successive barriers of gendarmes in riot gear, auxiliary forces, and Moroccan border police sealed off the Findeq border (Castillejos during the Spanish Protectorate era) with Ceuta at midnight from Thursday to Friday. Dozens of police vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and even a water cannon truck formed a perfectly organized security deployment designed to seal off the autonomous city. Thousands of undocumented migrants had poured into the city by sea and land throughout Thursday, in a human onslaught unprecedented since 2021.

The officers were keeping at bay the hundreds of young people who were throwing stones at them from the nearby hills, against a backdrop of a battlefield scene with vehicles with smashed windows and barricades made of traffic barriers. They stood firm at their posts, whilst thousands of people, mostly young men and minors, marched silently down the beach, splashing through the high tide, with no one to interrupt their procession of shadows as they made their way towards Ceuta. They passed just a few metres from the police lines, heading towards the breakwater that marks the European Union’s border in North Africa.

“We are expecting reinforcements in the next few hours so that we can stem this flow of people,” said a non-commissioned officer from the auxiliary forces (a para-police unit). The officers said they were awaiting a ‘zero hour’ to disperse the young people gathered on the hills of Castillejos, who were planning to storm the border fence, and to put a stop to the uninterrupted flow of Moroccans, groups of Moroccans and some sub-Saharan Africans into Spain.

Isaías, an official from the Castillejos Cerámica district – the closest to the Tarajal border post – would send women with children to spend the night in the village from the final security checkpoint. Dozens of people were spending the night in parks and camping by bonfires on the Findeq site, waiting to try to reach Spanish soil. “Nobody without papers is going to be able to get through up here,” he stated flatly. “Those going down there along the beach will carry on getting through. That’s a problem Spain has. It’s a matter of diplomacy,” he claimed, offering no further explanation.

No one was going home; whole families with children remained seated beside the access road to the Moroccan border. “We’ve come from Tangier. We have passports, but we don’t have visas. I have a job, but I have no future. We believe a better life awaits us in Spain,” confesses Said, a 47-year-old painter, with a distant look in his eyes, in the fluent Spanish spoken by Tangier natives across several generations. He is accompanied by his wife Nesma, aged 36; his daughter Romaisa, aged 12; and his son Tarik, aged two. “With the children, we can’t cross via the beach and the rocks, like all those other people. We’re hoping the border will open tomorrow and they’ll let us through freely,” said a confident Said, amidst groups of young people marching with swimming rings, ready to take to the water in the middle of the night.

Like many others waiting at midnight in Castillejos, they were confident that the following morning they would be able to cross the border without any problems, as if in a dream. This was based on unfounded information circulating on social media, which many believed with religious fervour beneath the full moon, obscured by the sea mist.

The migratory pressure on Ceuta has also shifted to Melilla, where the border with Morocco has been closed to prevent an influx of irregular migrants. Thousands of people, mostly young, have flocked en masse in recent days to both Spanish cities in a phenomenon amplified by digital media and social media.