After Ceuta, Europe is once again mired in migration chaos of its own making

European interior ministers held an emergency crisis meeting on August fourth after roughly seventy thousand people crossed from Morocco into Spain's Ceuta enclave, many swimming miles of Mediterranean coastline to bypass border fencing. The Conversation reports that eighty-eight people drowned within forty-eight hours, and Spanish police, working with Moroccan authorities, escorted most of the migrants back to Morocco. Spain's prime minister pointed to online rumors about a Spanish Supreme Court ruling on sea-arrival asylum claims as a trigger, though the scale of the crossing has also raised questions about Moroccan border guards' involvement. As The Conversation tells it, the episode echoes a 2021 standoff over Western Sahara, and it now threatens to reopen the fractures the EU last faced during the 2015 migration crisis.

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