offered to send<\/a> Spain support from Frontex, its border and Coast Guard agency, to reestablish order.<\/p>\nMr. S\u00e1nchez, the Spanish prime minister, said from the border on Friday that his government was doing everything possible to repatriate the migrants who had entered the country \u201cirregularly.\u201d About 25,000 migrants have already returned home, Spain\u2019s interior ministry said.<\/p>\n
Still, hundreds if not thousands of young men were lingering on the beach in Ceuta on Friday. Some slept on the streets and in city parks.<\/p>\n
The Moroccan government has yet to officially respond to the surge. Moroccan police and security forces were deployed near Fnideq, a town close to the border with Ceuta, where clashes erupted on Friday.<\/p>\n
Thousands of migrants sought to cross from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on Thursday.Credit…Antonio Sempere\/Associated PressWhy does this mass crossing matter?<\/p>\n
The African mainland border has been a major source of domestic political tension for the left-wing government of Mr. S\u00e1nchez and a diplomatic pain point between Morocco and Spain.<\/p>\n
Domestically, Mr. S\u00e1nchez has sought to project an image of Spain as the West\u2019s new melting pot. He has embraced immigrants, especially Latin Americans, who speak Spanish.<\/p>\n
But on Ceuta, Mr. S\u00e1nchez has drawn criticism from anti-immigrant and conservative political opponents, who accuse him of being lax on border control \u2014 as well as pro-immigrant advocates who criticize the government for harsh immigration enforcement tactics.<\/p>\n
Right-wing critics seized on the moment Thursday, blaming Spain\u2019s new plan to give undocumented migrants already in the country a path to legal status for attracting illegal arrivals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an invasion,\u201d said Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right party Vox, who accused Mr. S\u00e1nchez\u2019s government of purposefully inviting in the migrants, who he suggested, without evidence, were criminals, rapists and potential left-wing voters.<\/p>\n
The government, however, has said that the high volume of illegal crossings was not part of its vision.<\/p>\n
Spain is eager to keep up good relations with Morocco, in part to maintain its cooperation in deterring migrant arrivals. After the major crossing episode in 2021, Spanish government officials said that Morocco saw the migrants as a kind of currency, leveraging control over their movement across the border to extract financial and political prizes from Spain.<\/p>\n
Hours after the migrants began pouring into Ceuta that year, Spain approved 30 million euros, about $37 million, in aid to Morocco for border policing.<\/p>\n
It was unclear early Friday what had prompted the latest amassing of people in Ceuta. Several migrants told The New York Times on Friday that they were encouraged to cross into Ceuta by the Moroccan authorities. Mr. S\u00e1nchez said that the Moroccan authorities were willing to help repatriate the migrants.<\/p>\n
Analysts said it was too soon to draw conclusions but that Morocco may have been upset about Spain\u2019s recent effort to deepen ties with Algeria.<\/p>\n
Jason Horowitz, Carlos Barrag\u00e1n, S\u00e9gol\u00e8ne Le Stradic and Monika Cvorak contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tens of thousands of migrants in recent days have crossed onto a tiny peninsula on Morocco\u2019s coast governed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[117518,5886,117519,68725,9,24,63,101263,122,124,123,101262,2208],"class_list":["post-310765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-ceuta-spain","tag-europe","tag-middle-east-and-africa-migrant-crisis","tag-morocco","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-pedro-1972","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-sanchez-perez-castejon","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}