Will the Local Mainstream Media Consider the Accusation That the American Right Was Behind the Ceuta Crisis a Conspiracy Theory or a Fact?

Is the US right behind the migrant emergency in Ceuta? The €40 million loan to Morocco and that article that “predicted” everything.

by Federico Fubini August 1, 2026, 7:22 AM – Updated August 1, 2026, 11:46 AM

Trump immediately took up the mantle of bulwark against illegal immigrants. All the signs point to possible US involvement.

In an era of instantaneous geopolitics, every event becomes a test. This is even more true if the friction occurs along a fragile fault line in the system: in the case of the migrants from Ceuta, across from Gibraltar, in one of the few large straits still open without conditions, and on the border between a European Union country and a low-income African country that has just received $40 million from the US military and security apparatus.

It certainly didn’t take long for everyone to show their colors. Even without the clash between Giorgia Meloni and Madrid’s leader Pedro Sánchez, the European Union immediately began to show new signs of fragmentation. Faced with what Spain views as an invasion and a hybrid warfare operation, the German president of the European People’s Party, Manfred Weber, responded by attacking the Socialist government in Madrid for its migration policies. France also strengthened its border in the Pyrenees, while offering assistance to Spain through the European agency Frontex.

Russia, which has a history of using migrants as weapons to throw at the borders of Finland or Poland ( via Belarus ), wasted no time. It quickly pounced on the political divide: Andrii Sibyha, Ukrainian Foreign Minister, noted yesterday that Moscow-based media outlets had published 1,500 articles on the Ceuta crisis (with Russian media in Italy second only to those in Spain in terms of content).

But it’s the American reaction that’s most pregnant with meaning and questions. Donald Trump predictably placed all the blame on the government in Madrid, a pariah for the White House, especially after Sánchez’s refusal to grant Iberian bases for the Iranian adventure. The president immediately presented himself, on the contrary, as a bulwark against illegal immigrants.

Yet the American right’s attention on Ceuta isn’t new. Several indications suggest that, on the contrary, it has been constant for some time. In March, an article by the right-wing Washington think tank American Enterprise Institute argued that Spanish control of Ceuta and Melilla was “illegitimate” and that Morocco should respond precisely according to the current scenario: with a “green wave” of thousands of unarmed people entering Ceuta. 

Then, in April, Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican congressman close to Trump, pushed through the House Appropriations Committee a document with two implications. Politically, it supports Morocco’s claims to Ceuta and Melilla, which are still controlled by Madrid despite being located south of the Strait. Financially, however, the same House document allocates $20 million from the National Security Investment Programs and another $20 million from the Foreign Military Financing Program to the Moroccan government.

This funding is the clearest sign yet that closer interaction was developing between Rabat and American intelligence agencies. And it was difficult for the former to avoid warning the latter of what was about to happen. There is no shortage of testimonies, including yesterday’s New York Times, according to which it was the Moroccan authorities themselves who pushed the migrants towards Spanish territory.

The White House’s political exploitation of the crisis, think tanks close to the Maga clan promoting the wave of immigration, Congressional support and funding for the anti-Spanish campaign, and intelligence collaboration: not even five layers of evidence, in geopolitics, make proof. But five layers of evidence remain.