Statecraft

24 September 2026 · essay

The Verb That Remains

Ceuta, Frontex and the grammar of governing without a mandate

by Jacob Huibers · Lees in het Nederlands →

Read once more the joint letter of the 22 European heads of government on Ceuta — the Spanish enclave on the North African coast where, at the end of July, some 72,000 people crossed the border from Morocco in a single day — but this time on the verbs alone.1 They are determined. They recognise. They cannot allow. They welcome the cooperation between Spain and Morocco. They expect the situation to come under full control. They take note that no unauthorized onward movements have been recorded towards Europe. They reiterate their readiness to take measures. They would ask the Irish presidency — Ireland currently chairs the Council of the European Union — to convene a videoconference. The ministers should in particular consider enhanced support from Frontex, the European Union’s border and coast guard agency. And the letter ends with the statement that the signatories count on the leadership of the addressees.

Nine verbs for their own position, and not one of them describes an action the writers themselves perform. The letter closes by assigning the acting to someone else. That is the find the Dutch commentator Oscar Hammerstein rightly points to in his commentary of 2 August.2 His conclusion is that administrative language has displaced statesmanship, and his remedy is a better sentence: Europe should have said that Spain’s border is Europe’s border. That leaves the diagnosis standing where it began. It replaces one text with another text.

The sharper question is why this vocabulary is available, and why it is the only one. Whoever holds no instrument is left with verbs of observation alone. Welcoming, expecting, considering and taking note are the forms that remain when the obligation sits in one place and the power in another. The language is the symptom. The division is the cause.

What happened between 31 July and 1 August

Two published texts of this letter exist, and the difference between them is the most instructive document in the entire file.

On 31 July the Slovenian government published the letter with the announcement that fourteen countries had joined so far.3 On 1 August the Italian and Estonian governments published the final text, signed by 22 heads of state and government.4 Between the two versions, the operative verbs have been systematically weakened.

The 31 July version states that the member states must take the required measures. In the final version the signatories reiterate their readiness to take measures. In the 31 July version the leaders expect Spain and Morocco to act swiftly. In the final version they welcome the fact that Spain and Morocco are already cooperating. The 31 July version asks the ministers to examine reinforced Frontex support, the effectiveness of the cooperation with Morocco and, in the words of that text, possible measures should commitments not be honoured. In the final version that last clause has disappeared. The only conditional consequence directed at a third state is no longer present in the final text. Added is one sentence that lowers the urgency instead: no unauthorized onward movements have been recorded towards Europe.

As the number of signatures rose from fourteen to 22, the modality descended from must to readiness. The Netherlands was not among the first fourteen and signed the version in which that movement was already complete.

Every additional signature is an additional veto on every operative verb in the text. A sentence that compels something must be carried by all signatories through to its consequences; a sentence that observes something costs no one anything. Consensus is a grammar, and it selects predictably for the verbs with the lowest price. Whoever maximises the number of signatories thereby minimises the strength of the strongest verb that survives.

Where the tension sits

With the Strategic Triangle — Mark Moore’s model, which judges any public undertaking on three axes: public value, political legitimacy and operational capacity — the diagnosis can be made in a single move. Political legitimacy is present in abundance: 22 of the Union’s 27 heads of government put their name to a single text, which in European relations is rare. Nor is there much doubt about public value, for the objective of a controlled external border is broadly shared and clearly articulated in the letter. The operational capacity is missing, and it is not missing in a material sense. There are ships, cameras, fences and units. What is missing is the power to deploy those means without the consent of the party that has the problem.

That gap is written into the regulation itself. Article 37 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1896 — the European law that governs Frontex, formally the European Border and Coast Guard — provides that a member state may request the deployment of joint operations. Article 41 gives the agency’s executive director one instrument when a section of the border is assessed as critical: he recommends that the member state request support. The member state replies within six working days and gives reasons for a refusal. The heaviest verb the legislator has granted the director of the European Border and Coast Guard is to recommend that another party request.5

Article 42 is the escalation, and its step-by-step construction is instructive. When border surveillance becomes so ineffective that the functioning of the Schengen area — the zone of European states that have abolished checks at their mutual borders — is put at risk, the Council, the institution in which the member-state governments meet, may on a proposal from the European Commission, the Union’s executive, adopt measures by implementing act. The executive director draws up an operational plan within two working days, and that plan comes about through his reaching agreement with the member state concerned within three working days. The member state is obliged to cooperate. If it does not cooperate within thirty days, the Commission may set in motion the procedure of article 29 of the Schengen Borders Code.6

There the chain ends. The strongest means of coercion the system possesses against a member state that does not guard its share of the external border is that the other member states may close their internal borders. The instruments point inward because outward they have nothing to grip.

The same thing in miniature

I sat in a regional collaboration in the social domain — the Dutch term for the municipal responsibility for care, youth services and welfare — seven municipalities around a central city of about 150,000 inhabitants, in the period when waiting times for specialist youth care rose above the statutory time limits. The administrative response came in a form everyone in this line of work recognises. The aldermen — the elected executives of Dutch municipalities — deplored the situation, expressed their appreciation for the commitment of the providers, expected the joint efforts to take effect, and requested the regional directorate to produce an in-depth analysis for the next administrative consultation, the periodic meeting of the responsible aldermen.

At the time I found that text too weak, and said so. That was a wrong diagnosis. The wording was an exact rendering of the allocation of powers. The municipality was responsible under the Youth Act, the Dutch law that makes municipalities responsible for youth care; procurement sat with a joint statutory body of the municipalities; the actual capacity sat with providers facing staff shortages of their own; and the power to force decisions sat with an administrative consultation that decided by consensus and in which every participant held a de facto veto. In that system there was no position where the sentence “we are doing this” would have been true. Anyone who formulates decisively in such a system anyway produces a promise that survives the next consultation and not the waiting list.

The correction, accordingly, lay in the assignment of a power: one regional official with a mandate to force placements outside the framework contract, with a budget ceiling settled between the municipalities afterwards. From the moment that power existed, the verbs changed by themselves. Language follows mandate, in that order. The reverse has never once been seen.

What the causal sentence compresses

The second paragraph of the final letter is the only place in the document that points to a cause. It states that the recent ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court has been used to trigger this attack and to abuse the migration and asylum system. The sentence after it adds a second, more general strand: policies that can serve as pull factors, “such as the regularization of very large number of irregular migrants”.

What that ruling holds can be established precisely. The Fifth Section of the administrative chamber of the Tribunal Supremo, Spain’s Supreme Court, ruled on 29 June 2026, in a judgment made public on 8 July, on the immediate transfer to Morocco of an Algerian man who had been intercepted at sea on 14 November 2024 while swimming towards Ceuta. The tenth additional provision of the Spanish Aliens Act permits rejection at the border for those who attempt to overcome the physical border barriers. Whoever swims overcomes no physical barrier, for at sea there is none. To this category, therefore, the regular return procedure of article 58.3 of the Aliens Act applies. The ruling does not change the law and does not declare return at the border unlawful. It moreover contains a sentence that has gone unnoticed in virtually every political reaction: were physical barriers to be placed in the sea, rejection at the border could be applied once again.7

The road from that judgment to 72,000 crossings has by now been documented step by step, and it is worth laying that road beside the single sentence from the letter.

The Spanish regional newspaper El Faro de Ceuta explained the ruling correctly in the article itself. In the accompanying Facebook post, the phrase en caliente was missing — the two Spanish words, literally “while hot”, that confine the ruling to summary returns without legal procedure. What remained was the message that people may no longer be sent back. That post was shared thousands of times. A Spanish fact-checking newsroom analysed over 1,100 Arabic-language Facebook publications between 8 and 31 July that mention the ruling and Ceuta. In the three weeks after publication this amounted to an average of ten posts a day. On 30 July alone there were 695, accounting for sixty per cent of all posts and more than half of the total reach across the entire period. Among the first spreaders of the chain message was a presenter with Morocco’s public broadcaster with 1.3 million followers, whose original post has since been deleted.8 One Facebook group offering wetsuits, snorkels and swimming lessons, meanwhile, counted some thirty thousand members.9

On 30 July this coincided with Morocco’s Throne Day, the national holiday marking the king’s accession, on which part of the services that normally guard the border had been deployed elsewhere. Around midday the Moroccan border guards stopped their work, and the route shrank from a five-kilometre swim to a walk to the breakwater.10

Set that beside the wording in the letter. The ruling has been used to trigger an attack. The subject of that sentence is a passive construction. Who used the ruling does not appear. The point of dispute that does have an address, the Spanish regularisation decision, appears only as an example within a category: policies that can serve as pull factors, with no country named and no sequel. What is to be done with either finding does not appear.

The causal claim is thereby rhetorically heavy and operationally light. A chain that runs from a correct article through a summary missing two words to a national holiday with reduced border staffing is compressed into a single noun: attack. That word has no address, no procedure and no sequel. As long as the question is only recorded and not assigned, the mention functions as cover. It has been written down, so it has been seen.

This is the difference between forgetting and dissociated knowing. Forgetting can be repaired with a reminder. What happens here is something else: it is there on the page, it is known, it has been confirmed by 22 heads of government, and it activates no follow-up whatsoever. In the second paragraph this is an attack. In the fifth paragraph it is a situation that will come under full control with the Union’s support. Both stand under the same signatures.

The image as point of leverage

On the European side, that same week, a mirror-image compression takes place, and the sharpest observation about it comes from Thomas Hogeling, writing in the Dutch daily NRC. The president of the European Commission called the images from Ceuta unacceptable, and the Dutch minister of Defence used the same wording within the hour.11 The object of the disapproval is the depiction of the event.

It is the same selection the letter makes. Welcoming picks an object the speaker can reach, and unacceptable applied to images does exactly the same. Where no instrument exists to address the event, the object of policy shifts to the only thing that does lie within reach: its appearance. The American vice-president then claimed that the migrants had reached the European mainland, which was factually incorrect, and a former European commissioner read the whole as Europe’s first algorithmic-hybrid attack.12 On both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar the same thing was done: a fact lost its restrictive clause and thereby became usable.

Countability follows that shift precisely. The number of crossings was fixed within a day and cited identically everywhere. The death toll took a week and is still not fixed: 57 on 31 July, 72 on 2 August, 75 on 5 August according to the European Commission, at least one hundred on 7 August, with at least 44 missing besides. Five weeks later the spread has only widened: the Spanish government holds to 75, the Guardia Civil to 83, the mortuary in Ceuta received 88 bodies, and the monitoring organisation Caminando Fronteras arrives at 145.13 The number that drives the political story was available immediately. The number that renders the human outcome had to wait a week for its own registration. A system counts what it believes it can act on.

The smallest unit that can be signed off

There is one commitment in the letter that can be ticked off, and that is the videoconference. Border control knows no moment at which it is complete, no number that can be reported upward, no date on which anyone can establish that it has succeeded. A meeting has all of that. It has a date, a list of participants, an agenda and minutes.

What that meeting produced can by now be read. The Council met by video conference on Tuesday 4 August, formally as an informal video conference of the ministers of home affairs. According to the Council’s own account, the Spanish delegation, the Commission and the European External Action Service — the Union’s diplomatic service — shared their assessment. The member states were united in expressing solidarity. The ministers appreciated the efforts of the Spanish authorities. There was shared understanding of the need to continue combating smuggling networks, to strengthen returns, to strengthen the borders, to build partnerships and to improve foresight. The ministers stressed the importance of a shared situational picture and noted that communication in moments of crisis can be strengthened further. The only outcome document the Council publishes for the meeting is the list of participants.14

The chairing minister summarised the purpose as assessing the instruments already available, establishing where more cooperation is needed, and advancing the joint preparation for the next ministerial meeting and the European Council — the summit of the Union’s heads of state and government — in October. The next regular Justice and Home Affairs Council is scheduled for 1 and 2 October 2026.

The European commissioner for Migration additionally announced five points, among them reinforced deployment of Frontex and a new mandate for the agency, to be adopted after the summer recess.15 There sits the only announced measure that would actually shift a power, and it is scheduled after the holidays, with the October Council as its target date.

The letter further contains exactly one call for implementation, and it is directed at the Chișinău Declaration, whose swift and effective implementation the letter advocates. That declaration was adopted on 15 May 2026 by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe — a different organisation from the European Union, with 46 member states and custodian of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is expressly non-binding, does not amend the Convention and creates no enforceable obligations.16 The only implementation demand in the letter thus attaches itself to the only document mentioned that by its nature cannot be implemented.

The anchoring question need not be put hypothetically in this file, for it has a date. While the ministers were meeting, a WhatsApp group founded on the Wednesday, in which a new crossing was being prepared, grew from 32 to 304 members. The agreed day was 15 August, a Spanish public holiday. What had changed on the European side at that moment, compared with 30 July, was an expressed solidarity and an agenda item for October.

That day has since passed, and the answer to the anchoring question is in. No mass crossing took place. What stopped it was national on both sides: Morocco deployed thousands of officers, carried out raids in the preceding days and put up a metal barrier of some four metres along the road from Fnideq to the border post, while Spain reinforced the border with police, Guardia Civil and army. The strengthened Frontex action the letter offered for consideration played no part in that outcome.17

The border that shifts inward

The close of the letter names the only hard instrument in the entire text. The signatories reiterate their readiness to take any necessary measures, in accordance with Union law and the Schengen Borders Code, including through reinforcing or reintroducing temporary internal border controls.

Now the facts beside it. Ceuta falls under a special regime. Article 41 of the Schengen Borders Code leaves intact the special rules for Ceuta and Melilla — Spain’s other enclave on the North African coast — as laid down in the Declaration by Spain in the Final Act of the Agreement on its Accession to the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement.18 Spain therefore carries out identity checks on everyone leaving Ceuta by ferry or by air, and those are the only exits. Irregular entry into Ceuta confers no right of onward travel to the mainland. The European commissioner for Home Affairs publicly confirmed on 31 July that those exit checks remained in force and that there were no movements towards the European mainland or other member states.19 The letter itself establishes the same, in the sentence just before that close, and the Council repeated it on 4 August.

Italy nonetheless introduced targeted checks on travellers from Spain on Friday 31 July, one day before the joint letter, thereby suspending free movement with a fellow member state.20 The only concrete instrument in the letter had thus already been deployed unilaterally at the moment of signing — against a route which that same letter establishes does not exist.

That is what remains when the only lever reachable from inside points inward. The instrument is chosen for reachability, whatever its efficacy.

There is, moreover, a precedent that shows how strongly position determines wording. When in 2023 over a hundred thousand migrants arrived on Lampedusa, the Italian island in the central Mediterranean, the Italian government argued that migration was a European problem requiring a European solution.21 The precedent shows the predictable outcome of a shared responsibility without an owner: the solidarity clause is invoked by whoever stands on the affected territory, and national policy is called into question by whoever does not. Both positions are available in the system, and which of the two a government takes depends on where the burden lands at that moment.

The only repair that touched a power

One thing did change in these two weeks, and it did not happen in Brussels.

The ruling of 29 June contained the condition under which the instrument of rejection at the border would work again: the presence of physical barriers in the sea. On 1 August the Guardia Civil, Spain’s national gendarmerie, together with the Spanish Navy and the maritime rescue service, began laying a five-hundred-metre pneumatic barrier in the water at the border crossing.22

That is the only intervention in the entire file that touches the allocation of powers instead of describing it. It came about within days, executed nationally, without a European instrument, and it traces directly back to a sentence in the judgment that the letter of the 22 designates as the cause of the crisis. The court that was named as the problem delivered the only instruction that could be carried out.

That completes the contrast. The letter that claims authority produces a meeting. The judgment that supposedly undermined authority produces a barrier. The difference is that the court’s ruling named an acting party that could also perform the act.

Conclusion

The sharpest Dutch reading of these weeks comes from Caroline de Gruyter, writing in NRC, who argues that power increasingly rests on the control of flows, and who adopts for this the concept of rheocracy: the capacity to open or close channels precisely where the chokepoints sit. Her proposal is to sharpen the existing Digital Services Act — the European Union’s regulation of large online platforms — to impose it on neighbouring countries, and to attach sanctions to it.23

That proposal confirms the diagnosis of this piece, even though it is meant as something else. Her answer is an existing instrument with an owner and a consequence. Precisely that is missing from the letter of the 22, from the conclusions of 4 August and from the escalation ladder of the regulation, and precisely that explains why those three texts are written in the same register.

Hammerstein reads this as a crisis of leadership. It is a crisis of architecture. An obligation laid down in one place and a power that sits in another together produce exactly this: a text full of verbs of observation, one countable act, an implementation demand aimed at the only unimplementable document, a sanction carried out on its own traffic, and a moment of decision that slid to October while the next crossing was being planned for 15 August.

Since those days something European has been added, and it confirms the diagnosis more sharply than a counter-example would. On 28 August the Spanish interior minister eventually asked the Commission for support: ten additional Frontex officers to triage the people still remaining in Ceuta, an extension of a running port operation, retention of a patrol vessel and of a surveillance service, assistance from Europol in investigating migrant smuggling, and interpreters from the European asylum agency.24 What is requested there is registration capacity: the processing of those who have already crossed the border. The support had been offered at the beginning of August; the request came four weeks later. In early September the Commission first sent a technical mission to Ceuta to establish the needs on the ground. On 9 September the decision followed: 114.7 million euros in emergency support, and the commitment that Frontex would extend its running operations in Spain into 2027. That is more than observation. But it shifts no competence: the money pays for cameras, buoys, screening and reception that Spain itself manages, and the Frontex deployment is an extension of what was already in place. The European verbs added in five weeks are observing and paying. Holding is not among them.

Whoever wants a stronger verb should not work on the sentence. The apparatus that does not hold its external border moves the border inward, for lack of another button.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Footnotes

  1. Joint Letter to President Costa (European Council), President von der Leyen (European Commission) and the Taoiseach (the Irish prime minister, as holder of the rotating presidency of the Council), 1 August 2026, published in full by the Estonian government (valitsus.ee, 1 August 2026) and by the Italian government (governo.it). Initiated by Italy and Denmark, signed by 22 heads of state and government. France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain did not sign. ↩

  2. Oscar Hammerstein, “Managerstaal aan de poorten van Europa” (“Manager-speak at the gates of Europe”), LinkedIn Pulse, 2 August 2026. The text of the 1 August post by Jetten, the Dutch prime minister, quoted in that piece is not reproduced verbatim here; its purport is confirmed in the Dutch press reporting of 1 and 2 August 2026. ↩

  3. “Prime Minister Janša joins other leaders in calling on the EU to take urgent action over migration pressure”, gov.si, 31 July 2026, with the full text of the letter and the list of the countries that had joined at that point. The Netherlands is not in that list. The Slovenian government has since overwritten that page with the final text and the 22 signatories (last updated 24 August 2026); no archived copy of the 31 July version is available. The account of that earlier version rests on the author’s own reading of the page on 31 July. ↩

  4. “Italy and Denmark put forward letter to EU leaders, signed by 22 Heads of State and Government”, governo.it, 1 August 2026; valitsus.ee, 1 August 2026, with the full list of signatories. ↩

  5. Regulation (EU) 2019/1896 on the European Border and Coast Guard, art. 37(1) and art. 41(1) and (2). ↩

  6. Regulation (EU) 2019/1896, art. 42(1), (4), (5), (8) and (10). Paragraph 10 refers to the procedure of art. 29 of Regulation (EU) 2016/399 (Schengen Borders Code). ↩

  7. Tribunal Supremo, Sala de lo Contencioso-Administrativo, Sección Quinta (Supreme Court, administrative chamber, Fifth Section), judgment of 29 June 2026, made public on 8 July 2026, on the tenth additional provision of Ley Orgánica 4/2000 (the Spanish Aliens Act). Press release of the Consejo General del Poder Judicial, the governing body of the Spanish judiciary. Full citation: STS 814/2026, Rec. 3795/2025 (ROJ: STS 2965/2026). On the passage concerning physical barriers in the sea, in which the court considers that nothing would stand in the way of rejection at the border were barriers to be placed in the sea to protect the border line: Europa Press, 30 July 2026. The Spanish Ministry of the Interior confirmed on 3 August 2026 that the ruling does not amend the Aliens Act and does not declare rejection at the border unlawful. ↩

  8. Maldita.es, a Spanish fact-checking organisation, 5 and 6 August 2026, analysis of over 1,100 Arabic-language Facebook publications between 8 and 31 July 2026. ↩

  9. NRC, the Dutch daily newspaper, “Opgezweept door verkeerd geïnterpreteerd nieuws, online speculatie en valse beloftes” (“Whipped up by misinterpreted news, online speculation and false promises”), reconstruction, 7 August 2026. ↩

  10. NRC, reconstruction, 7 August 2026, drawing in part on observations by El País and by migration researcher Myriam Cherti (COMPAS, Oxford). The Spanish Ministry of the Interior put the figure for 30 July at around 72,000 border crossings; some 48,000 people returned within the same week, rising to around 50,000. ↩

  11. Thomas Hogeling, “Voor politici gaat het om de béélden uit Ceuta” (“For politicians it is about the images from Ceuta”), NRC, 6 August 2026. ↩

  12. NRC, 6 and 7 August 2026; Caroline de Gruyter, “Ceuta en de opkomst van de rheocratie” (“Ceuta and the rise of the rheocracy”), NRC, 7 August 2026, for the characterisation by former European commissioner Thierry Breton. ↩

  13. Reuters, 31 July and 2 August 2026; European Commission (Commissioner Brunner), 5 August 2026; NRC, 7 August 2026. For the later counts: the Spanish government figure of 75; the statement by Juan Jesús Vivas, president of the autonomous city, to El País that the mortuary in Ceuta received 88 bodies; the figure of 83 from the Guardia Civil, Spain’s national gendarmerie (Infobae, 12 August 2026); and the tally by Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish organisation that monitors deaths at the southern border, dated 12 August 2026 and covering 30 July to 11 August, which arrives at 145 dead, 78 on the Spanish and 67 on the Moroccan side (at least 141, 78 and 63, on 4 August), where Morocco officially acknowledges fourteen. That the series does not close has a structural cause: current and wind carry bodies to the Moroccan side, and Rabat has published no official account of dead, injured, rescued or missing. The figures cannot be reconciled with one another and are presented here as a series. Position checked on 10 September 2026. ↩

  14. Council of the European Union, “Informal video conference of home affairs ministers, 4 August 2026”, consilium.europa.eu, last revised 5 August 2026, including the statement by the Irish minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan. The only published outcome document is the list of participants. ↩

  15. Statement by European commissioner Magnus Brunner following the meeting of 4 August 2026, with five action points and the announcement of a new Frontex mandate after the summer recess, with the October Council as target date. ↩

  16. Chișinău Declaration on the European Convention on Human Rights in the context of migration, adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, 15 May 2026. Non-binding; does not amend the Convention and creates no new enforceable obligations. ↩

  17. NRC, reconstruction, 7 August 2026. On the outcome: El Faro de Ceuta, the local newspaper of the enclave, 15 August 2026, on the security deployment on both sides and the absence of a mass crossing; El Debate, 13 August 2026, and The Objective, 14 August 2026, on the Moroccan deployment and the metal barrier of some four metres at Fnideq. Position checked on 3 September 2026. ↩

  18. Regulation (EU) 2016/399 (Schengen Borders Code), art. 41 and recital 37. ↩

  19. Statement by the European commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner, 31 July 2026. ↩

  20. Euronews, 31 July 2026: the Italian Ministry of the Interior ordered temporary targeted checks on non-EU travellers from Spain via air and sea connections. ↩

  21. NRC, editorial “Ceuta laat zien hoe snel Europa zich uit elkaar laat spelen” (“Ceuta shows how quickly Europe can be played apart”), 7 August 2026. ↩

  22. AFP photo report, 1 August 2026, and the Guardia Civil’s own announcement the same day: the installation at the El Tarajal breakwater is a joint operation of the Guardia Civil, the Armada Española (the Spanish Navy) and Salvamento Marítimo (Sasemar, the maritime rescue service). The structure consists of a five-hundred-metre pneumatic barrier reinforced with a line of naval buoys, standing thirty to seventy centimetres above the water and reaching about one metre below it, with an intervening channel allowing Guardia Civil vessels to patrol on both sides. The Ministry of the Interior describes it as a temporary measure rather than a permanent installation; two days after it was laid a buoy anchor was found broken, with repairs scheduled for 6 August 2026. Position checked on 3 September 2026. ↩

  23. Caroline de Gruyter, “Ceuta en de opkomst van de rheocratie” (“Ceuta and the rise of the rheocracy”), NRC, 7 August 2026, with reference to Edward Fishman, Chokepoints (2025), and to the term coined by historian Xavier Carpentier-Tanguy. ↩

  24. Letter from Spanish interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska to Beate Gminder, Director-General for Migration and Home Affairs at the European Commission, 28 August 2026; press release of La Moncloa, the Spanish prime minister’s office, of the same date. The requests were for ten additional Frontex officers for the triage operation, an extension of Operation Minerva in the ports of Algeciras, Tarifa and Ceuta, retention of the patrol vessel Duque de Ahumada during 2027 and of the EUROSUR Fusion Services, continued cooperation with Europol on migrant-smuggling investigations, and assistance from the European Union Agency for Asylum with interviews and interpreters, alongside more than 32 million euros in emergency funding from the AMIF and BMVI funds. On the position in early September: after a telephone call between Commissioner Brunner and Grande-Marlaska, Commission spokesperson Markus Lammert said on 4 September 2026 that some important open questions still had to be answered first, and the Commission announced a technical mission to Ceuta to establish on the ground what support was needed from Frontex, Europol and the asylum agency (Europa Press via Infobae, 4 September 2026; El Debate, 8 September 2026). A day earlier, Prime Minister Sánchez had announced in the Congreso, the Spanish lower house, that he would ask for a permanent Frontex presence in Ceuta. The technical mission travelled to Ceuta in the week of 8 September, a second one to Madrid. On 9 September 2026 the Commission approved 114.7 million euros in emergency support, 82.7 million from the AMIF and 32 million from the BMVI, for border surveillance (thermal cameras, floating buoys, underwater drones), additional staff and equipment, facilities for initial screening and return, and reception, including unaccompanied minors; Frontex is extending its running operational plans for joint operations in Spain into 2027, including Minerva, to continue the deployment of standing corps officers in Ceuta (Europa Press via Infobae, 9 September 2026; Ceuta Actualidad, 9 September 2026). Position checked on 17 September 2026. ↩