Right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and center-left Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday reiterated their push to combat illegal migration after thousands of unauthorized migrants surged into Spanish exclave Ceuta in late July.

“We are aware that many might be wondering about our cooperation. We come from very different political backgrounds, and we certainly do not agree on everything,” Meloni posted in a “joint message” on Facebook, sharing an archival photo of herself and Frederiksen.

“We do not accept uncontrolled immigration to Europe, and we have promoted a strict immigration policy, both in our Nations and in Europe,” the statement continued.

In response to the Ceuta crisis, which reignited Europe’s long-running debate on illegal migration, Denmark and Italy had sent a joint letter to the European Commission demanding immediate action at the EU’s external borders. The letter was co-signed by 20 other European heads of state and government.

Italy has since been one of the harshest critics of Spain’s left-wing government and its migration policies, with Rome announcing border controls for travelers arriving from Spain on Friday.

Meloni and Frederiksen argued that the adverse effects of illegal migration — “rising crime rates, growing pressure on public services, and an erosion of citizens’ trust” — were indisputable.

“For too long, ordinary people … have paid too high a price because of uncontrolled immigration,” they said.

“We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and want to protect it. We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share,” they said.

European People’s Party leader Manfred Weber has called for the swift establishment of migrant return hubs in Africa after tens of thousands of unauthorized migrants surged into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in late July.

In an op-ed for German outlet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that was published Monday, conservative boss Weber wrote: “Ceuta has shown that close cooperation with neighboring countries can work. Morocco immediately took people back. No one was able to travel onward into the Schengen area” and, he added, “Europe must quickly establish return hubs in Africa.”

After tens of thousands forced their way into Ceuta — which is situated in North Africa — several international leaders pointed the finger at Spain’s left-wing government and its migration policy. Madrid had previously granted legal status to half a million unauthorized migrants.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing government are among the harshest critics, with Rome introducing border controls for travelers from Spain on Friday and sparking retaliation from Madrid.

Weber echoed proposals made last week by EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner, arguing that countries outside the bloc could be offered closer trade ties, economic collaboration and legal migration opportunities in exchange for accepting the installation of return hubs.

“Migrants who have no right to remain must leave Europe — no ifs, ands or buts!” he wrote, adding that returns must no longer depend on the political will of individual member countries.

Weber called for expanding the EU’s border and coast guard agency Frontex to 50,000 operational personnel, working alongside national forces and monitoring member countries’ compliance with the bloc’s border rules.

Weber also rejected internal border controls within Europe as a long-term solution. “They may be necessary in exceptional situations. But they do not address the root cause of the problem … There can therefore be only one answer: strong, joint European protection of the external border.”

In early June, the European Parliament and European Council announced new EU rules on migrant returns, including removals to countries outside the bloc in return hubs.

Weber also argued that the Ceuta crisis, which left around 100 dead, was the result of unilateral national action and said that the Spanish government’s “political signals” have had “an immediate impact on migration routes.”

This article has been updated.

PISA, Italy — Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to be beaten at her own game.

With an election approaching next year and a new far-right rival emerging, the Italian prime minister — whose political origins lie in Italy’s post-fascist right — is putting aside the moderate image she has built over her four years in office and hardening her tone on migration and security.

Meloni’s government was the first in the EU to attack the Spanish government over a sudden influx of migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta last week. 

While France and other countries tightened border checks, Italy went further and announced it had suspended the EU’s free-movement Schengen agreement with Madrid. Now, in Italian airports, passengers from Spain are asked to join a different line. 

Meloni’s office has made clear it has no intention of lifting the controls until at least Aug. 15, escalating the clash with Spain, which retaliated by imposing checks on travelers from Italy.

“We will not back down one millimeter on illegal immigration,” Meloni posted on X while her allies attacked the socialist Spanish government, accusing it of failing to manage migration flows. “Defending our borders, stopping human traffickers, and ensuring effective repatriation will continue to be this government’s policy,” she added.

The clash with Spain is just the latest sign that the Italian leader is doing all she can to secure her core, hard-right electorate in the face of a challenge from the right by Roberto Vannacci, a former general and member of the European Parliament.

With an election expected as early as next spring, Vannacci’s far-right National Future party has been advancing in the polls, overtaking one of Meloni’s coalition partners, the far-right League party, and gaining on another, Forza Italia, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. 

For Meloni, who began her political career in the youth wing of Italy’s post-fascist movement, the challenge strikes particularly close to home.

“There is no doubt that there is concern about containing the competition from National Future,” said Marco Tarchi, a leading right-wing political scientist. “It all boils down to a sharpening of tone. The issues — security, immigration, identity — remain the same as before.” 

During the electoral campaign that brought her to power in 2022, Meloni promised to crack down on illegal migration by putting in place a naval blockade off Italy’s coast. Though that project never ultimately happened, Meloni’s government did open detention hubs in Albania to house migrants while their asylum applications are processed. 

Vannacci, who is campaigning on security and a hard line on immigration, is calling for a more radical solution: “remigration” — a yet-to-be-detailed plan to encourage migrants to return to their countries of origin.

The crisis in Ceuta, during which tens of thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave and nearly 100 died, provided Meloni with an opportunity to show that fighting irregular migration remains an absolute priority for her government.

Meloni’s reaction was “purely the result of domestic political calculations,” said Giorgio Gori, a member of the European Parliament from the left-wing Democratic Party. The Italian prime minister is trying to secure her electorate “by showing that she is loyal to the right-wing slogan and propaganda on migration and beyond.”

For Giovanni Orsina, director of the political science department at Rome’s Luiss Guido Carli University, Meloni’s priority at this stage is “that the Brothers of Italy [Meloni’s party] doesn’t start losing votes too” — in preparation for a potential alliance with Vannacci before or after next year’s election.

“Vannacci has been growing a lot in polls, especially over the past two months,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco from the YouTrend polling firm, noting that National Future is polling at over 7 percent. 

“Without Vannacci, the center-right could lose the upcoming election,” he said. “These seven points matter a lot.”

The Vannacci effect

Nicola Procaccini, Meloni’s lieutenant and co-chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, denies that Meloni is shifting on policy to protect herself from Vannacci.

“She stands where she has always stood,” he told POLITICO. “She simply isn’t the racist, xenophobic fascist she was made out to be when she first took office. And she isn’t one now, either.” 

Meloni is also facing a challenge to her support for Ukraine, with both the League and Vannacci advocating a softer line on Moscow, opposing military aid to Kyiv and arguing against an increase in defense spending. 

Though Meloni has portrayed herself as a strong backer of Ukraine, her reliance on the League for support has meant Italy has contributed just €3 billion in four years, roughly the equivalent of €1 a month for every Italian citizen, less than the cost of an espresso.

Italy has also declined to join NATO’s PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List), an arms-buying scheme set up last summer after U.S. President Donald Trump ended new military aid commitments to Kyiv.

Ukraine is where Meloni’s real difference with Vannacci lies, argued Tarchi, who teaches at the University of Florence and is considered the key figure of a movement called the New Right.

“Otherwise, the gap is artificially exaggerated in rhetoric and posturing for tactical reasons,” he said.

Meloni’s allies haven’t ruled out an alliance with Vannacci but they stress that the possibility will depend on where he stands on key values such as foreign policy.

If he seeks “to position Italy, alongside Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, clearly, it is not possible to stand together,” said Procaccini. “If, instead, he chooses the West — the democracies, Western nations, Western liberal democracies — then we can certainly stand together.”

Tourists traveling between Spain and Italy are caught in the middle of an escalating ideological feud over European border security involving Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

Madrid on Saturday restored border controls on ships and flights arriving in Spain from Italian ports and airports, suspending passport-free travel between the two countries. Spain said the move was necessary to protect its citizens from “the persistent irregular migration pressure suffered by the transalpine country.”

The move was an unmistakable retaliation for the checks that Italy has imposed on travelers arriving from Spain since Aug. 1. Rome enacted those measures in response to the mass arrival of people in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, citing fears that the unauthorized migrants could cross the Strait of Gibraltar and take advantage of the passport-free Schengen area to travel onward to Italy and elsewhere in the EU.

Madrid has pushed back forcefully against that narrative, and noted that the migrants could not leave the North African territory because they lack valid IDs required to travel on ferries to mainland Europe.

Spanish authorities and the European Commission this week confirmed that none of the 72,000 people who surged into Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. During a meeting of EU interior ministers on Tuesday, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi publicly praised Spain for its handling of the situation and expressed Rome’s “sincere solidarity” with Madrid.

Yet despite requests from Madrid, the Italian government has declined to end border checks even after it became clear that there was no risk of the Ceuta crisis spilling into the rest of Europe. Rome’s inaction prompted Spain to issue a statement on Friday threatening to adopt “proportional measures” if Rome did not change course by Aug. 9.

After Meloni’s office responded by declaring “Italy does not accept ultimatums or demands from abroad regarding national security and border control,” Madrid moved to reintroduce its own controls.

Magnus Brunner, the European commissioner for internal affairs and migration, sought to mediate in the dispute.

“I was in contact with both the Spanish and Italian Interior Ministers today. Both confirmed that the internal border controls are temporary,” Brunner said in a post on X. “I stressed the progress we’ve made on tackling illegal migration and that trust between Member States is our most valuable currency.”

“Spanish authorities assured us the events in Ceuta will have no lasting effect on the Schengen area. That is why there are signals from Italy that controls could be lifted soon,” the Austrian commissioner added.

A battle fought in passport queues

The tit-for-tat measures are emblematic of Meloni and Sánchez’s broader feud over migration policies.

Italy’s right-wing premier built her political brand as an opponent of migration and has led a charge to get the EU to adopt tougher border controls. Her Socialist counterpart in Madrid has, meanwhile, taken a diametrically opposed approach, arguing that the bloc needs to take in more foreign workers to remain economically competitive and stave off a demographic collapse.

Meloni slammed Madrid after it rolled out a scheme to grant legal status to more than 1 million unauthorized migrants earlier this year, and called for a debate on the consequences of the measure during a meeting of European leaders last month.

As the Ceuta crisis unfolded, the Italian premier spearheaded the drafting of a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa in which 22 EU leaders argued Madrid’s migration policies had undermined the security of the bloc’s external borders.

“We have a duty to effectively deter and relentlessly combat illegal migration, by coordinating our action, strengthening our external borders and addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors, such as the regularization of [a] very large number of irregular migrants,” the leaders wrote.

Madrid has forcefully rejected Italy’s accusations and pointed out that none of the migrants who entered Ceuta could have benefited from the legal status scheme, which is subject to specific qualifying conditions. Moreover, Spanish officials have bristled at Rome’s suggestion that they are mismanaging the bloc’s external borders, pointing to data showing Italy is doing a far worse job of handling unauthorized migrants.

“Italy is the EU member state that has recorded the highest number of irregular crossings in recent years, with figures that have at times been twice those of Spain,” a Spanish government spokesperson said on Friday.

By reintroducing border controls, Italy and Spain have underscored the fragility of the Schengen area, which has existed since 1995 and now extends to 29 European countries.

Under the current rules, any member country is allowed to reintroduce checks for an initial period of up to six months to address security threats. The measures can be renewed for six-month periods for up to two years, and, in exceptional circumstances, up to three years.

Few expect the spat between Rome and Madrid to endure for that long, but in the meantime those traveling between the two countries will have to endure the resulting inconvenience.

Throughout the week, passengers on flights departing from Spanish airports have complained about the scrutiny they have faced upon arrival in Italy, with travelers reporting significant delays as Italian carabinieri checked their IDs. On Saturday, passengers on Italian flights arriving in Spain were subjected to similar controls, with National Police holding travelers who could not provide official identification.

Some 3.2 million Spaniards traveled to Italy in 2024, and 5.4 million Italians visited Spain. The renewed controls could push travelers to reconsider trips between the two countries — and make other European destinations the inadvertent beneficiaries of an ideological battle playing out in passport queues.

This article has been updated with additional reporting by Gabriel Gavin.

VILARDEVÓS, Spain — Nestled in the scrubby hills of northern Spain, this small village feels like a place that has fallen out of time. In reality, it offers a glimpse of the demographic future.

When Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos begins her English lesson on a June morning, eight children are sitting in front of her. The oldest are in sixth grade, the final year of primary school; the youngest are in fourth.

Teaching them together is not always easy, the 30-year-old says. But there are too few pupils to separate them.

The Rodolfo Núñez Rodríguez nursery and primary school opened in 1974 and was built for 700 children from Vilardevós and the surrounding villages. Today, it has 31 pupils, from preschool through sixth grade.

Apart from the school bell, the building is eerily quiet, even during breaks. The silence extends into the village. Most people encountered in its lanes are old. Many houses are abandoned, their façades marked with signs reading Se vende — for sale.

Vilardevós is an extreme case, but not an isolated one. Across Europe, birth rates are falling, populations are aging and fewer young people are entering the workforce.

Modern welfare states rest on an intergenerational bargain. Today’s workers finance pensions and health care for older people, trusting that others will eventually do the same for them.

Low fertility is straining that bargain. Fewer young people are entering the workforce just as large generations approach retirement. Pension reform has already become one of Europe’s most politically difficult issues, and the viability of the Social Security system is a perennial concern in the United States. Those political pressures will continue to intensify as the population ages.

That has forced governments to confront an increasingly urgent question: Can they persuade people to have more children — and, if not, can immigration prevent the demographic arithmetic from breaking down?

Why birth rates are falling

For a population to remain stable over time without immigration, women must have an average of about 2.1 children. According to the latest Eurostat data, the European Union’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — fell to 1.34 in 2024. In Spain, the lowest among the continent’s large countries, it was 1.1 and still declining.

The United States is only slightly less exposed. Its fertility rate, long higher than Europe’s, has also dropped well below replacement level. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it fell to 1.6 in 2024.

For a long time, falling birth rates were not treated as an urgent problem. After all, their effects take decades to emerge: A decline in births does not become a shortage of workers until roughly a generation later. By the time schools empty and pension systems come under strain, the demographic trajectory is set.

Europe and the United States also appeared less exposed than parts of East Asia. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are already grappling with fertility rates below one child per woman.

Then there is the harder question: Why is this happening?

There are many competing explanations. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has argued that part of the fall in the U.S. reflects a public-health success: Americans have become better able to avoid teenage pregnancies and unintended births. But beyond that, the story is similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

Housing is too expensive. Women are prioritizing their careers. Men are taking longer to mature. Religion has lost influence. Smartphones and social media are weakening real-world relationships. Fear of climate change makes having children feel useless and cruel.

Each hypothesis has its adherents, along with its own books, podcasts and preferred evidence. None, on its own, fully explains the decline.

Berkay Ozcan, professor of social and public policy at the London School of Economics, has little patience for attempts to identify a single culprit. The decline, says the 47-year-old father of two, is driven by a combination of causes. Insecure labor markets and high housing costs play a role, as do changing values, longer periods of education and rising expectations of parenthood.

But all these factors have a common effect: postponement. Surveys show that young people still want, on average, about two children. But many delay parenthood until they feel professionally, financially and emotionally ready, Ozcan says — and often wait longer than they intended.

Eva Beaujouan agrees, and she speaks from more than just professional experience. When the University of Vienna demographer was 34, she and her partner started trying to have a child. They finally managed five years later, after using IVF.

“I would never have imagined, starting at 34, that I would have issues,” says Beaujouan, who is now 48 and has focused her research on late parenthood.

Delayed parenthood extends well beyond affluent urban professionals. “Postponement is now observed in all social strata,” she says.

Assisted reproduction can create false reassurance. It may improve the chances of conception, but it cannot guarantee a child or fully overcome the effects of age. “It is invasive,” she says. “It is expensive. It creates inequalities. Not many people can afford it. And of course, it often fails.”

The cost of children

The fertility problem reflects a basic economic contradiction: Children are essential to the welfare state, but economically disadvantageous to the households that raise them.

In the past, children contributed labor and provided security in old age. In modern welfare states, that role has largely disappeared. “Although having children is necessary for the functioning of the welfare system, they do not have an economic function within the household,” says Beaujouan.

For all the meaning and fulfillment they may bring, raising children is expensive, can interrupt careers and may reduce lifetime earnings. Bringing up a child costs roughly $320,000 for a middle-class family in the United States, according to inflation-adjusted estimates based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In Britain, the Child Poverty Action Group, an anti-poverty charity, estimates the cost at about £250,000. For a household solely concerned with financial security in retirement, that money may offer a greater economic return if it is saved and invested instead.

What may be rational for individual households, however, can be damaging when repeated across an entire society.

Martin Bujard, research director at Germany’s Federal Institute for Population Research, explains the problem from an office in Wiesbaden crowded with stacks of paper. Before the conversation can begin, the 50-year-old sociologist and father of two has to clear a space for our two cups of coffee.

For an industrial country, Bujard says, quality of life does not depend primarily on the number of inhabitants. The crucial factor is how many people are entering the labor market relative to those retiring.

“If that is roughly in balance, the economy and welfare systems work,” Bujard says. “If only a few young people come up behind while very many retire, things become tricky.”

Searching for solutions

Back in Vilardevós, Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos remains in the classroom after the lesson and talks about her own plans. The 30-year-old is childless, like all her female friends.

“We work, and afterward we want fun or time for ourselves,” she says.

Collazos and her friends sometimes discuss having families, but she worries about what motherhood would require her to give up. “If I had a child, I could no longer continue my current life,” she says. She also worries about how pregnancy would change her body.

Governments across Europe have spent years trying to make such decisions easier. So far, none has found a reliable way to reverse falling fertility.

Two decades ago, Germany launched a major expansion of childcare for children under three. The reform was aimed primarily at closing the gap between the former West and East Germany. During the years that followed, fertility rose from around 1.4 to around 1.6 children per woman. But then the gains petered out — and the rate fell again. By 2025, it had reached a new historic low of 1.32.

Hungary relied more heavily on financial incentives. Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government — proudly “illiberal” by its own description — offered parents bonuses and fiscal advantages, including an income-tax exemption for mothers with four or more children. Fertility rose from about 1.25 in the early 2010s to around 1.6 in 2021, before falling back to roughly 1.4.

Attempts at persuasion have fared no better. In 2016, Italy introduced a “Fertility Day” campaign. One advertisement showed a young woman holding an hourglass beside the slogan: “Beauty has no age. Fertility does.” The campaign provoked widespread outrage.

“It is very difficult to develop such campaigns,” says Beaujouan. “If you tell women at a later stage that if they do not start having children before such an age they will have trouble, then they start feeling guilty and anxious.”

Her assessment of the policy record is harsh. “I have not seen anything yet that would increase fertility rates,” she says. “Some policies can lay reasonable conditions for having children. And if they were not here, fertility may be even lower in some places. But they are rarely a motor of fertility rates.”

The immigration alternative

There is one response that has changed the demographic numbers where family policies and tax incentives have not: immigration. Spain offers perhaps the clearest example.

By the logic of its birth rate, the country should be shrinking. Instead, its population has grown from 46.5 million a decade ago to almost 50 million today. Foreign-born workers accounted for more than 70 percent of Spain’s employment growth between 2019 and 2024, according to an analysis by Esade, a prominent Spanish business school.

The country’s immigration policy is, however, hardly a template for the rest of Europe. Much of its recent immigration has come from Latin America, especially Colombia and Venezuela — countries where Spanish is the mother tongue and Christianity is the dominant religion. That does not make integration automatic. But it makes things easier.

In much of the rest of Europe, immigrants have been harder to absorb: Newcomers often arrive without the language, credentials or cultural familiarity that make it easier to find work and settle quickly. Migrants from Muslim-majority societies have also faced greater political and public pushback than Spain’s Latin America newcomers.

That may help explain why Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been more willing than most European leaders to embrace large-scale immigration. Spain, he argues, needs younger workers to keep its economy growing and its welfare state afloat. His government recently launched one of Europe’s largest regularization programs for undocumented migrants. By early July, 1.2 million people had already applied.

But immigration solves one demographic problem by creating a different political challenge. Sánchez’s critics argue that the government counts the economic benefits while underestimating the pressure on housing, schools and public services, as well as the difficulties of integration and social cohesion.

Spain’s conservative opposition and the far-right Vox party accuse Sánchez of rewarding illegal immigration. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has claimed that the government is creating a “pull effect” and accelerating what he calls an “invasion.”

The recent crisis in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on Morocco’s northern coast, demonstrated just how politically explosive immigration has become in Europe. In late July, tens of thousands of migrants, almost all of them young men, crossed into the territory, overwhelming local authorities. Some factors remain disputed, including the role of the Moroccan government, but the political backlash was immediate: Twenty-two of the EU’s 27 leaders signed a letter warning that Madrid’s generous policies risked creating a “pull factor” for irregular migration and placing pressure on other member states.

This criticism is backed by a public increasingly skeptical of large-scale immigration. Recent polling by YouGov, a London-based opinion research firm, found that majorities in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Denmark said immigration over the past decade had been too high. In the United States, about half the population supports deporting immigrants back to their countries of origin.

The controversy will not be resolved anytime soon. Just as the consequences of collapsing birth rates take decades to become fully visible, the long-term effects of large-scale immigration unfold slowly.

Renewal and resistance

Luton, 1,350 kilometers north of Vilardevós and half an hour by train from London, offers a contrasting picture of Europe’s demographic future. The English city has just under a quarter of a million inhabitants. In 2024, its fertility rate was 2.0, the highest in the country. The national figure was about 1.4.

Data provided by the city administration points to one important difference: Women in Luton tend to have children earlier. One in three births is to a woman aged 25 to 29, compared with one in four across England. Births to women aged 35 to 39, by contrast, account for a larger share nationally than they do in Luton.

Immigration is central to that pattern. Two-thirds of babies born in Luton in 2025 had a mother who was born abroad, according to figures provided to POLITICO by the local council. Across England, the share was about one-third.

Tahmina Saleem, the Labour politician who chairs the town council, describes Luton as “super-diverse and proud of it.” Born in Sheffield to parents from Punjab, she argues that the city attracts families because it still offers jobs, including through its international airport, while housing remains cheaper than in London. Behind her, on the wall, hangs a portrait of King Charles III in a scarlet parade uniform.

The diversity is most visible in the neighborhood of Bury Park, where many newer families have settled. Shops, travel agencies and religious institutions reflect the area’s large Muslim population and its links to South Asia and elsewhere. Women in headscarves and hijabs are a common sight. Travel agencies advertise the Hajj and Umrah, the major and minor pilgrimages to Mecca, and grocery stores sell halal products.

Luton is also illustrative of the political backlash that large-scale immigration can engender.

While Saleem sees immigration as having made the city younger and more open, others see Luton as a symbol of a country becoming demographically and culturally unrecognizable.

The far-right English Defence League emerged in the city in 2009, drawing heavily from the football-hooligan milieu and organizing against immigration and Islam. Its best-known leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, is also from Luton. Robinson has built his political identity on the same themes.

His influence now extends far beyond his hometown. In May 2026, Robinson drew roughly 60,000 supporters to a “unite the kingdom” rally in London, evidence that the grievances first mobilized in places such as Luton have become a national political force. The previous September, an even larger rally drew an estimated 110,000 people and featured a video link with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has repeatedly amplified Robinson’s agenda on his social media platform X.

“Tommy comes by now and then with cameras and foreign journalists to provoke us,” says Hamza Parker, a volunteer at Discover Islam Public Information Centre, a nonprofit organization in central Luton. “But he does not succeed.”

Limits of policy

Back in Vilardevós, Mayor Tamara Balboa García studies the population pyramid of her municipality. Of its 1,598 inhabitants, just 66 are 14 or younger. More than 960 are 60 or older. For every child or teenager, there are almost 15 senior citizens.

If the trend continues, García says, the village will eventually cease to have a future. But she insists that decline is not inevitable. The municipality helps returnees and newcomers find housing and work, particularly in agriculture, wine production and elder care. And even though the municipality is shrinking, it still has a supermarket, a pharmacy, a football pitch, an outdoor swimming pool, several bars, a bank branch and, of course, the school with its tiny classes.

A local nonprofit, Portas Abertas (“Open Doors”), plays a central role in the effort to keep the city alive. Andrea Rodríguez, the social educator who runs its local office, describes how the organization helped one immigrant family settle in the village: The mother, a trained nurse, found work quickly; the father was placed first as a truck driver and later as a baker; their child joined an after-school program.

Rodríguez’s own life is an example of what Portas Abertas wants to achieve. She left Vilardevós as a young woman for her training, but later returned. Four years ago, she bought a house for €92,000.

When the reporter looks at her incredulously, Rodríguez laughs. “It was even in good condition!”

Unlike the mayor, the schoolteacher and many other women in the village, Rodríguez has a child: a four-year-old daughter.

Before the reporter can ask whether she plans to have another child, Rodríguez answers.

“One child is enough.”

GROSSETO, Italy — The Italo-Spanish clash on border controls is escalating.

Italy on Friday said it has no intention of suspending border checks on travelers from Spain, “a friendly country,” and rebuffed Madrid’s threats to retaliate if Rome maintains the emergency measures it instituted in response to the mass arrival of migrants in the Spanish exclave Ceuta last week.

“Italy does not accept ultimatums or demands from abroad regarding national security and border control,” the Office of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote in a statement.

Earlier in the day, the Spanish government had threatened to take “proportional measures” if Rome did not stop its reintroduced border checks and temporary suspension of the Schengen Agreement by Aug. 9.

In its statement, Rome said it would keep these controls in place “at least until August 15 and, in any case, until security and terrorism risks to Italy can be completely ruled out,” adding that a new “migratory wave” is expected in Ceuta on that date.

“Only when it is certain that there will be no security or terrorism risks for Italy, that there will be no new wave and that there are no irregular migrants heading toward European territory will it be possible to reconsider what has already been decided,” said the document.

BRUSSELS — EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner warned on Thursday the bloc is vulnerable to unauthorized migration if control of its external borders depends on the goodwill of neighboring countries.

Brunner’s remarks came at an extraordinary meeting of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, a week after a major migration surge from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which has reignited debate over how the EU should secure its frontiers.

“What we have seen in Ceuta during the past few days was … a test of our resilience and also of the security of our external borders,” Brunner said.

“We must cooperate with our neighbors, of course. But as long as control depends on the goodwill of one neighboring state, we remain … vulnerable,” he added.

Brunner described last week’s events in Ceuta, when around 72,000 migrants forced their way into the Spanish exclave, as “solid proof that we need a strong and effective tool — and different tools — to combat smuggling.”

Ceuta Mayor-President Juan Jesús Vivas, who also attended the meeting, said that around 100 people died during the mass border crossing, and that between 3,000 and 5,000 remained in the exclave.

Brunner said the EU should use all available leverage to secure the cooperation of countries bordering the bloc.

“It’s about further strengthening the work with partners … [We need to] step up our migration diplomacy by reinforcing comprehensive partnerships to stem this illegal migration, secure effective returns and create the right opportunities for people at home,” he said.

Brunner said cooperation with non-EU countries was essential “because the goal there is to make sure such events never happen again.”

The conservative Austrian commissioner’s party colleague Integration Minister Claudia Bauer warned on Thursday in a written statement that “another attempted mass crossing” in Ceuta could happen on Aug. 15, quoting Spanish media.

“In light of reports of another attempted mass crossing, Spain must immediately and significantly reinforce border protection in its African enclaves and ensure that this time it will hold,” she said.

The United States on Thursday moved to allay fears that it was questioning Spain’s sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla, but criticized Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government for its “refusal” to defend the North African exclaves from a “migrant invasion.”

Tens of thousands of migrants poured into Ceuta last week from Morocco in a surge that heightened Spanish fears about the vulnerability of its North African cities to hybrid attack.

Amid the crisis, Spanish politicians and media raised concerns about the warming relationship between Morocco — which claims Ceuta and Melilla — and the U.S. President Donald Trump, who was infuriated by Socialist Sánchez’s refusal to back the war in Iran.

Many in Madrid expressed fears Washington could decline to rein in Rabat, and pointed to a recent U.S. Congress report that described Ceuta and Melilla as being in “Moroccan territory” and was supportive of negotiations on the “future status” of the cities. But U.S. State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott insisted that there has been no change in U.S. policy on the exclaves.

“The United States unequivocally supports Spain’s sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla,” he told POLITICO.

The State Department noted that the congressional report did not represent U.S. law.

Pigott said that allegations suggesting Washington was questioning Spain’s continued control of the cities had been “pushed by nefarious actors who wish to distract from the Spanish government’s shameful refusal to defend its people from the migrant invasion of its territory in Ceuta.”

He also argued the Spanish government was solely to blame for the crisis in the exclave, into which 72,000 unauthorized migrants surged last week.

“The invasion of tens of thousands of migrants into Ceuta is a direct consequence of the Spanish government’s refusal to defend their sovereignty, secure their borders, and protect their people,” he said.

The crisis in Ceuta initially prompted widespread criticism from EU leaders such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen, who last week attacked Spain for having “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration.”

Ceuta is not in the Schengen area, and is separated from mainland Spain by the Strait of Gibraltar.

While the EU member countries have since reversed course and praised Madrid for its handling of the situation, Pigott on Thursday called on Spain to “take all necessary actions to remove illegal migrants and regain control over its borders.”

“Unrestricted mass migration into Ceuta endangers the Spanish people and threatens the security of Europe,” he said. “The State Department stands with the Spanish people and all Europeans in defense of their sovereignty and welcomes all efforts to repel the invasion, remove illegal migrants from European territory, and secure Europe’s borders.” 

Additional deaths involving Delaney Hall, a private immigration jail run by The GEO Group in Newark, New Jersey, has sparked renewed calls for the closure of the notorious 1,000 bed facility even as the Trump administration dramatically increases arrests and detentions across the nation.

On Saturday Aug. 1st, 41 year-old Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died while in custody. Multiple press reports and Lopez-Cornejo’s mother maintain that Lopez-Cornejo, a father of a 12-year-old girl, who suffered from chronic illness, died from medical neglect after he was refused treatment. He had been in the United States for 20 years and was taken into custody on his way to work.

In a statement shared with CNN, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that Lopez-Cornejo “experienced a medical emergency while in ICE custody,” and GEO Group staff “responded immediately and called 911 for emergency medical services.”

After the confirmation of Lopez-Cornejo’s death, Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) disclosed he had learned of a third death in late July in which the detainee experienced a seizure not long after arriving at Delaney Hall. According to Menendez’s account, GEO Group and ICE officials told him they called for EMS and the unidentified man was taken to University Hospital where he died. His name and additional details have yet to be disclosed. 

Back in December 2025, 41 year-old Jean Wilson Brutus died while in custody in Delaney Hall. At that time, 30 people had died in ICE custody across the country that year.

Unlike the high profile violent confrontations witnessed in Minneapolis that sparked massive street protests and culminated in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Peretti, ICE is now utilizing non-law enforcement databases for programs like Medicare to target and apprehend thousands of people who are actually in this country legally. In fact, scores of American citizens have been abducted off the street and detained.

Since Delaney Hall re-opened as a private immigration prison at the start of the second Trump admin, grassroots groups like NJ Pax Christi and Eyes on Ice NJ have had a humanitarian witness at the site located next to the Essex County Correctional Facility in the Ironbound section of Newark.

Back on May 9, 2025 masked federal agents abducted Newark Mayor Ras Baraka off of a public street outside the private jail, only to release him later that day after a mass non-violent protest. While charges were dropped against Baraka, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice continues to prosecute Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) on charges related to that day that could result in a 17 year jail term. McIver, along with Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. (D-N.J.) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), who were also on site at Delaney Hall that day, insist they were there only fulfilling their constitutionally-protected oversight duties.

The city of Newark has been pressing for The GEO Group to permit a fire inspection and obtain a certificate of occupancy for the sprawling private jail. Back in 2021, activists had successfully lobbied the state of New Jersey to prohibit municipal and county governments as well as private facilities from entering into new contracts with ICE to house immigration detainees.

Private jailers like The GEO Group successfully challenged the legislation in court. At the time, the Biden administration was holding more than 26,000 detainees nationwide at more than 120 sites. Multiple press reports indicate the Trump administration is now holding almost three times that number at over 450 facilities in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and in U.S. territories. In July, ICE reported it had arrested 51,000 people, the largest number in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, according to ABC News.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump pledged to target millions of U.S. residents and “deport them so rapidly” he would “rescue every town that had been invaded and conquered.” In that same campaign, Vice President JD Vance advanced an admittedly completely fabricated story about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ domestic pets. The claim was so outrageous that local municipal officials and Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine spoke out on behalf of Springfield’s Haitian residents, who they said had filled jobs in the rust belt town that had actually helped revive the local economy.

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At least 22 people have died in ICE custody in 2026, with close to four months still to go in this year. That does not include the multiple fatal shootings just since Trump was sworn in for the second time. According to the Guardian, last month’s fatal shooting of 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was the 10th such fatal ICE shooting since Trump regained office.

In an interview with WBAI Pacifica Radio, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.), who has been in Congress for less than three months, recounted that in her multiple visits to Delaney Hall “what was clear was that there were individuals being detained with chronic health conditions that were not receiving the kind of care that is necessary and mandated by their doctors.”

Lack of access to timely medical care has been a long standing and well-documented complaint throughout the ICE system and private contract immigration prisons across the nation.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall. Under the GEO Group business model, detainees maintain the private jail for a dollar a day. Earlier this summer, large crowds of protestors converged on Delaney Hall in support of the hunger strikers.

While New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill has been a vocal opponent of the private jail and was turned away when she initially came for a visit, she did call out the New Jersey State Police at the height of street protests outside Delaney in solidarity with the hunger strikers.

The move marked a significant escalation and came after the Trump administration threatened to suspend the processing of international flights at Newark Liberty International on the eve of the World Cup, in which New Jersey had invested heavily.

Henry Craver, writing for the American Friends Service Committee, described GEO and ICE’s repressive and violent response to the show of solidarity for the hunger strike.

“In one incident guards tried to remove a strike leader soon after the strike began,” Carver wrote. “When other detained people formed a human shield around him, armed officers returned in force. They swept through multiple units, physically assaulted people, and deployed tear gas. People in those units told AFSC that they struggled to breathe for hours after.”

Carver continued: “The retaliation escalated in the following weeks. Hundreds of detained people have been transferred out of Delaney Hall to facilities in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — far away from their families and communities.”

With a Republican Congress very much under the control of Trump, efforts at oversight of ICE and the private prison system that has expanded significantly has been left to the Democrats, who are in the minority. Grassroots efforts at the municipal level have been far more effective in galvanizing resistance to the creation of new immigration prisons.

State lawmakers also have a mixed record when it comes to reigning in ICE’s mass deportation strategy. A federal judge recently struck down New York State’s legislation to prohibit federal agents from wearing masks while letting stand a provision that prohibits town and county governments from entering into so-called 287(g) partnership that deputizes local police to enforce immigration laws.

“I need to say that every single American should be paying attention to what’s happening here — our government is treating a set of people with such impunity, with such inhumanity it is costing them their lives,” Mejia said. “Now we can debate our positions on immigration and immigration reform but I think it is fair to say that essentially sentencing people to death is not what the American people are calling for or want.”

Mejia continued: “It is imperative that at least the state of New Jersey is pushing hard to make sure that our state officials have full and unrestricted access to these detention centers to ensure the well being of these individuals. These are human beings.”

Trump has repeatedly described undocumented immigrants as “animals,” “illegal monsters” and “gang members” staging “the largest invasion in the history of our country.”

These claims, which have been the way the Fox media complex frames the immigration, are easily debunked by study after study that found immigration into the U.S. is actually associated with lower crime rates.

A previous version of this article originally appeared on WBAI. Read the original here.

The post Two more deaths at Delaney Hall detention center as ICE arrests surge appeared first on Salon.com.

Working at the European Commission is one of the most coveted civil service jobs in Brussels. Yet, officials employed there describe high pressure, bureaucracy and burnout.

Our colleague Seb Starcevic has interviewed dozen officials from different commissioners’ cabinets and directorates-general, varying in age, nationality and seniority. On the podcast, Zoya Sheftalovich and Sarah Wheaton parse through what these insiders had to say about their working conditions.

Next, last week’s Ceuta crisis — when a surge of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave — has revived a basic question: Why does Spain still hold territory in North Africa? With Madrid increasingly isolated from both U.S. and European allies, doubts are also growing over who would support Spain if Morocco moved against Ceuta or its other North African city, Melilla.

Plus: Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharma company of Ozempic fame, is launching a pill version of its weight-loss drug Wegovy in Europe … and transatlantic tensions are already brewing.

Questions? Comments? Get in touch! You can message us or send a voice message to our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

PARIS — The United States is dragging its feet on approving President Emmanuel Macron’s pick for French ambassador to Washington amid a spat over human rights at the United Nations, according to three people familiar with the dispute.

Macron may have charmed U.S. President Donald Trump with pleasantries and fine dining at Versailles Palace during his June visit to France, but the delay in approving the new envoy reveals that diplomatic tensions between the two countries are still simmering.

Aurélien Lechevallier, a longtime Macron ally, was expected to take office next month but his posting is yet to be approved by the U.S. Department of State — a process that is usually a formality between allied countries.

According to two people familiar with the matter, the Trump administration took offense at a social media post from France’s mission to the U.N. in Geneva that criticized Washington’s decision to side with Russia and North Korea against the renewal of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk’s mandate.

“The U.S. used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore,” wrote the French mission on X last month. “And the world no longer listens to it.” The post prompted the U.S. delegation to walk out of a U.N. Security Council meeting in protest.

“The United States is very disappointed in the irresponsible and disrespectful rhetoric from the French,” said an official from the Department of State in response to a written question about Lechevallier’s clearance process. “We are responding appropriately to their comments.”

Türk, an Austrian national who has been high commissioner since 2022, has drawn U.S. ire for his criticism of the country’s immigration policy and Israel’s war in Gaza.

Two of the individuals also expressed hope that the dispute, which was first reported by Reuters, would blow over and Washington would not block Lechevallier’s appointment.

Love-hate relationship

The spat illustrates the volatile relationship between the U.S. and its oldest ally France. While Macron and Trump have shared moments of camaraderie in front of the cameras, they have polar opposite world views and regularly spar over NATO, Ukraine and trade relations.

Trump’s participation in the June G7 summit in Evian was praised as a high point in the relationship, with the U.S. president showing signs of support for Ukraine and prolonging his visit to France to join Macron and his wife for dinner at the gilded Versailles Palace.

“We have our ups and downs in our relationship with the U.S.,” said a former French official, who has kept informed of the transatlantic relationship. Macron is capable of challenging America’s bullying at the Economic Forum of Davos, but “can also hug President Trump and invite him to sign his Iran deal in Versailles.”

The hold-up in Lechevallier’s approval process will end up being “an anecdote,” said the former official, who, like others quoted here, was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “But it confirms we are not afraid of a confrontation” with Washington, they added.

For a senior figure from Macron’s Renaissance party, however, the U.S. targeting a senior French diplomat is “staggering.” Lechevallier is currently chief of staff to Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot and was Macron’s classmate at the elite ENA graduate school.

“We’ve been extremely cooperative, even considerate, on Iran … We’ve been polite and diplomatic. And we’re faced with something that is a bit humiliating,” said the official.

Diplomatic tensions

The French foreign ministry declined to comment on Lechevallier’s stalled approval procedure and has not protested publicly. But Paris has not rowed back its criticism of the U.S. human rights record either.

“Our position was known. We supported the renewal of the high commissioner’s mandate,” said a French diplomat. “Differences of opinion over a [U.N.] vote do not call into question the strength of our relationship or our ability to work together.” Last month, the U.S. voted against the renewal of Türk’s term, accusing him of leading the U.N. human rights system “to its deathbed.”

Despite the personal relationship between Trump and Macron, the dispute comes at a time of simmering diplomatic tensions with the U.S. Barrot has sharply criticized Washington over its military intervention in Venezuela, as well as its threats against Greenland. He also vowed France would never give in to U.S. “blackmail” over trade tariffs.

Relations with U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Kushner have also soured over his perceived lecturing on the fight against antisemitism in France and his alleged interference in French political life. Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, was twice summoned to the foreign ministry.

“Kushner had problems [with the French foreign ministry] … He was humiliated. Maybe this is also payback,” said the former French diplomat.

Jerry Wu contributed reporting.

The news came the way it always comes in my family, sideways, through a phone. I was in my living room, sunk into the chaise lounge I retreat to, comfortable in a way that now embarrasses me, when I heard my mother’s voice in the other room calling my father. Something in her tone. You learn your parents’ registers the way you learn weather, and this was the register of bad news from far away. 

Greece was burning again. Crete worst of all, in the south, where a fire near Rethymno had driven some 8,000 people from their homes in a single night. Fires on Paros and Andros, scattered across the Aegean. And then the name I had been bracing against: Lesbos. A blaze near Plomari, the old ouzo town on the island’s south coast, was eating coastal homes while roughly 100 firefighters fought it, and a seaside resort emptied into the dark. 

The fires are not a freak event, and no one in Greece pretends they are. They began in early July and have barely paused since; this is the second week of a major outbreak, dozens of fronts at once, fed by a record European heat wave, a spring of too little rain and the Meltemi, the dry seasonal winds that come screaming down the Aegean in July and August at up to 100 kilometers an hour and turn a spark into a wall. Scientists have said it plainly: Climate change is loading the dice, the Mediterranean’s pine and olive and dry scrub catch faster and burn hotter than they used to, and summers like this one are becoming the rule, not the exception. Greece has always burned in August. It has not always burned like this. 

My father is from Lesbos. My mother’s people are from there too, further back, so the island runs down both sides of me like a watermark you only see when the light hits it right. It is where my family’s houses stand, where a portion of my life is already promised, where I know I will one day go to live for a while, because the pull has never once loosened. It is, if I am honest, where I come from in the deepest sense, not only the blood but the making. My love of poetry, my hunger for art — I trace all of it back to that island, to Sappho, who sang there 26 centuries ago and somehow reached a Greek-American boy in Pennsylvania and told him what he was.

I have not set foot on Lesbos in 10 years.

That is the sentence, the amount of time, I keep circling. Now I watch it burn on a screen from a soft chair, an ocean and a lifetime away, useless. 

There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell. You refresh a feed for news of a village whose name your relatives say with their whole mouths and you say with an accent that gives you away. The distance is not only miles. It is the knowledge that everyone there is living what you are merely watching, and that watching, from comfort, is its own small shame.

I was made by that island’s water. They tell me that as a baby, I would not leave the sea. I would stay in the Aegean until I cried at being carried out, submerging myself again and again until, the family story goes, I matched the sea, my skin gone the temperature of it, indistinguishable, a small animal that had already decided where it belonged. Even now, when I step into that water, something in me resets. The sun on it, the salt, the particular blue no postcard has ever gotten right — it reconnects me to my own being, returns me to whatever I was before the world got complicated. 

There was a year, when I was barely one, that the island nearly kept me for good: a lost passport, a wary government that took an American baby for a Greek one, and a U.S. congressman who finally untangled it and got me home. It is a longer story than this essay can hold, but its shape has never left me. The point is this: That island has been trying to keep me since before I could speak, and I have spent a decade letting the ocean between us win.

And here is the thing I cannot hold simply, what kept me on the chaise longer than the news required. That same sea that baptized me is, for thousands of others, a grave. 

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Lesbos is not only my father’s Eden. For more than a decade it has been a frontline, the first Greek soil that exhausted, terrified people touch when they cross from Turkey in boats that were never built for open water. My sacred water is someone else’s last water. My homeland is a stranger’s checkpoint and, if they are lucky, their refuge.

I don’t know how to make those facts, that awful juxtaposition, clean, and I have stopped trying. Both experiences are true. The island is sacred to me for what it gave me, and it is sacred to the fleeing for what it offers them, which is the oldest thing land can offer: safety, ground, a place to stop running. 

When the fires come, they do not check anyone’s passport. They take the olive groves and the goats and the summer houses, and they take the makeshift shelters and the fragile new footing of people who had already lost everything once. In Crete, the deadliest front this week, three firefighters have already died trying to hold the line against the blaze. That is what steadies me and breaks me in the same breath, that a land this rich in what it gives, in shade and figs and refuge and myth, keeps burning while the world half-watches. 

A Mediterranean summer on fire has become a genre now, a seasonal rerun we thumb past on the way to something else. This year’s footage looks like last year’s, and that of the year before, a sameness that is its own quiet violence. Repetition sands horror down into wallpaper. But it is not wallpaper to the family loading a car in the dark, or to a firefighter’s widow, or to a man in Pennsylvania watching his one island go up in flames on a screen. Familiar is not the same as bearable.

What the fire has done, strangely, is make me want to go back not to take but to give. To help. To stand on the ground instead of scrolling past it. I have spent ten years loving Lesbos as an inheritance, a thing I own from a distance, and the smoke on my screen has shamed that love into something more useful. My mother’s ancestors and my father’s boyhood and Sappho’s fragments and the sea that raised me are all still there, waiting, under a sky the color of alarm. My uncle is in Athens. My family’s houses are still standing, for now. And I am here, finally understanding that loving a place from afar is not the same as loving it.

I think I will go to Lesbos this year. Not because the fire is out, but because it isn’t. The sea is still there. It is still the color no one can name. And it is still, for me and for the strangers arriving on its shore, the difference between drowning and being born.

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The surge of migrants into the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla last week has thrown Madrid onto the defensive over the status of its two autonomous cities in northern Africa — and Morocco’s long-standing claim to them.

The ease with which tens of thousands of migrants penetrated the border has ramped up a sense of vulnerability to hybrid attack. And that alarm has only been amplified by a fear that traditional NATO allies in the U.S. and the EU are no longer fully dependable because of their political feuds with Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

Buoyed by an increasingly warm relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, Rabat is seizing the moment and doubling down on its claims to Ceuta and Melilla, which it sees as occupied territory, in Morocco’s state-aligned press.

But, more alarmingly for Madrid, that argument is no longer coming exclusively from Rabat. Questions over Spain’s centuries-old control of the fortress cities have also been raised in a U.S. Congress report, and by Israel’s ambassador to the U.N.

It is a sign of the level of concern in Madrid that the government is now having to make public declarations on a point of international law that — only a week ago — it would have thought was self evident.

“Ceuta and Melilla are not to be touched,” Defense Minister Margarita Robles said during a press conference on Monday. “Everyone must be very clear that Spanish territorial integrity and sovereignty are not up for debate.”

The government’s rejection of Morocco’s claims has done little to reduce worries in Spain over what would happen if Rabat dials up the pressure. This week, national newspapers have been filled with columns expressing fears of a “Green March 2.0” — pointing out the parallels with Morocco’s use of a mass popular mobilization to take over the province of Spanish Sahara in 1975.

José Manuel García-Margallo, who served as Spain’s foreign minister between 2011 and 2014 and is a member of the center-right People’s Party, said it was vital for Spain to show its control over the cities is not negotiable.

“Do you think the British would have allowed 60,000 Spaniards to enter Gibraltar?” he asked. “I’d encourage this government to be a little bit more British.”

“We should aim to be friends with Morocco,” he added. “But it’s important to ensure that even your friends understand that there are red lines that simply cannot be crossed.”

Imperial legacies

Ceuta and Melilla are among the few remaining vestiges of the vast Spanish Empire. They have been under Madrid’s rule since 1668 and 1497, respectively, and are fully-integrated parts of Spain — and the European Union.

But since gaining independence from France in 1956, Morocco has consistently claimed sovereignty over both settlements, which it characterizes as “colonies” that are “occupied” by Spain. And those territorial aspirations have been underscored in the country’s largely state-aligned press following last week’s events.

“The central question is no longer whether these cities will be reintegrated into their natural environment, Morocco, but how long it will take and how many human tragedies will have to be endured in the meantime,” wrote Le360, a publication considered close to the Moroccan royal household.

Morocco’s claims on Ceuta and Melilla have lately been boosted by Rabat’s international allies — among them, a prominent Republican politician in the U.S.

In an interview with Spanish newspaper El Español in April, U.S. Congressman Mario Díaz-Balart, who serves on the powerful Committee on Appropriations, stated “Ceuta and Melilla are in Moroccan territory” and questioned whether the autonomous cities “are part of Spain or should be part of Morocco.”

He also noted that while Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez was “jeopardizing” the alliance between the U.S. and Spain by opposing the war in Iran, Rabat had been Washington’s steadfast ally.

Weeks later, as U.S. lawmakers prepared an appropriations bill that included a proposal to allocate $40 million to Morocco for defense and security expenditures, Díaz-Balart submitted a congressional report noting “the Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory and remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim.”

The document additionally expressed support for “diplomatic engagement” on “the future status” of the autonomous cities.

Speaking to POLITICO, Díaz-Balart denied the congressional report had been intended to signal a major shift on Ceuta and Melilla.

“It’s been an issue of dispute for some time. Morocco has been a strong ally of the United States — it was the first country to recognize the United States. And we’ve had good ties with Spain over the years. All we were asking is for Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio to keep an eye on this and be sure that both sides are talking about this issue,” he said.

But the congressman’s willingness to give a platform to Rabat’s claims on Ceuta and Melilla reflects how close Morocco and the United States have become since 2020. That year, Trump took the landmark step of recognizing Rabat’s claim to the disputed territory of Western Sahara in exchange for the normalization of relations between Morocco and Israel. 

Last week, Trump reaffirmed that recognition in a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Rabat at the same moment as the migrants surged into Ceuta. Rabat showed its pleasure with this decision by announcing that it had renamed a major highway after the president.

Adding to Spain’s concerns about its territories in North Africa, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon reacted to the images of last week’s migrant influx by hitting back against Madrid’s criticism of the war in Gaza and challenging Spain’s presence in Ceuta and Melilla.

“Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa,” he wrote on X.

Israel’s head of mission in Madrid, Dana Erlich, later clarified that Danon’s comments did not represent an official position.

García-Margallo said the problems with Díaz-Balart and Danon were a consequence of Sánchez’s foreign policy.

“I’m also not surprised that those claims are being amplified in other parts of the globe … The current government’s relations with the Trump administration and with the government of Israel have deteriorated tremendously in recent times,” he said. “When you make a point of showing you’re against specific countries, consequences are to be expected.”

The specter of the ‘Green March’

For Spaniards, the idea that Morocco could engineer a situation to annex territory is far from theoretical speculation. Many still remember Morocco’s 1975 “Green March,” an operation that forced the handover of Spanish Sahara.

“Rabat deployed tens of thousands of civilians to overwhelm border posts in Spanish Sahara in 1975 as dictator Francisco Franco lay dying,” said José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez, history professor at Madrid’s Rey Juan Carlos University and author of a book on the fall of Spanish Sahara.

“At the time, it wasn’t clear who was running — or would run — Spain, and Morocco took advantage of the weakness of the Spanish state to take over the province,” he said.

Half a century later, he said, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI had detected similar weakness in Sánchez, whose minority government is unable to pass major legislation and whose inner circle is caught in web of embarrassing corruption scandals.

As former Foreign Minister García-Margallo put it: “I don’t have the slightest doubt that the current government’s weakness has contributed to this crisis.”

Historian Rodríguez Jiménez said Rabat had sporadically tested Madrid’s willingness to defend its territories in northern Africa.

In 2002, a squad of Moroccan marines launched an “invasion” of Perejil Island, an uninhabited Spanish islet off the coast of Ceuta, sparking a week-long crisis that only concluded when Spanish special forces were deployed to evict them.

And in a strikingly similar incident to last week’s massive influx of migrants into Ceuta, in 2021 some 8,000 people surged into the autonomous city after Morocco abruptly withdrew its gendarmes from the border.

Rodríguez Jiménez argued Sánchez had blundered by responding to that incident by reversing Spain’s historic support of Western Sahara’s self-determination and accepting Morocco’s bid to control the disputed territory.

“The government opted to placate Rabat, failing to understand that this was seen as a sign of weakness in Morocco, a country which is not our friend, and which has every interest in exploiting our vulnerabilities,” he said.

“What happened last week was a dress rehearsal for an eventual invasion,” he added. “And Rabat has noted Madrid’s complete inability to repulse that attack.”

Spanishness ‘beyond all doubt’

Spanish officials reject the accusation that the Ceuta crisis has made Madrid look weak, with Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska on Tuesday insisting the crisis showed the country to be a “strong” and respected regional player.

That ability to project strength to Rabat is increasingly important as NATO’s commitment to defending Ceuta and Melilla appears less certain than it once did. Back in 2022, then-Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg specifically listed the North African cities as falling under the alliance’s aegis.

But things have changed since then. Trump has cast doubt on NATO’s commitment to common defense and his relationship with Spain, which he has repeatedly lambasted for its lackluster defense spending and failure to support the Iran war, is particularly rocky.

When asked about NATO’s position now, an official said: “We don’t speculate on hypothetical scenarios,” while adding the alliance was “ready and well-postured to protect and defend all allies.”

García-Margallo said that NATO’s common defense commitment is only as strong as “our allies’ willingness to support us … the interpretation of the terms of any treaty is ultimately a political decision.”

POLITICO asked the Spanish foreign ministry what measures the government had taken to address concerns about the international conversation over Ceuta and Melilla, especially in relation to Díaz-Balart’s congressional report.

The ministry did not answer the questions directly, but hit back at any assertion that the cities’ sovereignty could be negotiable.

“The Spanishness of Ceuta and Melilla is beyond all doubt and is recognized as such by international law and the entire world,” a spokesperson said.

Eric Bazail-Eimil contributed reporting from Washington. Victor Jack contributed reporting from Brussels.

French and British authorities rescued more than 150 migrants from a distressed boat crossing the English Channel Tuesday after the vessel’s engine caught fire.

The incident came less than a day after U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham vowed his government would be “relentless” in curbing small-boat crossings.

The vessel left France on Monday night. During the overnight crossing, five people accepted assistance from French rescue crews, but the remaining passengers refused and continued toward Britain.

On Tuesday morning, French maritime authorities said in a statement that the boat’s engine “caught fire” and its structure “deteriorated very rapidly,” triggering an immediate mayday call.

All 157 people on board were brought to safety and returned to Boulogne-sur-Mer in France.

The French maritime prefecture added that when migrants are “determined to reach the United Kingdom” they often refuse assistance and accept it only in “situations of extreme urgency.” No deaths were reported.

The incident “underlines the terrible dangers of small boat crossings,” a U.K. government spokesperson said in a statement seen by POLITICO on Tuesday. Britain will “continue to work relentlessly with the French and our partners overseas to prevent these perilous journeys,” the spokesperson added.

Burnham visited Dover on Monday, saying his two-week-old government was already making progress in tackling irregular migration. “People want to see this issue addressed,” he said, pointing to a doubling of enforcement officers targeting smuggling gangs on both sides of the Channel. But he also called for “a system that offers safe routes for people.” More than 2,000 migrants have reached Britain by small boat since Burnham entered Downing Street.

The rescue came as migration climbed back to the top of Europe’s political agenda following the arrival of 72,000 people in Ceuta last week. After days of governments trading blame, EU interior ministers closed ranks behind Spain at an emergency meeting Tuesday, insisting the Schengen zone had never been at risk and calling for closer coordination in responding to future border crises.

BRUSSELS — EU interior ministers sought to draw a line under five days of bitter recriminations over the arrival of 72,000 migrants in Ceuta, closing ranks behind Spain and accusing smugglers and foreign actors of exploiting the crisis to divide the bloc.

The show of solidarity marked a sharp shift after EU leaders publicly blamed Madrid’s migration policies for creating a crisis they warned could spill across Europe, prompting Italy to suspend air and sea links with Spain.

Following a three-hour emergency meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, ministers praised Spain’s response, stressed that the passport-free Schengen zone had never been at risk and called for tighter coordination among capitals during future migration emergencies.

The meeting followed days of unusually public anger at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. In a letter signed by 22 EU leaders, governments demanded tougher action to stop irregular arrivals, while Italy suspended air and sea transit with Spain over fears that migrants could move onward through the Schengen area. Sánchez hit back by urging his counterparts to show “understanding” rather than turn Spain into a scapegoat for a crisis on the EU’s external border.

By Tuesday, ministers were keen to close ranks. The EU’s Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner said the influx had been “instrumentalized” by smugglers and human traffickers, while French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said ministers had condemned efforts to use images of the crossings to divide the bloc.

“The divisions that we have heard over the weekend were not welcome and they were exploited by foreign countries,” Nuñez told reporters. “But what I heard this morning reassured me.”

EU countries that had publicly called out Spain over its migration policies took a more conciliatory tone in the meeting, apparently appeased by the speed and effectiveness of Madrid’s response to the crisis, three EU diplomats with knowledge of the meeting said. They were granted anonymity to discuss the confidential talks.

Matteo Piantedosi, Italy’s interior minister, praised Spain’s efforts to control the unrest, the diplomats said. Rome clashed with Madrid on Friday, calling for Spain to be kicked out of the Schengen zone.

Another diplomat referred to the past 24 hours of diplomacy as EU “couples counseling.”

Brunner declined to speculate about whether Morocco had played a role in the influx. The question is sensitive because Spain relies heavily on Rabat to police departures toward Ceuta, and the episode revived memories of 2021, when thousands entered the exclave after Moroccan forces relaxed controls during a diplomatic dispute with Madrid.

Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska instead praised Morocco’s cooperation in bringing the latest crisis under control and described Tuesday’s meeting as “entirely constructive.”

He said 70,000 of the 72,000 people who entered Ceuta had since returned to Morocco and insisted the Schengen area had never been at risk. Ceuta has special arrangements requiring travelers to show documentation before continuing to mainland Europe.

Grande-Marlaska also called Italy’s transport restrictions unjustified and said he expected them to be lifted. He rejected suggestions that the crisis had made Spain look weak.

“Spain has come out looking like a strong, reliable partner,” he said. “This isn’t a matter that depends on testosterone.”

Ministers also called for better early-warning systems, closer coordination between capitals and stronger cooperation with non-EU countries to prevent departures.

Several pressed for faster work on so-called return hubs outside the bloc. Greece proposed an EU mechanism allowing asylum procedures to be suspended and migrants returned immediately in extreme circumstances, according to a Greek government official.

“The EU’s external borders are our shared responsibility, and migration requires a united European response,” said Ireland’s Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan, who chaired the meeting.

The Commission is expected to consider further measures in September after examining what caused the influx and whether social media helped organize or amplify it. Strengthening the role of the EU border agency Frontex is among the options under discussion.

Max Griera and Nektaria Stamouli contributed to this report. This article has been updated.

LONDON — Two of Britain’s leading right-wing politicians are stuck in a will-they-won’t-they tussle — and it could have big implications for the next general election.

Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe have spent the week flirting with, retreating from … and then once again talking up a rapprochement between their two parties, Farage’s Reform UK and Lowe’s Restore Britain.

It comes after months of bitter briefing against Farage by Lowe, whose hard-right party — while still polling in single digits — has eaten into support for Farage’s much larger right-wing force.

POLITICO recaps the saga — and tries to map out what it could mean for the wider British right.

Who are the key players?

Farage has been a dominant figure in British politics for many years. He was originally leader of the Euroskeptic UKIP, then the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK after a comeback at the 2024 general election. That election delivered five Reform MPs, including Farage … and Rupert Lowe himself.

Best known to some for a tumultuous stint as chair of Southampton Football Club, the multimillionaire Lowe briefly joined Farage in the European Parliament in 2019 as a Brexit Party MEP. He unsuccessfully stood for Reform in a 2024 by-election, but the pair were reunited after the general election when Lowe won the coastal seat of Great Yarmouth.

Why did they fall out?

It’s complicated. On the surface, it’s a policy split, but there’s plenty of personal bad blood too.

Farage has always taken a hardline approach to immigration — but some of Lowe’s stated positions went too far even for him. The Great Yarmouth MP publicly backed the deportation of families of people convicted of child grooming, a move the Reform UK leader rejected. Lowe said he had been “silenced” by the party.

Then Elon Musk weighed in. In January last year, the tech tycoon used his platform to lay into Farage, saying he was no longer the right person for the job — and giving his backing to Lowe. Lowe is a hit on the Musk-owned social platform X, where his lengthy posts have topped up his earnings.

After publicly criticizing Farage’s management of Reform, Lowe lost the Reform UK whip in March 2025. In a significant escalation, he was reported to the police over alleged threats of physical violence against Reform chairman Zia Yusuf — though no further action was taken by the authorities.

The pair’s mutual loathing only seemed to escalate.

Lowe sat as an independent MP in the House of Commons, before setting up Restore Britain as a cross-party group, publishing policy papers on mass deportations and holding its own inquiry into the emotive issue of grooming gangs.

It became a full-blown party this February, capitalizing on the Great Yarmouth MP’s growing X following.

What’s that meant for Farage?

The Reform UK leader, who has a well-established history of falling out with one-time allies, initially kept his distance from Lowe, claiming the hard-right party’s following is minimal.

However, Lowe’s movement has already proven effective at splitting the already fragmented right-wing vote. The Great Yarmouth First party, an affiliate of Restore, picked up nine seats at May’s local elections and denied Reform a majority on Norfolk County Council, although Reform still made huge gains nationally.

At the Makerfield by-election, which Labour’s Andy Burnham won shortly before becoming British prime minister, Restore Britain bagged 6.8 percent to Reform’s 34.5 percent. Even though their combined totals wouldn’t have beaten Burnham, Farage lambasted the result, asking Restore voters: “What do you want?”

A similar pattern emerged at last week’s Greater Manchester mayoral by-election to succeed Burnham, where Restore picked up 8.7 percent of first preference votes.

What’s the latest on a rapprochement?

After the Greater Manchester contest, Lowe shot a 12-minute X video calling for the two men to put “personal differences aside” to deliver credible change. Lowe’s monologue had five conditions. They included a referendum on the death penalty, banning halal and kosher meat, and preventing former ministers from the center-right Conservatives who’ve defected to Reform from having a role in a future Farage government.

The following day, Farage claimed he had reached out to Lowe but had received no reply. Lowe then denied this and accused Farage of “outright lying about our private conversations” — even publishing a purported WhatsApp message from the Reform UK boss.

Farage told Times Radio those claims were “extraordinary” and that Lowe is “not a very easy person to deal with.” But he insisted he has a willingness to “put past differences aside in the interest of getting some sort of unity” … which suggests the pair might come to the table.

What does this mean for the Tories?

There’s another layer of intrigue to this row, too.

The Conservatives — who were running Britain until a spectacular general election defeat in 2024 — have ruled out any arrangement with Farage’s Reform UK, decrying the party’s economic policies and questioning Farage’s financial affairs.

But they have sounded much more conciliatory towards Lowe.

The party gave him one of its seats on the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, which scrutinizes government spending. Party Leader Kemi Badenoch even praised Lowe as someone who “turns up to work. Nigel Farage doesn’t.”

Those answers suggest that placating Lowe — and his huge online following — is no longer seen as bad politics for Britain’s two big right-wing parties.

On July 26 in Pennsylvania, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries introduced the party’s Fighting for an Affordable America agenda to mark 100 days until November’s midterm elections. The plan, according to the Associated Press, calls for “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.” 

Democrats always want to run on kitchen table issues, and this time they have an opening you could drive the Titanic through. Even among Trump’s most fervent followers, the war in Iran is unusually unpopular; it’s the first time I can ever remember Republicans not rallying around a war started by a GOP president. In fact, the party used to rally around so-called “Democrat wars” too, at least most of the time, even as they condemned them for being mistakes. Trump, though, seems to have broken that knee-jerk reaction, which, if it lasts, may end up being one of the only things he has done right, even if it was by accident. 

“Holding Donald Trump accountable” is obviously a necessary goal, and we can only hope that if they take back the House, and perhaps the Senate, Democrats will spend the next two years hammering Republicans on corruption, malfeasance, criminality and incompetence, pounding as many nails into the MAGA coffin as possible in anticipation of a hard-fought 2028 campaign. After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.

As we get further into Trump’s second term, the rise of the progressive left, generated at least in part by the desperate need for generational change, is bringing some longstanding issues to the surface. Younger Democrats aren’t talking about politics in technocratic terms, as the party’s politicians have been doing for the last 30 years, offering up 10-point economic plans and telling the public how they can work the system more efficiently. They see politics in largely moral terms, and they are ready to address some of the thorniest moral issues we face. 

Oligarchy is at the top of the list, an issue that has animated the left since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011. Fifteen years later, a global backlash against billionaires who have outsize influence over politics — and who do not pay their fair share — is taking shape.

The left also rejects America’s global role as security guarantor, particularly in light of the tragedy taking place in Gaza, which has been aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The party’s mainstream has moved substantially in their direction, leading to an unprecedented split in the House caucus in July that saw over a hundred House members vote to cut off aid to Israel. Whether it was done out of genuine desire to end the blank check or simply to allow members a symbolic vote going into the midterms, it’s clear that the intense opposition to Israel’s actions have made a difference, despite the ongoing debate about the scope of the policy. 

These moral issues are animating a significant faction of the party, and they are having an impact. But I find myself wondering why another moral issue, much closer to home and shocking almost beyond comprehension, isn’t getting much play on the campaign trail. 

We are witnessing a fascist crusade taking place on the streets of America every single day that has seen federal immigration officers shoot and kill at least eight people since January. Over the weekend, a Salvadoran immigrant being held at the notorious Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey died after experiencing a medical emergency, the second death the facility has seen since December.

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The treatment of immigrants of all statuses, and sometimes American citizens who happen to look “foreign,” is an abomination. But aside from perfunctory nods to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it seems to have become background noise.

Masked federal agents are killing people with impunity. They are splitting up families without compunction, throwing people in camps and deporting them to countries they have never even visited. Now, with the permission of the MAGA-compliant Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in the process of deporting Haitians who have been here legally for decades by forcing them to leave immediately or wear an ankle bracelet in anticipation of being sent to a country which our own State Department says is too dangerous to visit. These are people who own property and businesses, and many of them have American-born children. They also happen to be Black. 

This is not a popular policy. While most congressional Republicans still approve of Trump’s immigration agenda, many of them aren’t thrilled with the administration’s deportation policy. According to Strength in Numbers, most Americans are appalled and prefer a path to citizenship for non-criminals. Trump’s cruel priorities clearly work for many rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have some timorous Democrats spooked. But if there has ever been an issue that the left should be screaming about every single day, it’s this.

Many Americans are out in the streets protesting and putting themselves on the line. In fact, average voters may be more up in arms than Democratic politicians. If the progressive left wants to consolidate the party behind a more virtuous set of values, this is the issue that will rally the entire spectrum of ideologies. Jeffries and party leaders should move it to the very top of the agenda, and make Trump’s abuses a rallying cry across the country.

The Democratic Party should not play politics with this; the president’s abuses are happening right here on our own streets, in our own communities. It is the moral issue of our time.

The post Democrats’ missed opportunity on Trump’s immigration cruelty appeared first on Salon.com.

Home affairs ministers are meeting this morning as the fallout of the Ceuta crisis continues to roil Europe.

Last week’s sudden influx of migrants into the Spanish exclave — most of whom have since returned — sparked heated exchanges between European leaders. On the show, hosts Zoya Sheftalovich and Ian Wishart preview whether today’s emergency meeting can cool tensions, and what measures the Commission may propose to address concerns across the bloc.

Next, a drought in Hungary and Romania could grind nuclear power plants to a halt since the River Danube has fallen too low to cool their reactors. Budapest and Bucharest are on high alert over the risk of an energy crisis in the coming days.

Plus: The Belgium push to encourage young people to sign up for voluntary military service appears to have worked, as the program starting Sept. 1 is already fully booked.

Are you taking part in voluntary military service, in Belgium or elsewhere? We’re intrigued. Get in touch on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

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Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the prime minister of Greece.

Europe’s security environment has fundamentally changed.

Alongside conventional military threats and cyberattacks, the EU is increasingly confronted with a more insidious form of hybrid pressure: the deliberate instrumentalization of migration by state and nonstate actors seeking to test Europe’s resilience, undermine its cohesion and extract political concessions.

Recent events at Europe’s borders, most notably in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, are the latest reminder that migration is no longer just a humanitarian issue or management challenge. In some cases, it has become a tool of geopolitical coercion.

The EU has made important progress on this issue with its Pact on Migration and Asylum. It has introduced mechanisms to manage migratory pressure, including flexibility in its procedures and solidarity among member countries. But these tools are designed for situations that remain, at their core, manageable. They do not adequately address scenarios in which migration is weaponized, or where flows are engineered, amplified or facilitated in a way that creates a de facto hybrid challenge.

To be sure, we don’t yet know what caused the situation that unfolded in Ceuta last week. But scenarios like these are not unprecedented.

Greece faced a similar situation at its land border with Turkey in Evros in 2020, as did Lithuania, Poland and Latvia at their borders with Belarus in 2021. What we are witnessing in these cases is not a gradual increase in arrivals but the sudden, massive and often coordinated movements of people — sometimes in the tens of thousands within just a few days — that overwhelm national capacities and test the EU’s resilience as a whole.

In such extreme circumstances, the immediate and full application of standard asylum and reception systems for all arrivals is not simply difficult — it is often impossible. Systems risk paralysis, public trust erodes and the very functioning of Schengen is put under strain.

Europe needs to acknowledge this gap and act decisively.

What is required is a dedicated European framework for situations of mass and instrumentalized migratory pressure, with clear and objective criteria for its activation. These criteria should combine quantitative elements — such as the scale and speed of arrivals relative to a country’s capacity — with qualitative indicators, including any evidence of coordination, facilitation or involvement by third countries or organized criminal networks.

Once triggered under a specifically defined EU emergency regime, a mechanism like this could allow for temporary, proportionate and strictly controlled adjustments to standard procedures. Accelerated asylum processes must also continue to be part of the toolbox, particularly for individuals coming from countries with low recognition rates for international protection.

But this is not sufficient.

Europe has to be honest about the limits of its fast-track asylum procedures. In clearly defined exceptional situations of extreme and disproportionate pressure — whether at land borders or following mass arrivals by sea — member countries should be given the option, under a dedicated EU emergency regime, to temporarily suspend asylum applications for newly arrived persons while proceeding with the swift return of those not entitled to remain, in full compliance with the EU’s legal obligations.

This is not a departure from Europe’s values but a necessary adaptation to new realities.

Moreover, any such measures must be strictly time-bound, proportionate and subject to robust safeguards. Full respect for EU law, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and the principle of non-refoulement remains non-negotiable. At the same time, safeguarding international obligations must go hand in hand with the EU’s ability to protect its borders and preserve its internal stability.

Crucially, this balance cannot be sustained without genuine European solidarity. No member country facing this kind of pressure should stand alone. Operational support from EU agencies, coordinated return efforts and financial and technical assistance must be automatically mobilized whenever a mechanism to this effect is activated.

Without such a framework, the risks are clear. Frontline countries remain exposed, incentives grow for hostile actors to exploit migration for geopolitical purposes and internal divisions within the bloc deepen. Most importantly, citizens’ confidence in Europe’s ability to effectively, fairly and collectively manage its borders will continue to erode.

Europe has always adapted its policies to changing realities. Migration is no exception. And recognizing that it can be weaponized is not alarmism — it is realism.

The EU must now equip itself with the legal and operational tools needed to defend its external borders, deter those who seek to exploit its openness and respond to this new reality firmly, lawfully and collectively.

POLITICO occasionally publishes opinion pieces from guest authors to offer our readers a range of perspectives on the intersection of power and politics. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of POLITICO.