They shouted "Viva España!" as they came up out of the water.
Young men who have swum around the breakwater at Tarajal, past the place where the border was supposed to be, and the first thing they do on European soil is to salute the country whose border they have just confirmed does not exist.
Hold onto that image.
It is the most honest moment in this entire matter.
You have probably seen the pictures across social media today. But let me tell you what has happened in Ceuta, because it is not a natural disaster or a refugee crisis - and it is not a mystery. It is a chain of decisions, and every link is documented.
On 8 July, Spain's Supreme Court issued a ruling. It established that a person who swims into Ceuta from Morocco cannot be sent back immediately, the way it has been done for years.
The reasoning is legally elegant - the immediate refusal only applies to someone who has forced a physical barrier - that is, a fence, or a wall. But at sea there is no barrier. The one who swims has not forced anything. So he must instead enter the long procedure, with case processing and accommodation and time.
Within its own logic, the ruling is impeccable.
That is precisely what is disturbing about it.
The same day the ruling fell, the border guards' own union warned that deaths would rise. Not the politicians, not the commentators. No. The men who stand at the water's edge at night and pull people up out of the water. They said it out loud, while the ruling was still new -
"Now more will swim, and more will drown."
Then came July. Ten bodies have washed ashore at Ceuta's coasts this month alone. Twenty-nine this year. One and a half to two thousand people have officially entered in ten days, around three hundred a day, in a city of eighty-four thousand inhabitants.
(Edit: revision as of 31.7. The Spanish Interior Ministry now estimates that 49,000 migrants have crossed the border from Morocco)
The centres for unaccompanied minors are running at sixteen hundred percent of their capacity. The city's president calls it an absolute humanitarian and social emergency and asks Madrid to declare a national state of emergency and send the army.
And now you must hear Madrid's answer, because this is where the actual collapse sits in isolation as far as Ceuta is concerned.
The Interior Ministry refuses. Not because the situation is not serious, but because a state of emergency, they say, does not cover migration crises. The category does not exist in law.
What is happening on the beach cannot be recognised, because the dictionary does not have a word for it…
But Ceuta is not an episode. It is a month in a larger calendar, and the calendar began in January.
Because in January, the Sánchez government entered into an agreement with Podemos about an extraordinary legalisation of the country's illegal immigrants.
"Half a million," the government said, again and again. The national police's own immigration commissioner wrote in a report that the number would be almost three times larger, and simultaneously warned of overloaded public services, social tensions and security problems. But the government held firm on its half million.
When the deadline expired in June, more than 1.2 million applications had been submitted from illegal immigrants wishing to be legalised.
The police were right.
That is the second time in this text that the people who stand with reality in their hands predict precisely what will happen, and are ignored by those who administer it.
A pattern many in the public systems across Europe undoubtedly know. Perhaps it is you?
And here one must understand what a legalisation is, and what it is not. It does not grant citizenship. It grants residence and work permit. But Spain has a special rule - citizens from Latin America can apply for Spanish citizenship after only two years of legal residence. Two years. And a Spanish passport is not a Spanish passport. It is a European passport, with full right to settle anywhere in the union. Also in Denmark.
The chain is not a claim, it is paragraphs -
Illegal presence, legalisation, two years waiting time, European citizenship, free movement. Each link can be looked up. People have just never laid them next to each other.
Those who swim into Ceuta this week are formally not covered by the legalisation, it only applies to people who were in the country before New Year. But they know that, and that is not why they swim. Spain has carried out six extraordinary legalisations since 1978. Six times history has taught the same lesson - presence becomes papers, if you wait long enough. No one swims to meet a deadline. One swims because the pattern is more reliable than the law.
And should anyone now object that this sounds like a conspiracy theory, that no one could possibly wish for such a development, then let me give the microphone to Irene Montero, Member of the European Parliament for Podemos and former minister, on stage at the party's meeting in Zaragoza, four days after the agreement.
She herself mentioned the accusations that the legalisation was supposed to provide the left wing with voters. And then she answered them for open cameras - Of course we want them to vote. We have got the papers, and now we are going for citizenship, for changing the law so they can vote, of course. And she continued, with the word no one else is allowed to use - I wish we could sweep this country clean of fascists and racists, with migrants, with working people. Of course I want replacement, she said.
The hall applauded.
The video is freely available. The party explained afterwards that the bit about replacement was meant ironically. But notice what was called irony, and what was not. The sentence about changing the law so they can vote was not withdrawn. It was repeated. It is the party's declared goal.
Now lay the chain next to each other, the whole chain.
A government legalises more than a million people and rejects its own police's figures. A court removes the mechanism that kept the sea route closed, without anyone dimensioning the alternative. The border guards predict the corpses, and the corpses come. The state announces that it does not have a word for what is happening. And in the background stands a government-supporting party on a stage and says out loud that the goal is new voters, so the old ones can be swept out.
No one has voted on any of it. There exists no mandate, no election night, no day when the Spaniards, or the Europeans, or we, were asked - should it be like this?
It has happened in the gaps, between a ruling and a decree and a podium, by institutions that each did their work correctly and together created a result none of them will take responsibility for.
For twenty years one has been told that whoever described this pattern was paranoid. That the connection was a theory, and the theory was dangerous, and whoever mentioned it had disqualified themselves.
Meanwhile the pattern has become policy, and the policy is now being read from stages, to applause, by those who formulate it.
What we were not allowed to describe, they describe themselves.
Well. It is Friday tomorrow.
Are they still sending Dancing with the Stars?
🤓🤷♂️