Hundreds of people fled a massive fire that destroyed dozens of migrant shelters in Ceuta, Spain. Authorities reported no casualties and are investigating whether the blaze was deliberately set.
Published On 11 Sep 202611 Sep 2026
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Rabat: Morocco said on Thursday there were “no facts” establishing its involvement in the massive migrant rush into Spain’s North African exclave of Ceuta in July.
More than 70,000 migrants entered Ceuta from Morocco on July 30 and 31 in an unprecedented, chaotic surge that left scores dead and sparked European Union infighting over the touchy issue of migration.
The Moroccan foreign ministry said there were “no facts or reports proving any involvement by the Moroccan authorities”.
The ministry added that Rabat refused to become the “scapegoat for political score-settling” in Spain.
The statement marked the kingdom’s first official reaction to a Spanish police report accusing Morocco’s security forces of “total permissiveness” when the mass crossing took place.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has consistently avoided blaming Morocco, noting that there was no “solid proof” that the North African country orchestrated the migrant rush.
MEXICO CITY — When the Trump administration announced this summer that illegal crossings into the U.S. from Mexico had reached historical lows, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin declared, “Our border is CLOSED to lawbreakers.”
Even so, the administration continues to pressure both Mexico and U.S. officials serving there — publicly and behind the scenes — to curb illegal immigration further. The crackdown has prompted smugglers to become more creative, turning more often to tunnels once reserved for transporting drugs.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, in the White House on Sept. 4, has been the main architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)
Stephen Miller, the main architect of President Trump’s immigration policies, has been in near-daily communication with senior U.S. law enforcement officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, looking for new ways to stop migrants from entering the United States, according to people familiar with the conversations.
An average of 400 migrants were apprehended while crossing into the U.S. every day in July, according to data by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. It’s a precipitous drop from the thousands who crossed daily at the peak of a migrant surge in 2022.
Sometimes the number of crossings has dropped to 200 a day. But for Miller, that reduction is still not enough, said sources not authorized to speak publicly about internal matters. Miller’s goal, they said, is to have zero migrants entering the U.S.
Miller has directed officials to increase investigations into migrant smuggling networks, people familiar with his directives said.
Mexican Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco Álvarez, left, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, where they met Aug. 26 to discuss what the minister called “priority issues on the bilateral agenda.”
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
Since returning to the White House in 2025, Trump has often asked Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to crack down on immigration. On Aug. 26, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mexico’s foreign minister, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, and urged him to take “decisive action on illegal immigration,” according to a statement from the State Department.
The Trump administration’s border crackdown has been so effective it’s forced some smugglers literally underground.
Mexican drug cartels are increasingly turning to tunnels built for drug smuggling to ferry migrants into the United States. They are linking into sewer drains, according to people familiar with the trend.
Though the number of migrants apprehended while using tunnels appears to be relatively small — there are no hard statistics — authorities believe it is increasing, given the crackdown on the border and financial incentive for the cartels to smuggle people and not just drugs.
“Enforcement along the border has become more robust and that has increased the demand for alternative methods of passage,” said David Shirk, director of the Justice in Mexico program at the University of San Diego.
The Trump administration has added extra miles of razor wire to border fences, has increased surveillance technology and uses autonomous Predator drones with surveillance and infrared technology to monitor swaths of the border for migrants crossing into the U.S.
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1. A bulldozer sits near Santa Elena Canyon on Aug. 14 in Big Bend National Park, Texas, where contractors have begun construction of a border wall. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images) 2. Protesters gather in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 28 to demonstrate against construction of a border wall in Big Bend National Park. (Alma E. Hernandez/San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images)
And, picking up on Trump’s “build the wall” pledge from his initial run for president, more border barriers are being built.
Trafficking through cross-border tunnels is not new. In 2023, Ken Salazar, then the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said there were at least 200 tunnels that spanned the border. Many of them were found linking Tijuana and San Diego.
But in a twist, some tunnels now connect to drainage and sewer systems. This May, authorities captured 19 migrants, including three unaccompanied minors, in the San Diego storm water drainage system. A remote surveillance camera spotted the migrants emerging from the system.
The smugglers were two brothers who had previously been charged with methamphetamine trafficking in the Northern California town of Yreka in 2017.
Smugglers employ tunneling specialists whose work is getting more sophisticated, outfitting the tunnels with lights, ventilation systems and sometimes mini rail lines. Many tunnels are faster, safer and much more expensive for migrants who would otherwise face increasingly dangerous mountain and desert routes, experts said.
Last year, Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations agents also found a tunnel that ran under the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico into El Paso.
The passage tapped into the El Paso sewer system, where, according to U.S. authorities, migrants surfaced from a manhole. They climbed into a box truck outfitted with a trap door that was parked over the manhole.
Cartels charge migrants from Latin America up to $15,000 dollars each to use tunnels to El Paso, an official familiar with the dynamics said. For people from the Middle East or Southeast Asia, the price can be as high as $25,000.
The tunnel traffic continues to vex U.S. officials.
A Homeland Security Task Force drug investigation of a supposed retail store in Otay Mesa, Calif., resulted in the discovery of a sophisticated cross-border tunnel leading to Tijuana.
(U.S. attorney’s office)
In Tijuana, one tunnel discovered last year stretched from Tijuana to what appeared to be a Buy 4 Less store near the Otay Mesa port of entry. The store never had customer traffic, so U.S. law enforcement suspected it hid a tunnel and began monitoring the business.
Authorities raided the building and found the entrance to a tunnel controlled by the ruthless Jalisco New Generation Cartel. It was 55 feet deep and nearly half a mile long. It featured a hydraulic lift, ventilation and a rail and cart system. Authorities stopped a freezer truck after it left the location and seized more than a ton of cocaine, worth roughly $45 million.
In 2024, U.S. law enforcement found a tunnel in the border town of San Luis, Ariz. Authorities said it was used to smuggle migrants and drugs. Its exit was hidden in an abandoned KFC restaurant.
This article was co-published with Puente News Collaborative. Fisher is a special correspondent.
RABAT: Moroccan media have criticized a Spanish police report that accused Morocco’s security forces of failures as tens of thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish territory of Ceuta.
More than 70,000 migrants entered Ceuta from Morocco on July 30 and 31 in an unprecedented, chaotic surge that left scores dead and sparked European Union infighting over the touchy issue of migration.
The Spanish police report seen by AFP flagged a Moroccan police response of “total permissiveness” that it said facilitated the rush, with some officers directing migrants toward the water.
Moroccan police numbers around the border post were “clearly smaller than usual” and officers “made no serious attempt” to stem the surge, said the report.
But Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has consistently avoided blaming Morocco, noting that there was no “solid proof” that the North African country orchestrated the migrant rush.
Sanchez’s leftist government has tried for years to improve the countries’ historically delicate relations — notably over the status of Ceuta and Spain’s other north African territory, Melilla.
Moroccan authorities have yet to comment on the leaked police report, but several Moroccan media outlets have weighed in on its allegations.
Moroccan news site Hespress on Friday called it “particularly weak,” saying it lacked material evidence and contained “glaring contradictions.”
Hespress said the police report sought to make Morocco “the scapegoat” in Spanish political and judicial disputes.
Moroccan news site Le Desk on Thursday described the report as “botched,” pointing to factual errors including a reference to June 30 instead of July 30.
And TelQuel said that claims by some media that the report directly accused Morocco of “planning and executing” the influx were false, adding that the allegations did not name any Moroccan official as responsible.
News site Medias24 challenged the “permissiveness” claim by arguing that it was based solely on one satellite image that was “obviously just a snapshot.”
Last month, a senior Moroccan official told AFP on condition of anonymity there had been no Moroccan security failures during the influx.
Germany, Austria, Greece, Denmark and the Netherlands did not outline where the centres would be located.
Published On 4 Sep 20264 Sep 2026
Five European nations have agreed on concrete steps towards a deal with an unspecified non-European Union country to host migrant return facilities, senior officials said, in a sign of mounting determination to counter immigration.
Germany, Austria, Greece, Denmark and the Netherlands, known as the Group of Five, aim to sign deals this year to send migrants without legal residency to countries outside the European Union. The nations expected to host return centres have not been named.
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“Around New Year, we expect to have a common understanding with a partner country outside of the European Union,” Danish Immigration and Integration Minister Morten Bodskov told reporters on Friday at a news conference in Copenhagen, without elaborating.
“It’s a new chance to have a life in a partner country,” he said, adding that the five nations would be in dialogue with the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on their next steps.
A spokesperson for UNHCR said the agency had not been approached with details of the proposal and therefore could not comment.
The Group of Five is set to reconvene in Munich, Germany, at the end of September to advance the plan.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt confirmed that the group wants “to reach an agreement with third countries this year that will enable the establishment of return hubs”.
The European Parliament in June approved an overhaul of migration policy aimed at speeding up deportations and allowing member states to set up centres abroad, in what some critics of the policy say could weaken safeguards for asylum seekers.
The Council of Europe, a non-EU body that promotes human rights, democracy and the rule of law, said in July that the proposed return hubs posed “considerable human rights risks”.
Danish Refugee Council Secretary-General Charlotte Slente said a better policy would be to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, which focuses on stricter border screening, faster return procedures and expanded digital systems for managing asylum claims.
“Return hubs focus on a small number of returns; they will not stop people from taking even more dangerous routes, and they could violate basic human rights,” she said.
Tens of thousands rallied across Spain in support of Ceuta, protesting the government’s handling of the migrant crisis and accusing Morocco of involvement in the border surge.
Published On 3 Sep 20263 Sep 2026
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DAKAR, Senegal — Twenty migrants deported from the United States arrived in Liberia on Thursday, the first group of an eventual 1,200 deportees that the West African country says it will receive from the U.S. under a new deal.
Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to two dozen countries that aren’t their own, as it pushes ahead with its immigration crackdown, advocates say.
An estimated 11 of those agreements, nearly half the total, are with African countries and the Liberia-U.S. agreement involves one of the largest numbers of such third-country deportations
Immigration lawyers say the practice is being used as a legal loophole to indirectly return some asylum-seekers to countries they fled. Authorities in Liberia have said the deportees being welcomed in their country can seek asylum there or leave if they choose.
Here’s what to know about the deportations:
Other African countries that have received third-country deportees from the U.S. include South Sudan, Eswatini, Rwanda, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Congo, Uganda, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic.
Some, like Ghana and Sierra Leone, are accepting deportees from their regions — in this case West Africa.
Many of the African countries approving the deals are among the worst hit by the Trump administration’s policies, including on trade, aid and migration. A good number of them also have authoritarian governments, raising questions about the lack of accountability and due process to ensure the protection of the deportees’ rights.
Details of most of the deals are never made public and some of the African nations, like Ghana’s government, have defended their actions as having been taken on humanitarian grounds.
The Trump administration had spent at least $40 million to deport about 300 migrants to countries other than their own, according to a February report by the Democratic staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. More countries have entered the deal since then.
Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi has described his country’s agreement as an “act of goodwill between partners,” without financial compensation. The deal came as Washington increased pressure on neighboring Rwanda over its support for M23 rebels, a dynamic analysts say may help explain Congo’s willingness to cooperate.
Early flights to Africa included people that the U.S. said had convictions for serious crimes. But later transfers have included asylum-seekers with U.S. court orders protecting them from being returned to their home countries because they could face persecution or torture.
Many say they’ve been sent to countries with which they have no ties and where they were not told about until hours into the deportation journey.
For instance, a gay Moroccan woman deported to Cameroon, where homosexuality is illegal, and an Iranian woman with U.S. court protection from returning to Iran who was sent to the Central African Republic.
Immigration lawyer Alma David called that an effective legal “loophole,” saying deportees can be left with “impossible choices” — remain in an unfamiliar country with little support or return to a country a U.S. judge found unsafe.
U.S. policy says that when a receiving government gives blanket diplomatic assurances that deportees won’t face persecution there, they can be removed without additional procedures, David told The Associated Press.
Some of the deportees have recounted being shackled while some were held in full-body restraint straitjackets called the WRAP during flights that can sometimes last more than 16 hours.
Their conditions in the different countries vary. In Sierra Leone, the government hired private contractor Kenvah Solutions to provide housing, food and healthcare.
In Congo, the International Organization for Migration said it has provided “humanitarian assistance” and offered assisted voluntary return to the migrants’ home countries. But deportees told the AP their movements were tightly controlled. They were housed behind locked gates, could not leave alone and were allowed out roughly once a week accompanied by IOM staff.
In Equatorial Guinea, the AP found deportees confined in a hotel owned by the family of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Migrants said they were barred from leaving, had uneven access to medical care and faced repeated pressure to return home. Twenty-five of at least 32 people held there had been sent to their home countries by May.
Rights advocates say the third-country deportation program risks violating non-refoulement, the principle barring governments from sending people to places where they face persecution or torture.
An international coalition sued Ghana in June on behalf of 27 deportees, alleging most were quickly sent to their home countries, despite U.S. protection orders, and that some were held under armed guard in military camps, hotels and airport cells.
Rights lawyers have also brought a case against Equatorial Guinea before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, alleging deportees were returned to countries where they faced persecution despite U.S. court protections.
Banchereau writes for the Associated Press.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration says it is temporarily pausing construction of a controversial border construction project in the Big Bend National Park while the head of the agency tasked with building the wall visits Texas to do an “on-the-ground evaluation.”
The project through the national park in southern Texas has faced fierce bipartisan opposition by critics who say that it is marring a pristine environmental area and that the region’s rugged and remote terrain already serves as a deterrent to migrants and smugglers.
Rodney Scott, who heads Customs and Border Protection, which is tasked with building the wall, announced on X that he was visiting Texas to do an evaluation.
“CBP is pausing all construction activity in Big Bend National Park while I visit and conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation,” Scott said.
Congress gave the Trump administration $46 billion last summer to build a wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and the administration has been racing ahead and waiving numerous regulations in an effort to swiftly build the wall.
Scott has said that he expects that they will build the first layer of the wall by the end of next year.
But they have run into fierce opposition in Texas especially when it comes to construction in and near Big Bend National Park and a state park to the west.
Santana writes for the Associated Press.