This month, in a Muslim cemetery at the northern tip of Africa, Europe began burying the dead of its border.
We don’t know the names of almost all of those lowered in body bags into graves in Ceuta. They were among at least 96 people who died on 30 July, when more than 72,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish-governed enclave — drowning at sea or crushed in the rush. Three weeks later, families were still searching for the missing. One reason so few bodies could be named was that relatives in Morocco were struggling to cross legally into Ceuta to provide the DNA samples needed to identify them.
The surge came ten days after Sánchez travelled to Morocco’s Algerian rival, recalling 2021 when Rabat opened the pressure valve at Ceuta over Spain’s treatment of a Polisario leader — this time amid hostility to Sánchez from Washington and Israel over his opposition to the genocide in Gaza and war on Iran.
The fences around Ceuta mark one edge of Fortress Europe. Further south last week, Mauritania's coast guard intercepted 161 people — including 17 children — whose boat had drifted for eight days after leaving Gambia for Spain's Canary Islands. In 2025, 54 shipwrecks on the West Africa–Canary Islands route left 1,214 people dead or missing, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Mauritania is not a member of the European Union. But it has become one of Europe's borderlands. The EU pledged more than €210 million to the country in 2024, including money for border and migration management. Spanish boats, aircraft and security personnel operate there. Spain has funded migrant detention centres on Mauritanian soil. The violence of Europe's border is being pushed steadily beyond Europe itself.
One year ago last week, another part of that border opened fire. Forty nautical miles north of Libya, two men aboard a Libyan Coast Guard patrol boat fired for twenty minutes on the Ocean Viking, a rescue ship carrying 87 people pulled from the Mediterranean. The patrol boat had been donated by Italy two years earlier under a European Union programme for “integrated border and migration management” in Libya.
The attack opens First They Came for the Migrants, the latest case study for Reactionary International, the Progressive International’s research project. It traces a European border operating far beyond Europe itself: arming and training security forces; using aid and trade as leverage; spreading surveillance systems across continents; and building detention and deportation centres outside the Union.
In Morocco, the European Union spent more than €2 billion on migration cooperation between 2014 and 2022. Security forces have conducted mass arrests of predominantly Black migrants and refugees before transporting them towards desert borderlands without food, water or shelter.
“You have to make migrants’ lives difficult. Complicate their lives,” one consultant working on an EU-funded project explained. ”Leave someone from Guinea in the Sahara twice, the third time he will ask you to voluntarily bring him back home.” Along the coast in Tunisia, the EU offered more than €1 billion in support in 2023, including €105 million for migration control, months after President Kais Saied had denounced sub-Saharan migration in the language of the European far right’s “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
In 2019, the EU suspended the ships of Operation Sophia, a naval mission that had rescued tens of thousands of people at sea. They were replaced by drones, which locate boats crossing the Mediterranean from above and pass their coordinates to Libyan forces to intercept those aboard and return them to a country where migrants face arbitrary detention and violence. European authorities can watch people in distress without having to bring them to safety.
Britain spent hundreds of millions of pounds preparing to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda without forcibly removing one. Italy built detention centres in Albania, only for repeated court challenges to block the original scheme and force Rome to repurpose them. In 2018, the European Commission insisted offshore deportation centres would be unlawful. This June, negotiators for the European Parliament and EU governments agreed rules allowing precisely such “return hubs” in third countries.
Policies once associated with the continent’s far right now pass through the institutions of the European Union. Some people move the other way. Fabrice Leggeri spent seven years running Frontex. Under his leadership, it acquired its own armed standing corps — Europe’s first “civilian troops wearing a uniform”, as Leggeri described them — while the agency was repeatedly accused of involvement in illegal and deadly pushbacks at Europe’s borders. He resigned in 2022 amid investigations into those allegations. Two years later, he was elected to the European Parliament for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
The far right supplies personnel, pressure and ever more radical demands. Governments of the centre and centre-right turn them into budgets, agreements and administrative machinery. Frontex is the biggest and fastest-growing European Union agency. Its officers already operate far beyond the Union, while its growing standing corps gives Brussels an armed force of its own.
The machinery does not stop there. Giorgia Meloni’s 2025 security law tightens controls on migrant detainees while increasing penalties against climate protesters. Spyware has been deployed against journalists and activists. Powers justified against migrants become part of a broader architecture of surveillance, policing and repression.
Fortress Europe does nothing to remove what drives people towards it. War destroys homes. Climate breakdown disrupts farming. Unequal exchange drains wealth from the Global South. European states participate in each, then spend billions policing the movement that follows. A global order makes life impossible for millions; public money flows to security forces, arms manufacturers, technology companies and authoritarian governments to stop them moving.
Breaking that grim circuit means defending the right to move — to cross a border, seek refuge and build a life elsewhere. It also means defending the right to stay in the place you already call home.
Europe is denying both. Our task is to defend them instead: to dismantle the machinery that punishes people for moving, and build the peace, livelihood and sovereignty that make staying possible.
Palestinian organisers take BDS into New Orleans restaurants
Two Progressive International members — the Palestinian Youth Movement and Democratic Socialists of America — are working together in New Orleans to expand the No Appetite for Apartheid campaign. PYM organisers addressed the local DSA chapter this week on the drive to persuade restaurants to identify and replace products and suppliers implicated in Israel’s assault on Gaza, with participating businesses publicly recognised by the campaign. The organising brings BDS into neighbourhood businesses and supply chains, with DSA members helping build the campaign locally.
23 August 1960 - The Federation of Cuban Women
The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) was founded on 23 August 1960, just 18 months after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Led by revolutionary Vilma Espín until her death in 2007, it became the mass organisation charged with making women’s liberation central to Cuban socialism — what Fidel Castro called a “revolution within a revolution.” From around 100,000 members, the FMC grew to organise millions of women, helping lead the literacy campaign, expand education and childcare, retrain former domestic workers, and advance reproductive and legal rights. “Socialism for Cuban women meant freedom, independence, sovereignty, dignity, social justice,” Espín said — “the right to decide on their own destiny.” More than six decades later, the Federation continues to organise in defence of those gains.
Read more about and share this history with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.
Julià Panadès is a Mallorcan artist working with found detritus, often washed up on the Mediterranean island. He has described this as archaeological, noting that some bottles and lids he finds have Arabic and Tunisian origins; his materials and working methods relate to a precarity and impermanence.
The Balearic Islands have a deep relationship with the threat of invasion. The Honderos Baleares, Balearic slingers, indigenous to the Balearic Islands, were ancient warriors who fought in the Punic Wars from 264 BC, while today there is increasing outcry against colonial tourism.
