The Government maintains its position. The publication of reports and communications about the situation in Ceuta does not alter the version that the Executive maintains regarding the warnings and alerts prior to July 30 and 31, when a massive entry of immigrants occurred in this autonomous city: none of these warned or alerted about the “magnitude” of what happened. What they do believe in La Moncloa is that the performance of the CNI was not entirely correct, because it limited itself to sending a message “to a lower-ranking official” on July 29 – that official was a member of the Government Delegation’s cabinet – and “at no time did the CNI send a formal warning or alert to its chain of command or to any member of the Executive by any means.”
Although the declassified and published documents strain the version maintained by the Government and its delegation in Ceuta, the conviction in the Executive is that they could not foresee the entry of more than 70,000 people because no agency alerted about that volume of entries. Not even the CNI. “The CNI communications of July 29 never alerted of a massive arrival: they reported that a call was circulating in two Facebook groups to enter the city irregularly during the week of the Throne Festival,” sources from La Moncloa consulted about the reports explain.
Only a few hours before these documents, prepared by the National Police, the Civil Guard, military intelligence, or the CNI, became known, Pedro Sánchez in an interview on TVE set the line to be followed by the Executive: “The situation reports made by everyone, without detracting from their professionalism, certainly did not foresee at all a massive arrival of so many migrants.” A line that has not changed despite the fact that it is confirmed that the Spanish intelligence service warned Morocco, the Government Delegation, and the Civil Guard of massive calls to enter Spanish territory. Various reports did detail an increase in entries in Ceuta as July progressed in numbers far exceeding those of 2025.
The Government explains that the figure of 180,000 people in the social media groups where the assault on Ceuta was discussed “was known by other institutions and in no way constituted or was interpreted as an indicator of scale or prospective probability.”
For La Moncloa, proof that there was no alert of massive entry is that the CNI “did not issue any formal alert and limited itself to transmitting that information by message and brief phone call to the Cabinet of the Government Delegation of Ceuta and to the UCE-3 of the Civil Guard.” They refer to the conversation that took place via WhatsApp on July 29 at 13:52 hours:
– CNI: On social media, there is a call for an assault by fence and sea tomorrow at 8 p.m.
– CNI: Taking advantage of the Throne Festival and that their security forces will be busy
– CNI: There are two different groups with a total of 180,000 followers
– CNI: To give you an idea of the reach of the dissemination
– Delegation: Their rilas (sic)
Later, at 21:34 minutes, an 11-minute call took place between the CNI and the Delegation. The Government Delegate in Ceuta, Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano, has stated that he was not aware of that conversation nor the content of the call.
“At no time did the CNI send a formal warning or alert to its chain of command or to any member of the Executive by any means. An agency that believes a massive entry will occur the next day does not limit itself to sending an ambiguous WhatsApp to a lower-ranking official: it escalates it. That is its responsibility and competence,” they say in the Executive.
“I am not aware of any report that could foresee the magnitude of what happened on July 30. And I am aware that all ministries, all administrative bodies, from the first minute, when they began to have that awareness of what was happening, did everything in their power to stop that flow and then reverse it, as was done very quickly,” explained the Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, visiting Brussels where he held several meetings with community commissioners, including the head of Interior and Migration, Magnus Brunner, the head of European diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, and members of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex.
“I am amazed at the biased, broad-stroke, and quite unserious interpretations being made of the documentation declassified by the Government regarding Ceuta,” said Minister Óscar Puente on social media. “The most accurate warnings about what could happen occurred a few hours before and were limited to informing border controls that there were calls on social media to cross the border by swimming and the size of the groups in which they were being spread.”
