President Donald Trump said the migrant surge overwhelming Spain’s Ceuta enclave is a preview of what could happen in the United States if Democrats regain political power.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
President Donald Trump warned Friday that the large-scale migrant influx into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta could foreshadow a similar crisis in the United States if Democrats prevail in upcoming elections.
Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich said she spoke with Trump Friday morning and that the president pointed directly to images from Spain while describing what he believes is at stake politically in the United States.
“It’s terrible,” Heinrich reported Trump as saying. “Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in.”
Heinrich said Trump was referring to Democrats winning elections.
“If the Democrats get in, you will not live a very good life,” she quoted Trump as telling her.
Trump returned to the subject later Friday during a Cabinet meeting, again using the situation in Ceuta to argue that Republican election victories are necessary to prevent a comparable influx at the U.S. border.
“You know, I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place. It looks like an invasion of a country, hundreds of thousands of people,” Trump said. “That same thing is going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse. Much bigger, much easier to get into.”
The president’s comments followed a dramatic escalation of the migration crisis in Ceuta, a small Spanish territory in North Africa surrounded by Morocco and the Mediterranean Sea.
The surge began after a Spanish Supreme Court ruling barred authorities from immediately pushing back migrants who reach Spanish territory by sea. Thousands subsequently began swimming around the breakwater separating Moroccan and Spanish territory.
A July 30 report said Ceuta’s local government had appealed to Madrid to declare a national emergency, send in the military and close the border as local authorities struggled to manage and count the arrivals.
“The local government of Ceuta — a tiny slice of North Africa that is an exclave of Spanish territory otherwise surrounded by Morocco and the Mediterranean — has called on the national government in Madrid to declare a national emergency, deploy the army, and close the border as the city is overwhelmed by an enormous migrant wave. Certainly more than two thousand, with the full number unclear as the surge continues and local law enforcement finds itself unable to cope nor count, are reported to have swum around the small fenced breakwater that demarks the Moroccan and Spanish territorial line,” the report stated.
By July 31, the number of migrants reported to have entered Ceuta had risen to at least 49,000.
The images and scale of the influx have triggered political responses elsewhere in Europe.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said events in Ceuta demonstrate “once again, that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a concrete threat to the security of Europe’s border.”
Trump cited the same scenes as evidence for his broader argument that changes in immigration policy following future U.S. elections could rapidly alter conditions at the American border.
His remarks Friday linked the overseas crisis directly to the upcoming U.S. political contest, warning voters that the outcome of future elections could determine whether the United States faces what he described as an even larger version of the migrant influx now confronting Spain.
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