Mostly young, mostly male Moroccans crawling onto beaches, climbing hills, scaling walls, jumping over fences, surging past police in order to get into Europe: The photographs and videos that emerged from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, on July 29 and 30 looked very much like migrant-terror videos, deliberately designed to be broadcast by the international far right. So closely did this incident resemble the “invasion” that MAGA and its European friends have long said is under way that it was hard not to suspect that it had been orchestrated.

As I am writing this, much is still not known about the 60,000-odd people who swam from Morocco to Ceuta last week. But we do know that many of them saw social-media posts encouraging them to swim to Ceuta and, perhaps, to thereby precipitate a crisis. Ceuta has been a Spanish city since the 16th century, but it is not part of mainland Spain. Nor is it possible to cross from Ceuta to mainland Spain, and therefore into the Schengen Area, the European Union’s free-movement zone, without crossing a checkpoint. Illegal immigrants cannot travel from Ceuta to mainland Spain at all.

Last week, according to El Pais as well as other Spanish, international, and Moroccan media outlets, many Moroccans saw a TikTok video nevertheless claiming that “the Spanish border is open and you can cross without papers,” meaning they could reach the European continent. The video appeared to reference a recent ruling by the Spanish supreme court making it harder to return migrants who arrive by sea, but it was not the only encouragement. Other messages, many of which have now disappeared, told people where to buy wet suits, flippers, goggles, floats, and even waterproof bags for documents and cellphones. Screenshots from Google Maps told them which sections of the Ceuta beach might have fewer police. Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them.

[Graeme Wood: When following the rules leads to disaster]

Surprised by the unprecedented numbers and perhaps fearing hundreds would drown—in the end, at least 70 people died in the water, including some children—the Spanish police let them land on the beach. This is when the photographs and videos began to circulate. Among those promoting them were senior members of the Trump administration, and senior leaders of the European far right.  

Vice President Vance posted a link to a wildly dishonest Fox News segment that incorrectly described the migrants arriving in “Northern Spain” rather than Northern Africa. “Thank God,” he wrote, “@POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.” Others made more specific threats. Robert Jenrick, a high-profile member of Reform, the British far-right party, wrote that “Ceuta is our future if we don’t secure our border. These men are on their way to Calais.” Nigel Farage, the Reform Party leader, posted a video also claiming that the Moroccans were en route to Britain. Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), declared that “Germany is the likely destination.”

These were lies. The Moroccans who swam to Ceuta were never going to make it to Britain, Germany, or anywhere else in Europe. Once again: Access to Ceuta does not give anyone automatic access to the rest of Europe. More to the point, nearly all of those who swam over the border had returned to Morocco by Sunday morning. The Spanish government negotiated their return with the Moroccan government. Moroccan police resumed blocking the border. Spanish police, according to El Pais and the Financial Times, were checking documents in Ceuta to find any Moroccans who illegally remained.

It remains unclear who created the viral posts that encouraged the would-be migrants to believe that they could get to Europe from Ceuta. But those who want to weaken the Spanish government, boost the European far right, and create turmoil inside the EU lost little time in promoting the photographs as soon as they arrived.

Because the Moroccan border guards did not stop the would-be migrants, some have speculated that the Moroccans themselves might have been behind the incident. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, was recently in Algeria, holding a friendly meeting with one of Morocco’s great rivals. Morocco might also want to put pressure on Ceuta and another Spanish North African city, Melilla.

The Trump administration, which has also questioned Britain’s control of the Falkland Islands and Denmark’s control of Greenland, might be interested in the same thing. Recently, a congressional report described the cities as “under Spanish administration,” rather than a part of Spain. Trump himself has reasons to be pleased with Morocco, which has joined his Board of Peace and named a highway in his honor. He also has reasons to dislike Sánchez, who refused to let the U.S. use Spanish military bases for Trump’s war in Iran and says he will not, like the rest of NATO, raise his country’s defense spending to 5 percent of its GDP.

Others also had reasons to exploit the incident. Inside Spain, where Sánchez’s administration and party are under investigation for corruption—a former party leader is alleged to have ties to Chinese and Venezuelan criminal networks—the prime minister has plenty of opponents. One politician from Vox, the Spanish far-right party, visited Ceuta and called for “everyone to defend their family with whatever they have at hand.” The Ukrainian foreign minister published a list of Russian outlets that enthusiastically piled on too.

As a result of these posts, many people, perhaps millions of people, will believe that the “invasion” succeeded. They are wrong. Whatever you think of Sánchez or his government, he did not open Spain’s borders to this wave of Moroccans. Instead, he spoke of an “attack on Spain’s territorial integrity.” Spanish police recovered the dead, put the injured in hospitals, and appear to have sent almost everyone home.

The misleading comments and images posted by Vance, Jenrick, Farage, and Weidel nevertheless remain online, with no correction or retraction. President Trump, who declared on Saturday that “the same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger,” has not praised the Spanish prime minister for resolving the problem. Nor has the State Department, which issued a travel warning and a statement accusing the Spanish government of making “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe” and then went silent after the crisis was resolved.

[Read: Schengen’s greatest failure]

This would not be the first time that a migrant wave has been boosted on social media in order to create a political crisis. In 2021, the Belarusian government imported planeloads of people from the Middle East, brought them to the Polish border, and told them to cross, provoking a political crisis in Poland. The Moroccans themselves are accused of having done this too, in 2014, when they allegedly relaxed border controls to express their annoyance with Spain.

But the most important precedent was in 2015, when the Russian destruction of Syria produced a massive wave of migration that also was filmed and photographed, especially after Germany declared that it would accept hundreds of thousands of war victims as refugees. Social-media posts showing migrants walking toward Europe, some amplified by the Russians who destroyed Syria, then played a major role in the Brexit campaign in the U.K., as well as the rise of the far right in Germany. The scars left by this memory are so deep that several European leaders, including the social-democratic prime minister of Denmark and the nationalist prime minister of Italy, this week accused Sánchez of endangering the Schengen Area even though, once again, the integrity of the zone was never threatened.

Readers can be forgiven for feeling a strong sense of déjà vu. For more than a decade now, European and indeed American politicians have known that real, fake, enhanced, or context-free pictures of migrants jumping fences will immediately create a wave reaction. Military rhetoric will be used—attack or invasion—and, to quote Vance, “radical left-wing globalist policies” will be blamed. Hardly anyone will ask why it is that so many people are so desperate to move that they will risk their lives. Few will mourn the dead.

Instead, far-right and MAGA politicians, influencers, and podcasters will immediately use the most divisive language possible in order to make voters as angry as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of what actually happened. Almost everyone else will be intimidated by their fury. As it turns out, it’s harder to stop the wave of anger than it is to stop the migrants themselves.