SPANISH Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s migration policies have come under withering criticism as leaders from across the European Union were set to meet on Tuesday following last week’s rush of Moroccans to Ceuta.

The sudden arrival of up to 60,000 Moroccans on Thursday and Friday sparked a humanitarian crisis in the Spanish territory in North Africa and reignited the immigration debate in the 27-nation bloc, even though most went back almost immediately. 

More than 80 people died, including some who drowned or were trampled in a stampede to cross a breakwater barrier, according to Spanish and Moroccan authorities.

Open letters from 22 EU leaders, and a quick retort from Mr Sanchez, have exposed a row inside the EU pitting migration hawks against the progressive Spanish leader who has challenged consensus within the bloc on migration as well as Nato spending and Gaza.

Mr Sanchez’s socialist government has fended off the attacks as politically motivated, saying most of the Moroccans were pushed back from Ceuta within hours in “close co-ordination with the Moroccan authorities and with very little support from other European states.”

Many EU leaders blamed a recent Spanish court ruling for triggering “this attack on our migration and asylum system,” according to an open letter signed from the leaders of 22 EU countries.

Spain’s Supreme Court had ruled that migrants arriving by sea could not be deported without due process, unlike those who cross by land or climb Ceuta’s border fence because they had not crossed a physical barrier.

Mr Sanchez said that the ruling had been intentionally misconstrued by migrant smugglers to convince thousands of people to cross by swimming around the border fence.

The Socialist leader replied in his own letter by recalling that Spain had, in solidarity with the EU, taken in migrants who arrived to eastern European nations from Belarus in 2021 and to the southern Italian island of Lampedusa in 2023.