A hospital doctor in Spain's North African exclave of Ceuta says the facility has treated at least five girls under 14 for alleged rape, cases she links to a massive border crossing that overwhelmed the small city's shelters and left migrant children living on the streets.
Dr. Susana Ascaso, an emergency physician at the University Hospital of Ceuta, known locally as HUCE, confirmed the cases to the local newspaper El Pueblo de Ceuta. She described treating "cases of rape of migrant girls" in the roughly two weeks since approximately 72,000 migrants surged across the sea border from Morocco on the final day of July.
The girls are believed to have arrived during that crossing. They ended up on the streets, Ascaso said, "because there isn't enough room for them in the children's shelters." She added: "It's not that they don't want to help them, but rather that there isn't enough space for them."
No arrests have been reported. No police investigation has been publicly confirmed. The only official confirmation of the alleged rapes comes from the hospital itself, a single institutional source in a city whose services buckled under a one-day influx larger than many mid-sized American towns.
The scale of the July border crossing is staggering by any measure. Roughly 72,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, a Spanish territory of limited size on the North African coast, within a single 24-hour window. Nearly 100 migrants are believed to have drowned during the sea crossing.
Spanish authorities said they returned approximately 70,000 of those migrants to Morocco within days. But thousands more are believed to have remained, and the city's infrastructure was not built to absorb them.
A Spanish Supreme Court decision issued in June created the conditions for the surge. The court found that authorities could not immediately return migrants who arrived by water, a legal distinction that effectively carved out a loophole for sea crossings into Ceuta. Spain has since moved to reverse that loophole, but the damage was already done by the time the July wave hit.
Unaccompanied minors who reach Spanish territory face a different legal calculus than adults. They stand a better chance of gaining asylum within the European Union, a fact that, combined with the court ruling, created a powerful incentive for the crossing.
The alleged rapes were not the only crisis Ascaso described. On the day of the crossing itself, HUCE was overwhelmed with migrants seeking treatment for injuries caused "by the border fences, wounds from rocks in the sea, and shoulder dislocations," she told El Pueblo de Ceuta.
Two weeks later, the patient load had not eased. It had shifted.
Ascaso warned that "patients are arriving with diseases that have the potential to become epidemics." She was brutally honest about the hospital's capacity to screen for them:
"We don't know if people are arriving with tuberculosis, hepatitis, or other types of diseases that, as of today, we also won't be able to detect."
She framed the situation as a public-health gamble the city's residents had no say in accepting. "These are health risks for our population that we are assuming and that we cannot control," she said. "In the future, we will be able to know if all this has had consequences for the population."
The doctor also offered a blunt demographic assessment of who had crossed. "The population that has arrived is mostly made up of young, strong adults," she said. "Therefore, we are having many problems."
Thousands of Ceuta residents protested over the weekend in what was described as a bipartisan, cross-faith demonstration. Their demands were directed at two targets: Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's socialist government in Madrid and the European Union. Residents called for better border controls and demanded that both institutions protect Ceuta from further mass crossings.
The protest reflected a city pushed past its limits. Ceuta is small. Its shelters were already at capacity before the July surge. The girls now alleged to have been raped were, by the hospital doctor's account, living on the streets because there was simply nowhere to put them.
And the broader policy backdrop made the situation worse. Sánchez's government has pursued a mass amnesty scheme aimed at regularizing upwards of a million illegal immigrants already living in Spain. Critics argue the program acts as a pull factor, signaling to would-be border crossers that if they can get in and stay long enough, legal status will follow.
That signal, paired with a Supreme Court ruling that stripped border agents of their ability to turn back sea arrivals, produced a predictable result: a city flooded overnight, shelters overrun, children on the streets, and a hospital doctor confirming alleged rapes she could do nothing to prevent.
Critical facts remain unknown. No law enforcement agency has publicly confirmed an investigation into the alleged rapes. No suspects have been named. The precise number of migrants still in Ceuta has not been disclosed, reports indicate only that "thousands" likely remained after the initial 70,000 were returned.
The capacity of Ceuta's children's shelters and the current number of unaccompanied minors housed there have not been made public. Whether any of the five girls have received follow-up care or legal advocacy is unclear. Whether the diseases Ascaso flagged, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and others, have spread to Ceuta's resident population is, by her own admission, something the hospital cannot yet determine.
What is clear is the chain of decisions that led here. A Supreme Court ruling removed the ability to turn migrants back at the water's edge. A government amnesty program broadcast that illegal entry could eventually be rewarded with legal status. And when 72,000 people arrived in a single day, a small city's shelters broke under the weight, leaving children exposed to predators on the streets.
Policies have consequences. When governments refuse to enforce borders and courts strip away the tools to do so, the people who pay the price are rarely the officials who made the decisions. In Ceuta, they were girls under 14.
