The people on the rocks were the last thing to happen.

The tide went out at El Tarajal and exposed the rocks beneath the border pier.

They came over those rocks by the thousands. Some swam around the end of the breakwater. Others climbed across the stone while the people behind them kept coming. Men lost their footing and pulled down the men holding them. Bodies disappeared under the water or beneath the crush.

Estimates placed the number who had entered Ceuta above 60,000.

At least 67 dead.

Divers were still searching the seabed. The old military hospital received modular refrigeration units with room for 200 bodies. Many of the dead were between 13 and 25 years old. A reception center built for 520 people held over 900.

A pregnant woman arrived without her 3-year-old son.

The child had vanished in the crossing. (El País)

The army deployed. Shopkeepers locked their doors and passed water, cigarettes, and biscuits through metal grilles. Soldiers moved through residential streets with loudspeakers. Spain laid a 500-meter floating barrier beside the pier while Guardia Civil divers worked below it. Some went back through the same opening. Officials said tens of thousands had gone back and the city was calm.

The official count is false. Thousands still hide in the city and the scrub above it, waiting for a route to mainland Europe. Shops stay locked. Residents carry sticks. Soldiers walk groups down the mountain. A mob chased Nick Shirley into a police car. At the cemetery, migrants wash themselves and their clothes from public taps. Men name Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands as destinations.

The images recall Jean Raspail’s forbidden novel, The Camp of the Saints. The book is remembered for masses crossing water. Its central action happens earlier, among the clergy, journalists, officials, and a president who turn national defense into a moral offense.

Ceuta resembles its cover more than its plot.

The Spanish state was overwhelmed, then deployed troops and narrowed the opening. Raspail’s fleet reaches a France with soldiers, laws, offices, churches, newspapers, and weapons. France refuses to use them.

THE OPEN DOOR

Raspail wrote the novel in a borrowed Mediterranean villa in 1971 and 1972. The library looked over open water. He had traveled among peoples near disappearance. He described walking into an abandoned Algonquin village on Lake Huron as entering a church. He wrote about the Kawésqar and Ainu, and imagined kingdoms kept alive by a few stubborn hands.

On the French coast, he turned the glass around.

The novel opens at the end. Calgues, a retired professor, stands on the terrace of a house completed in 1673. More than 100 rusting ships sit grounded below him. The stench reaches land first.

Calgues counts 200 arms in a circle of vision. He estimates 40 circles across the deck: 4,000 bodies in sight. He adds those below deck and arrives at 30,000 people on the hull. White rags and corpses drift around it. The living throw the dead overboard.

Behind him stands an oak door with his family name cut into the wood. It opens from dawn to dark. 5 stone steps connect the terrace to the road. There is no gate or guard.

The first man who climbs those steps is French.

Young and barefoot, he wears the imported costume of the post-1968 counterculture. He went down to the fleet and found his “real family.” The inheritance is finished, he tells Calgues. The house will be looted. Its books burned. Its wine poured out. The door will become firewood. He plans to give a woman from the fleet a child and disappear into the crowd.

Calgues goes inside for a shotgun.

The first body on the terrace belongs to the country that is about to be entered.

Raspail leaves the corpse beside the ancestral railing and jumps back to India, where the fleet was built.

THE CONSULATE

Calcutta is hot when the Belgian consulate ends foreign adoptions.

Mothers press children against the iron gate. A woman holds up the son she has fattened for a European family. His sisters received less food so he could meet the health requirement. A medal around his neck carries the name of the people waiting for him in Belgium. The papers are complete. The gate stays shut.

Behind the women stand the children no foreign couple selected. A giant holds his deformed son above the crowd. The boy has no useful legs, a hunched torso, and lidless eyes. When a stone opens the Consul’s forehead, those eyes follow the blood down his face.

Inside, a bishop, a missionary doctor, an atheist named Ballan, and other Western witnesses sit in a row. Their network sent 40,000 children from the Ganges to Belgium in 5 years. The Consul stamps each visa red. Ballan dismisses passports, countries, religions, oceans, and race as rubbish, then walks into the crowd.

At the docks, a grotesque prophet climbs onto a cart with the deformed child on his shoulders. His sermon gathers the gods of India around the crucified Christ. They pull the nails, heal his wounds, and demand his kingdom in payment. The cross is broken into lumber for a ship. Christ is left on the shore and drowns while the new believers sail west.

Jewelry comes off wrists and fills the collection bowls. The captains watch the counting, then lower their gangplanks.

Ballan spent the morning giving sweets to children. When boarding starts, he follows them. The crowd strips his hands from the rope. A fist closes his left eye, then his right. He falls between ship and stone after offering the people crushing him the forgiveness of the God he rejected.

His white hand disappears.

The children continue up the plank.

100 ships enter the current.

Descriptions reduce the book to nonwhite migrants attacking Europe. The young Frenchman wants the house burned. Ballan helps launch the ships. Clergy turns arrival into liturgy. Reporters cast surrender as proof of goodness. Raspail keeps his eye on shore.

FOUR CRYSTAL GLASSES

Back in Provence, Calgues sets his table.

He lays out bread, ham, goat cheese, olives, apricots, and wine. A silver fork goes beside the plate. Four crystal glasses stand ready. Mozart plays while the ships settle below the terrace.

The novel keeps returning to small forms: a door, a meal, a uniform, a procession, a song known without a printed sheet. The heir treats them as trivial. Once broken, they are hard to recover because their authority was never written down.

Across France, the army waits for the president.

His prepared address recognizes the duty of his office. France has a territory and a people. The fleet will land without permission. Soldiers on the coast need an order only he can give.

He reaches the order and retreats. Each soldier must consult his own conscience. The rifles stay loaded. France remains on the map. No order reaches the coast.

THE SIGNATURE

The American version opened with paperwork.

On January 20, 2021, the autopen-president known as Biden took office and removed consequences that discouraged illegal entry. His administration suspended the Migrant Protection Protocols, narrowed interior enforcement, stopped wall construction, and turned emergency parole into an operating system. His name sat atop documents executed by secretaries, lawyers, app designers, supervisors, grant administrators, and officers. Biden diminished in public. The machinery under his name kept growing.

In March 2021, Border Patrol released families without the charging document that opened removal proceedings. A new form gave them 15 days to reach a chosen destination and report to ICE. By December 2022, Border Patrol granted 130,905 paroles in 1 month. Then the counter moved onto a phone. (GAO, GAO)

From Mexico, an inadmissible foreign national could open CBP One, submit a photograph and identifying information, then select a port, date, and time. At the port, the interview usually had no detailed asylum questions and often no sworn statement. GAO found that officers did not decide whether the applicant had a humanitarian need for parole.

Without a criminal or security flag, the default was a Notice to Appear, two years of parole, and release.

97% of CBP One appointments in 2023 and 2024 ended in parole. (GAO)

By September 30, 2023, a House Judiciary staff report counted at least 3.3 million illegal aliens released and 1.7 million known gotaways. (House Judiciary Committee)

The procedure was stupidly obvious:

1. Cross

2. Surrender

3. Receive papers

4. Travel to a chosen destination

5. Obtain work authorization if eligible

6. Remain while the court calendar fell years behind

The census counts each resident for apportionment, citizen or not. That total divides House seats and electoral votes. (U.S. Census Bureau)

Border towns absorbed the first releases. People moved into schools, housing, hospitals, labor pools, courts, and congressional districts. Public money and charities built the receiving network. Officials called it compassion and sued states that restored consequence.

Smugglers brought people to the border. Federal officers issued release papers.

Biden’s handlers never required a fleet. They had an application, a parole stamp, a delayed court date, and an officer instructed to release.

JANUARY 20

Donald Trump returned to office and closed the application.

He restored case-by-case parole. Inadmissible applicants went to detention and expedited removal. Higher approval was required. Border Patrol recorded 0 paroles from February through May 2025. Monthly port paroles fell from 44,000+ across the previous two years to under 3,000. (GAO)

ICE executed final orders.

Arrest again led to detention, adjudication, and removal.

Border Patrol made 2.2 million southern-border apprehensions in fiscal year 2022. Fiscal year 2025 closed at 238,000, the lowest total since 1970. More than 60% occurred during Biden’s final months. During Trump’s first eight full months, monthly apprehensions stayed below 9,000. Under Biden, agents recorded 9,000+ in a day. (CBS News)

POTUS deserves the country’s gratitude for a lot of things but especially for restoring a simple fact. The United States may refuse entry, detain those who enter illegally, and remove those with no lawful claim to remain.

He restored authority to uniforms turned into costumes.

THE HOUSE ABOVE THE WATER

Ceuta’s final count is unknown. Bodies remain under the water. Thousands remain inside the city. Spain deployed troops, narrowed the opening, and restored consequence. Raspail’s France refuses.

Before the crowd came the signature, appointment, parole stamp, delayed hearing, and officer instructed to release.

Trump stopped the process and gave America time to repair the damage.

At naturalization ceremonies, new citizens surrender resident cards and raise their right hands. They renounce prior allegiance, promise to defend the Constitution, and accept duties. America can receive the stranger without abolishing itself. The form is an oath with a flag on the table. (USCIS)

On the terrace above the Mediterranean, Calgues places the silver fork beside the plate. 4 glasses catch the last light. Below him, the ships have grounded.

The oak door is still open.

<3EKO

Read the book: The Camp of the Saints, new English edition

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More soon. I love you.

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