Dems’ Open Border Policy Is Hybrid Warfare—Against Americans

The invasion last week of the Spanish city of Ceuta by some 60,000 Moroccans, mostly young military-age men, was a useful demonstration of how mass migration and indeed entire populations can be weaponized and deployed in what amounts to hybrid warfare against sovereign nations.

In this particular case, the reason for the deployment likely has to do with the Moroccan state’s longstanding irredentist claims in North Africa, which include the coastal enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla—the plazas de soberanía along the North African coast that have belonged to Spain for more than four centuries but which Morocco has claimed since its independence in 1956.

My friend Joshua Treviño has a useful recap of the relevant history of this simmering conflict over at National Review, but the upshot is that “the Moroccan political project has from the start been focused on what it perceives to be the completion of its full territorial control over Africa’s northwestern corner.”

Whatever the eventual outcome of the invasion—and to be clear, what happened in Ceuta should be understood in those terms—Rabat’s motivations are at least comprehensible in classical geopolitical terms. The Moroccan state believes those territories belong to Morocco, and is willing to deploy coercive, if irregular, force to reclaim them. Spanish authorities have responded in kind, deploying the military and declaring that all 60,000 migrant invaders will be removed.

Insofar as the conflict here is fundamentally one of state versus state—over territorial claims, no less—the crisis in Ceuta has a decidedly 20th-century character about it. But the use of migrants as an invasion force gives it a pointed relevance, both to our century and our situation in America, where migrant invasions along our southern border are not primarily the work of a hostile foreign state, but of the Democrat Party.

The shocking reality is that the party responsible for orchestrating and encouraging the illegal border-crossing of some 12 million foreign nationals into the United States during the Biden administration was not the Mexican state, nor even the cartels that function as proxies for Mexico’s ruling Morena party. Yes, the cartels and their smuggling networks profited greatly from illegal immigration from 2021 to 2025. And yes, Mexican officialdom was scandalously complicit in the mass human trafficking operation that ensued during that period.

But the primary responsible party came from within our country, not outside it. If what we suffered was an invasion (and it was), then it was an invasion that relied for its success on treachery. The gates were not battered down, they were opened from the inside. The first day he was in office, President Biden rescinded via executive order nearly every border policy the first Trump administration had put in place. Those policies had reduced illegal border crossing to near-historic lows, as they have again done in Trump’s second term.

What ensued is now well-known. Incentivized by explicit, official promises from the Biden administration that there would be no real enforcement of our immigration laws, record numbers of foreigners from every corner of the globe rushed over our border. In some cases, the rush created the potential for a humanitarian crisis. In September 2021, for example, some 15,000 Haitians crossed the Rio Grande and set up a massive encampment under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas. The shocking images of the encampment captured by news media forced the Biden White House to take swift action to break up the camp. But that was merely to control the PR narrative, not to stem the steady onrush of migrants over the border.

It’s important to understand that these were not policy blunders by the Democrats. It’s not as if they didn’t know what would happen if they loosened or removed entirely Trump’s border controls. They knew full well, and did it on purpose. If what Morocco did in Ceuta could rightly be considered an act of war against Spain, the same could be said for what the Biden administration did to the American people from 2021 to 2025.

What makes it more disturbing than what happened last week in Ceuta is that the Democrats, unlike Rabat, were pursuing irredentist claims not on behalf of the their own people but on behalf of the global south. They effectively launched a foreign invasion of the United States, the ultimate object of which was to wrest control of the country from its native inhabitants by overwhelming the country with illegal immigrants.

And they are going to do it again just as soon as they have the chance. As my colleague Brianna Lyman noted last week, the invasion of Ceuta is a preview and a warning: “If Democrats (and yes, that includes the socialists) regain control of Congress in November or the White House in 2028, they will not need four full years to reopen the border and flood our country with Third World migrants. Ceuta should serve as a warning about how quickly things can be destroyed.”

But it should also serve as another kind of warning: that in America, the real danger comes not from foreign powers or cartels or nefarious nongovernmental organizations that profit off mass illegal immigration, but from the Democrat Party itself. Morocco wants to expel Spain from Ceuta and the North African coast. Democrats want something far more sinister: they want to dislodge and replace their own people with other peoples, an invading force of foreigners who, they believe, will be more amenable to Democrat control than us stubborn Americans.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.