Two official numbers describe how many of the migrants who crossed into Ceuta at the end of July are still in the city, and they differ by a factor of more than three. Mayor Juan Jesus Vivas puts the figure at 8,000 to 11,000 people. The Spanish government says 2,500 [1]. Between those two counts sits every policy decision now being demanded in the enclave.
The scale of the crossing itself is not in dispute. Around 80,000 people entered the Spanish enclave from Morocco at the end of July, and roughly 70,000 returned within two days [1]. One hundred deaths have been reported during the crossings [1]. That last figure has drawn considerably less institutional attention than the argument over who remains.
The crossing arithmetic leans one way. Eighty thousand in and seventy thousand back leaves roughly 10,000 people unaccounted for by return, a residue that sits inside the mayor's 8,000-to-11,000 range and a long way from the government's 2,500. Departures since, onward to the Spanish mainland or back across the border, could reconcile the difference; neither administration has published the accounting that would show it [1]. This is not a small bookkeeping discrepancy. The two figures come from institutions that share responsibility for the same streets, and each has been offered to the public as ground truth in the same news cycle.
Vivas is not merely disputing Madrid's count; he is building policy on his own. "A space that acts as an internment centre for foreigners must be set up," he said [1]. The proposal's scale depends entirely on which number is real: a facility sized for the government's 2,500 and one sized for the mayor's 11,000 are different institutions, with different costs and different populations behind their fences.
The city's residents, for their part, are acting on the numbers available to them. On Sunday, 5,000 people protested in Ceuta [1]. A protest of that size in a small enclave is a significant fraction of the city making a demand about a population figure its own officials cannot fix within a factor of three.
What remains is a working definition of how the crisis is being governed. An internment centre is a concrete demand; the population it would hold is, as of Monday, an official unknown that two arms of the Spanish state place somewhere between 2,500 and 11,000 people. One hundred deaths in the crossings are on the record with no comparable dispute, because nobody with authority has made them the argument. Until the counts converge, Ceuta is debating infrastructure for a number, and the number belongs to whoever is speaking.
