A Soros-backed nonprofit aided Spain’s Ceuta crisis

“Sánchez permite la invasión de España por Ceuta para intentar ocultar todos sus juicios. Hasta ahí llega.” Translated: “Sánchez allows the invasion of Spain through Ceuta in an attempt to hide all his trials. That’s as far as he’ll go.”

Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, wrote those words on X as the recent Spanish border crisis unfolded. Ayuso is one of Spain’s most prominent conservative leaders, a member of the center-right Partido Popular and one of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s most consistent critics.

She was describing what happened starting in late July 2026, when an estimated 70,000 people (mainly young men) illegally crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. At least 41 people died, with other reports putting the toll far higher as search operations continued for days. It was the worst border crisis Spain has faced since 2021, and it followed one specific government decision by only a few months: amnesty for migrants.

The push for Spain’s mass amnesty law for illegal immigrants did not come from inside the Spanish government. Instead, it originated with a nonprofit advocacy coalition named Regularización Ya, a self-described antiracist, anti-colonialist movement born out of migrant support groups during the 2020 lockdown. They launched a Popular Legislative Initiative, a direct democracy option in Spain that permits citizens to propose legislation directly to Congress if they collect at least 500,000 signatures. This effectively forces lawmakers to debate and vote on it formally. The proposal, titled the Bill for an Extraordinary Regularization for Foreign Nationals in Spain, did exactly what its name suggests.

Regularización Ya also ran a full political campaign, staging protests outside Spain’s Congress and setting up eighteen territorial committees across the country to collect signatures. By 2024, more than 900 civil society organizations had joined the campaign for signatures, eventually delivering more than 700,000, which was well above the legal threshold. The Catholic Church backed the push directly. Cáritas, the Spanish Bishops’ migration office, and the Confederation of Religious banded together to support the bill starting in 2021, and the bishops’ conference publicly confirmed that support. Spain’s major trade unions came around after the fact, with CCOO and UGT publicly crediting the regularization with boosting Social Security enrollment and employment once it took effect. Between the Church’s organizing muscle and the unions’ after-the-fact praise, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had the political cover to act.

Sánchez’s government approved the regularization by royal decree in April, 2026, delivering by executive action what Regularización Ya’s citizen campaign had spent years building public and political pressure to achieve. The government initially estimated the decree would affect around 500,000 people. By the time the application window closed on June 30, more than 1.3 million undocumented migrants had applied, the largest migrant amnesty in European history, surpassing Italy’s 2002 regularization of roughly 650,000 people.

Amnesty is more than a leftist buzzword meant to signal compassion for people already living in a country illegally. It is real world policy that carries real consequences. It tells anyone in a country illegally that the consequences of entering without following the rules are negotiable. Forget everyone waiting on the sidelines, following the legal process. Not only did you force your way to the front of the line illegally, but you get rewarded for doing it. Spain granted legal status to well over a million people who entered the country illegally, then acted surprised when, within weeks of the amnesty window closing, tens of thousands more decided the invitation applied to them as well. Some even coordinated the crossing through Facebook groups with a combined 230,000 members before Meta shut them down.

An advocacy group like Regularización Ya can spend years lobbying a government and get nowhere. What can change the calculation is when the world’s most prominent progressive billionaire and philanthropist, whose own foundation has spent decades funding amnesty efforts, is personally in the prime minister’s ear. Regularización Ya was not lobbying alone.

Back at the start of this year when Sánchez pushed the decree through, he had a prominent, personal cheerleader in Alexander Soros, son of George Soros and chairman of Open Society Foundations. On February 5, 2026, Sánchez posted a link to his own New York Times op-ed defending the amnesty, arguing migrants “care for aging parents, work in small and large companies, and harvest the food on our tables.” Soros responded directly on X: Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez showing us what real leadership looks like! Instead of running away from society’s most important issues, he confronts them head-on with sound policy, both principled and pragmatic. We need more elected leaders like him!” Not just praise for Sánchez in general. Praise for the amnesty, the same day Sánchez defended it.

The praise followed real access. First, George Soros met privately with Sánchez at Moncloa (Spain’s version of the White House) in June 2018, a meeting Moncloa officials did not disclose until an opposition lawmaker forced the question in parliament. Sánchez met Alexander Soros specifically for the first time in 2019 in New York, then again in January 2020 at Davos, the annual gathering of world leaders, billionaires, and financial elites in Switzerland. In early 2020, the Spanish outlet OkDiario alleged Sánchez had met with George Soros or his family more times than he had met with Spain’s actual opposition leader, though that specific claim has not been independently confirmed elsewhere. By April 2026, Alexander Soros was personally hosting and paying for a Barcelona summit Sánchez attended, along with covering his costs at two other international leftist gatherings that year.

Open Society’s money is not absent from the picture either: the foundation directly funds porCausa, one of the five organizations that sat on the campaign’s official steering committee behind the amnesty push. This is not a new position for Open Society. The foundation’s leadership has said its lobbying operation exists in part to promote amnesty for illegal immigrants, and it has put money behind that stance before, including an $8 million investment in 2015 to help illegal aliens in the United States apply for deferred action from deportation.

Spain’s government insists the border crisis and the amnesty are unrelated. It has a harder time explaining away the second policy decision authorities themselves point to. Earlier that same July, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants intercepted at sea while trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla could not be deported, and this protection does not apply to migrants who cross by land or climb the border fence. Sánchez’s government admitted the ruling spread through smuggling networks within hours and helped trigger the mass surge by sea specifically. In other words, a court handed migrants a legal loophole for exactly the crossing method that let 80,000 people in, at almost the same moment the executive branch was granting legal status to over a million people who had already used other methods to get in illegally.

Spain and Morocco have since agreed to return migrants who entered illegally “as soon as possible,” an arrangement that arrives several years, one court ruling, and one massive amnesty too late to undo the message already sent.

Maybe the timing is a coincidence. It is also exactly what a country should expect after telling well over a million people already living inside its borders illegally that the rules were negotiable after all, on the advice of a nonprofit that got precisely the government decree it lobbied for, and with the loud approval of a philanthropic empire that treats national borders as a globalist agenda inconvenience rather than a line worth holding. America should take note, because the same nonprofit network cheering Sánchez on from Barcelona has an office here too.