Twenty-two EU leaders — including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — on Saturday took aim at Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s migration policies for undermining the security of the bloc’s borders.

The increasingly isolated Sánchez hit back that his EU partners were responding in a “selfish” and “unlawful” manner to the sudden influx of some 50,000 unauthorized migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in North Africa.

While almost all those migrants have now returned to Morocco — and none crossed into the EU mainland — the 22 leaders raised “serious concern” over the threat to the EU’s frontier, and zeroed in on Sánchez’s move to grant legal status to up to 1.2 million unauthorized migrants as a “pull factor” that fueled the crisis.