Spain’s Church-State Collusion Clears Path for 30,000 Jihadis To Enter Europe
Bishops Back Leftist Government’s Mass Regularization of Mainly Muslim Illegals
Catholic bishops have facilitated and backed the decision by Spain’s left-wing government to grant residency to over half a million illegal immigrants—a move that security analysts expect will open Europe’s borders to at least 30,000 jihadi terrorists.
These men have no children or grandchildren. They live in palaces with private drivers. They are totally disconnected from daily life in Spain...
Duane Alexander Miller
Moroccan Muslims, numbering over one million, form Spain’s largest contingent of illegal migrants and are expected to be the main beneficiaries of Spain’s migrant regularization plan, even though Moroccans remain a primary focus of jihadist investigations in Spain as of 2025.
According to Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, authorities detected over 30,000 entries of illegals from 2020 to 2025 from countries with high jihadist presence, such as Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and Egypt.
“One in nine illegal immigrants entering Spain came from areas with a high risk of jihadist activity,” Spanish daily La Gaceta, which obtained and analyzed the Frontex data, reported. By 2022, these profiles accounted for around 18 percent of total detections, rising to 30 percent in 2024.
“In 2025, although the overall volume of illegal entries decreased, the percentage remained at 24.8 percent,” the newspaper revealed, noting that one in four illegal immigrants continued to enter Spain from these high-risk jihadi environments.
Sources from the National Police’s General Commissariat for Immigration and Borders (CGEF) told La Gaceta that their coordination with the General Commissariat of Information had identified several cases in which illegals arriving by boat had “records or links to jihadist circles.”
“The irregular routes through the Sahel and the Maghreb are increasingly being used by individuals with profiles that raise concerns about radicalization, taking advantage of the permeability of mass migration flows to infiltrate economic migrants,” CGEF sources added.
Spanish Bishops Celebrate Newcomers
The Migration Department of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Caritas, the Spanish Conference of Religious (CONFER), and the Network of Entities for Solidarity Development (REDES) explained in a press statement issued on April 14 that the “church entities consider the extraordinary regularization of migrants a measure of political, ethical, and social responsibility.”
“For the Church, welcoming, protecting, and dignifying migrants is an inherent requirement of its mission. It is not merely a pastoral choice, but also a human rights imperative and therefore a coherent expression of the Gospel in public life,” the statement stressed.
Catholic authorities released the statement on the same day that Spain’s left-wing coalition government, led by the Socialist Party (PSOE) and Podemos, approved an extraordinary royal decree to grant legal status to roughly 500,000 illegal aliens.
Italian Bishops Call for Italy to Embrace ‘Spanish Solution’
A day later, the Spanish division of Vatican Newsannounced that the bishops were “celebrating” the decree regularizing half a million migrants. At the same time, the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire published an op-ed piece urging Italy to adopt the Spanish “solution” to its illegal aliens crisis and to reject recent calls for “remigration” from conservative Italian politicians.
Spanish Episcopal Conference Backs Mass Migration Petition
Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) asked the Spanish Episcopal Conference to respond to concerns that its support of the regularization was paving the way for jihadi infiltration and posing a threat to Europe.
“The only thing I can do is answer your question by sending you the [press] statement of the inter-church team that has accompanied this process, published on the day the government decree was released,” the bishops’ media office replied.
“This decree is not an amnesty, but rather an opportunity for many migrants who have been in our country for some time without legal status to regularize their situation,” the office noted, refusing to respond to concerns of jihadist infiltration.
Spain’s Catholic Church backed a 2022 petition to parliament with over 600,000 signatures demanding the regularization of illegal aliens. However, the church has remained silent on the links between Islamism and immigration despite security agencies warning of jihadi infiltration.
“The demographics and economics of this decision are absolutely disastrous,” Islamic scholar Duane Alexander Miller from the Protestant Faculty of Theology at Madrid told FWI. “There is a theological flaw in the bishops’ thinking: in Christian ethics, we have the obligation to care for the land and culture God has given us so we can bestow it on the next generation.”
“These men have no children or grandchildren. They live in palaces with private drivers. They are totally disconnected from daily life in Spain and don’t care at all about leaving a functional, secure society for the Spanish children of the future,” he added, lamenting the “toxic empathy” of the bishops.
Counter-Terrorism Experts Confirm Fears of Jihadi Infiltration
The International Center for Counter-Terrorism’s report, Migration-related Terrorism: Trends, Challenges, and Policy Implications, warned in 2025 that Europe faces an objective security threat linked to illegal immigration and extremist infiltration.
“Reports and figures from counter-terrorism services in Europe confirm that there is an objective threat related to (illegal) immigration,” a 2025 report titled Migration-related Terrorism: Trends, Challenges, and Policy Implications,” by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism warned.
“Increased migration from mainly Muslim countries has added to the risk of jihadi terrorism” in Europe, defense experts Dario Kuntić and Martina Mihalinčić concluded in a peer-reviewed article, noting that homegrown jihadism poses the biggest threat, but migrants “from terrorist-prone states are an important vehicle through which terrorism is manifested and diffused.”
“It should not be forgotten that the Islamic State’s call for all terrorist activities in Europe found fertile ground in Spain, where the influx of illegal immigrants from Africa had increased and local Muslims were becoming heavily radicalised,” terrorism expert Krzysztof Izak observed in the journal Terrorism: Studies, Analyses, Prevention.
Izak noted that jihadis “usually arrived in Spain mixed in with groups of African migrants, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in boats.”
Islamists have long considered Spain to be the symbolic and strategic target of jihadism because of its (perceived) illegitimate occupation of Al-Andalus, the territory under Muslim control between 711 and 1492. The claim serves as a powerful narrative in radicalizing propaganda.
Spanish police carried out 58 counterterrorism operations against jihadis in 2025, the highest number ever recorded in Spain. In 2023, police launched 36 operations in 24 provinces, arresting 78 jihadi suspects.
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