Read: The new authoritarians are waging war on women

Vox’s stance on the Manresa case—calling out the apparent hypocrisy of the left for not pushing for harsher restrictions against North African immigrants, after promoting feminist legislation in the wake of the Wolf Pack case—would thus have appeared to be a radical about-face. But it wasn’t. This latest case, which is still making its way through the courts, and a series of others illustrate how Spain’s far right is harnessing and fomenting misinformation during a genuine moment of attempted reform to further its agenda. But while far-right parties across Europe—from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to Italy’s League and France’s National Rally—all tout anti-immigration platforms and have justified them as necessary to protect local women, such rhetoric is new in Spain. Anti-immigration sentiment here was, until recently, comparatively low for western Europe, but that is at risk of changing.

Though Vox has a marginal presence in Catalonia, where it has just one elected representative, and nationally (it has less than 4 percent of seats in Parliament), it’s whipping up anti-immigration sentiment across social media, criminalizing migrants—especially youth migrants—by co-opting progressives’ zero-tolerance rhetoric for sexual assault.

“Ultraconservative sectors, groups with a certain affinity for Vox, and the far right are weaponizing the arguments being made by social movements, whether feminism or LGBT or human rights, to delegitimize them,” Violeta Assiego, a human-rights lawyer, told me.

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After reports emerged that the public prosecution in the Manresa case was charging the accused with “sexual abuse” and not rape, Vox took it upon itself to champion the victim’s rights. Ignacio Garriga, Vox’s lone lawmaker in Catalonia, tweeted a video of a man standing alone before the Barcelona courthouse where the trial was unfolding, holding up a sign that read IT’S NOT ABUSE, IT’S RAPE—the same slogan women had rallied behind during the Pamplona Wolf Pack protests. (This month, the public prosecution elevated the charges to rape.) Garriga denounced what he said was the “hypocrisy of the so-called feminist movement” for not voicing greater outrage, saying he was against “all those who fall silent when a rape is perpetrated by illegal immigrants, in this case, MENA’s,” the Spanish acronym by which migrant children are known, which rights groups avoid using because they believe it dehumanizes them.

Most youth immigrants are boys from Morocco ages 14 to 17 who’ve come to Spain to finish school and find work. Once they reach Spanish soil, they’re automatically considered wards of the state, since child services here extend to both citizens and migrants. But that’s contingent on proving their age—that they’re younger than 18—which can be difficult for older teens. Once that’s done, they’re registered with the police, fingerprinted, and ID’d, then transferred to residential centers (though this can take weeks or months). There are approximately 2,500 youth migrants in these shelters in Catalonia, though some evade local authorities and strike out on their own.

On a hot July morning, I visited a group of eight teenagers living in such a center, a nondescript apartment building in a suburb of Barcelona.