French police fail to stop Channel migrant on crutches
French police failed to prevent a man using a crutch from getting into a migrant boat setting out across the Channel.
The man, who leant heavily on the crutch, was one of several dozen people who boarded a dinghy off a stretch of beach near Calais
It comes after Sir Keir Starmer admitted that the small-boats crisis is getting worse, and ahead of an expected surge in crossings due to warmer weather.
Just after first light on Wednesday morning, the man with the crutch was among a group of migrants, marshalled by a trafficker wearing a mask, who made their way across the long sandy beach at Gravelines and into the shallow waters. French police were nowhere to be seen.
His companions had helped him wade out to the boat and cries of encouragement could be heard as he climbed aboard the tiny, overladen dinghy.
Unlike many of his fellow passengers, he was not wearing a lifejacket.
The number of people arriving on small boats across the Channel so far this year is more than 22 per cent higher than it was by this time in 2024.
From the beginning of Jan until June 14, 16,317 migrants crossed to the UK. Last year 13,489 had made the journey by the end of June.
On Monday, another 228 people crossed in four boats, according to the latest Home Office figures.
A further 134 people had managed to reach the UK on Saturday, in two small boats. On Friday, more than 900 migrants crossed in 14 boats – the single largest number for several weeks.
Last Thursday, 52 reached the UK coast in one boat, and the day before 400 had made it across in six small boats.
The crossing remains perilous. Since the beginning of the year at least 15 people have died at sea while attempting to cross the Channel, according to the French. In 2024, more than 78 migrants died while attempting to reach the UK.
On Saturday, the French coastguard said they had rescued almost 100 people who had attempted the crossing on that day and the previous 24 hours.
There has been growing frustration at France's apparent foot-dragging, with it stopping fewer than 40 per cent of boats so far this year.
It marks the lowest proportion on record despite a three-year Anglo-French deal costing £480 million to combat the crossings.
But France's interior ministry has pledged to come up with a new strategy by the time of Franco-British summit – which begins on July 8 – involving police and gendarmes intercepting migrant boats at sea up to 300 metres from the coast for the first time.
Matthew Pennycook, a Labour minister, said the reform was part of a series of changes which he said would allow the UK to cut the number of economic migrants and asylum seekers reaching its shores.
French police have already begun to adopt more robust tactics, including dousing beaches with tear gas, to try to stop so many small boats leaving northern France.
They are also using drones to spot boats along a 75-mile stretch of coastline, which is policed by hundreds of officers.
At Gravelines on Wednesday, police officers appeared to be focusing their efforts further inland in a bid to deter migrants from even reaching the beach.
The French authorities claim two-thirds of vessels are already being prevented from leaving.
The promised crackdown comes as conditions in the migrant camps in northern France appeared to be deteriorating, with rising tensions among those desperate to leave.
Two migrants were shot dead in two separate incidents at camps near the town of Dunkirk on Saturday and Sunday, with around five others wounded. All those involved were reported to be of Sudanese origin.
French police said that one migrant was shot and killed at a camp at Loon Plage, outside Dunkirk, on Sunday. The shooting came a day after gunfire killed another man in the same area the previous day and left five others wounded.
Armed officers arrested two suspected members of an organised gang on Saturday in connection with one of the shootings. A 29-year-old man who claimed to be from Iraq was held, along with a 16-year-old from Afghanistan, the public prosecutor's office said.
Salomé Bahri, a volunteer with Utopia 56, a group working with migrants based near Grande-Synthe, site of a large migrant camp outside Dunkirk, told the InfoMigrants news website that there had been 'a lot of tensions in the area . . . in the last two or three weeks'.
She said the situation had worsened because of the authorities' attempt to clear out the camps. One, near Loon Plage, is currently home to between 1,500 to 2,000 people, an increase from around 1,000 last winter.
'The tensions are also caused by the trafficking gangs,' said another volunteer. 'You can't say that all the migrants there are causing these tensions. But everything that is happening there, all this violence is also a consequence of the migration policies being carried out at the border.'
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