On Sunday, French police announced that they found the body of a migrant on the beach at Sangatte on the Channel coast. The man did not have any documents on him but was wearing a life jacket. Prosecutors suspect he had been hoping to cross the water towards Dover in the UK.
According to a report in the Telegraph on Sunday, Britain's Clandestine Channel Threat Commander is considering using nets in the Channel in order to deter migrant boats from crossing.
At the beginning of October, a flight chartered by the British Home Office left the UK for France with just one migrant on board. Under the Dublin agreement, the UK authorities say he should pursue his asylum claim in France. On Wednesday, October 7, the man’s lawyers went to court in France to try and stop his repatriation to Africa.
The British Home Secretary (interior minister) in a speech at the Conservative Party conference pledged to fix the "fundamentally broken asylum system" in the country. She said it was currently "neither firm nor fair," and needed a raft of new laws which she would start introducing in 2021.
European police have arrested a dozen people suspected of smuggling migrants across the English Channel to Britain. The mainly Iranian gang reportedly charged migrants thousands of euros per crossing.
French authorities dismantled a migrant camp of "about 800" people in the port city of Calais on Tuesday, September 29. The makeshift camp is thought to be the biggest since the authorities cleared the so-called “Jungle” camp in 2016.
According to reports in several British newspapers, the British government is planning to provide weekly flights to return migrants arriving in the UK via the Channel. The plans were revealed after a freedom of information request made by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
More and more people are taking to small dinghies to cross the English Channel to the UK, in spite of the efforts on both sides to stop them. Many are desperate to escape unemployment and homelessness they experienced elsewhere in Europe.
Abdulfatah Hamdallah was found dead on a beach in northern France on August 19. The 28-year-old Sudanese migrant had tried to cross the Channel to the UK after his asylum application in France was rejected, according to media reports.
British and French authorities are reporting having picked up hundreds of migrants in the English Channel on Monday, September 7. Kent border force vessels said they had intercepted more than 200 and French authorities reported rescuing more than 80 people on their side of the water.
Two protests happened in Dover in the UK over the weekend. One in support of migrants passed off relatively quietly and a second one protesting against the arrival of migrants across the English Channel resulted in clashes between protesters and police.
The number of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel on small boats has increased dramatically following months of good weather and a fall in freight traffic due to the COVID-19 pandemic. InfoMigrants visited the 80 kilometer-long stretch of coastline in the Calais region as the numbers of boat crossings hit a new daily high, with 416 migrants reaching the UK on September 3.