More than 300 migrants arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel on Sunday and a seven-year-old girl drowned while trying to make the journey.
The French coastguard said the child was travelling with her pregnant mother, father and three siblings in a boat carrying 16 people and died after it tipped over.
According to Prefect Nord, another couple, two men and six young children were on board when the boat became stranded early in the morning off the French coast. All were taken to hospital in Dunkirk.
The Home Office recorded 327 people arriving in the UK on eight boats that day, an average of about 41 people per boat. This brings the provisional number of arrivals so far to 2,582. This number is expected to rise as border crossings continued on Monday.
Some 29,000 people reached the UK in 2023 on small boats, despite the British government saying stopping them was a priority. It is trying to push ahead with a plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda, despite a High Court ruling in London that the policy is illegal.
Last August, six people died after a boat carrying migrants sank in the English Channel off the coast of France. And in November 2021, at least 27 migrants died after a dinghy bound for the UK sank – the highest number of deaths from a single incident.
