The number of migrants arriving at UK shores on small boats is breaking another record as authorities detain the smugglers’ organisers.
The number of migrants arriving in the UK on small boats crossing the Channel is now approaching 10,000. This is 2,600 more than last year.
Some 103 people arrived yesterday on two small boats, meaning the total at the moment, not including today’s arrivals, is 9,803. This compares to 7,217 at the same date last year and 8,693 in 2022, 3,112 in 2021 and 1,492 in 2020.
Journalists photographed women and children on the first boat that docked Sunday morning. Border Agency took them to Dover in their own vessel. Labour’s shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said:
This milestone is yet more evidence that the Tories’ plans are fundamentally failing. Thousands of people have crossed the Channel since the Government’s Rwanda bill passed, with crossings up a third on last year already. The figures also show that criminal smuggler gangs are piling more and more people into each unseaworthy boat, putting lives at even greater risk.
It comes after Home Office agents detained the first group of illegal migrants travelling to Rwanda last week.
Immigration officers took part in several raids across the UK to recruit asylum seekers who had crossed the Channel in small boats. Around 800 immigration agents took part in the operation, codenamed Vector, which will take nine to 11 weeks to travel and target 2,143 asylum seekers.
Asylum seekers who have made the journey are receiving letters from the UK Home Office informing them that the migrants will fly to Rwanda because they have failed to seek asylum in the first “safe country” they visited.
Parliament passed a law last month aimed at getting asylum seekers on a one-way flight to Kigali. But the UK Supreme Court said Rwanda was an unsafe country to send migrants to.
The UK is cracking down on people smuggling
Meanwhile, a UK court has sentenced two men who organised the smuggling of migrants into the UK in lorries and small planes to a total of five years and two months in prison.
Albanian nationals Myrteza Hilaj, 50, and Kreshnik Kadena, 37, both from Leyton in east London, appeared in court in March after an eight-year investigation. They were part of an Albanian crime syndicate that organised at least nine migrant trips in 2016 and 2017.
The National Crime Agency launched an investigation in 2017 and found that Hilaj was the coordinator of a multinational organised crime group in the UK. Kadena acted as his assistant and was mainly involved in smuggling migrants using light aircraft.
Telephone evidence showed the pair were middlemen for a criminal network that charged Albanian migrants around £10,000 to enter the UK.
Hilaj and Kadena helped people to settle in the country by providing them with fake passports, identity cards and fake utility bills.
Police caught them in an NCA Micropus operation. On Friday, Southwark Crown Court sentenced Hilaj and Kadena to three years and six months and one year and eight months respectively.
