‘The migrants are everywhere': People smugglers are winning the battle of the beach

Sydney Morning Herald

18-07-2025

Karwan and Sara watch as smugglers hoist Mohammed, their six-year-old son, and Alina, their four-year-old daughter, onto their shoulders, wade out to sea, and bundle them onto an overloaded dinghy.
Behind them, a crowd of 200 or so migrants are herded like cattle, waist-deep in the water, waiting their turn. The people smugglers shout and shove them into position.
More than 70 passengers are eventually squeezed on board the barely seaworthy vessel, their feet dangling over the side, ready to motor towards Dover. A French police patrol boat lazily circles the inflatable dinghy, watching the chaos unfold.
It is 6am on Gravelines beach, and all in a day's work for the smugglers who increasingly control this sweeping stretch of coastline.
All they have to do now is wade through the surf and head back unhindered towards the dunes 300 metres away to regroup and plan tomorrow's crossings.
The scenes are painfully familiar to any of the 1200 gendarmes deployed along France's northern beaches. Some told London's Telegraph they are outmanoeuvred and outnumbered by the smugglers, who adapt their tactics at pace.
'We are helpless ... there is a French expression 'donner de la tête', we are overwhelmed and don't know where to start, we don't know where to go, there are so many boats leaving,' says Marc Musiol, a French border police officer in Pas-de-Calais.
One well-placed international policing source labelled the situation a 'failure'.
Since the beginning of this year, there have been 22,360 arrivals via small boats into the UK – an almost 60 per cent increase on last year.
The numbers are rising as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer promises to 'smash the gangs' and hails a new deal with French President Emmanuel Macron to stem the tide.
But authorities here suggest the 'one-in, one-out' pledge is not worth the paper it is written on. Some also pour scorn on Macron for talking tough without following through with concrete changes.
The scene on the beaches of Gravelines this week is one replicated along the coast of northern France day in, day out, when the weather permits.
In the early hours, police patrol cars scour the 200 kilometres of coastline between the border of Belgium and the Bay de Somme estuary. Police use drones fitted with night-vision technology to scan the dunes where the migrants, mostly young adult men, will camp for the night before they attempt to cross the Channel.
But the distances make it easy for smugglers and migrants to hide from stretched authorities. Gendarmes drive beige 4x4s in teams of three, moving down the shoreline and surveying the waters for inflatable dinghies.
'We are here every night, it is always the same, it never changes,' one officer said as he patrolled a beach car park. 'The migrants are everywhere.'
The London Telegraph encountered six patrols in the space of two hours during a 3am drive from Calais towards Wimereux, a seaside commune south of Boulogne and another known hotspot for Channel crossings.
Interceptions remain scarce.
Smugglers launch simultaneous crossings from up to 10 beaches to divide police attention and resources. Pre-inflated dinghies are launched from waterways and canals dozens of kilometres from the pick-up point and sail down the coast.
The smugglers use weather apps, such as Windy, on their phones to help them plan their crossings. The apps provide up-to-the-second information on wind speed, direction and the swell.
Sentries linked to the smuggling gangs are posted in the dunes and near the camps to watch for the boats. They alert over the phone that the dinghy is arriving and that it is time for its passengers to get on board.
Musiol, the border police officer, said: 'There are always small groups of smugglers who know our beaches very, very well.'
Often carrying nothing other than orange life jackets around their necks, the migrants sprint across the beach, hoping to do so before the police have time to react. Sometimes officers do, and fire a salvo of tear gas from grenade launchers. But this is often not enough.
'You have smugglers and their friends who throw stones at the police officers to distract them and to get the migrants onto the boat as quickly as possible,' one officer said. He estimated there are only three to six police for every 50 migrants trying to enter the sea.
'We have a lack of officers and you have a huge, huge amount of the coast to monitor,' he said. 'It is not possible with the number of personnel the border police have, the gendarmerie, to monitor this entire stretch of coastline and beach.'
The camps where migrants live are even more lawless. Inside the main camp at Loon Plage, 12 kilometres south-west of Dunkirk, shootings and stabbings between warring gangs for control of the best beaches are commonplace. On July 8, a 44-year-old Kurd from Iraq was shot five times in the legs at the camp.
About two dozen armed police were deployed that day to quell the violence. The month before, two migrants were shot dead and another five injured.
Balkan crime groups have established themselves as the dominant players in orchestrating the operations, but police sources say East African gangs out of Eritrea, especially, are rivalling them.
One police source with knowledge of the people-smuggling gangs said efforts to stop the migrants were futile without a strategy to break up the wider smuggling networks.
'If you are dealing with it in Calais, you have failed, you are never going to succeed,' they said. 'You have got to look at it earlier on and deal with the cause of all of these problems.
'They are going to keep trying. A week later, they are going to give it another go. What else are they going to do, camp in Calais for the rest of their life? It's just not realistic.'
Locals along the coast, meanwhile, are fed up with seeing their coastline dominated by years of crisis and inaction.
Alain Boonefaes, the deputy mayor of Gravelines, whose remit includes the town's safety and security, admitted the problem is endemic and there is little to be done.
The seaside resort town, 30 kilometres south-east of Dunkirk, relies on tourism for survival but can experience up to 350 migrant departures in a single evening.
The mayor and many others in the town are deeply sceptical about Macron's one-in-one-out policy, agreed with Starmer during the French president's three-day visit to London last week.
The trial would allow the UK to return selected numbers of small boat arrivals to France. In exchange, the UK will admit an equal number of asylum seekers with legitimate ties, such as family.
Even the police are sceptical. 'Macron has made political announcements and not concrete ones,' Musiol said. 'We have the impression that nothing will change in terms of the police officers' work itself.
'You can put a police officer on every beach on the Opal Coast. The migrants will continue to come. We must stop this problem at the source – that is, in the country of origin.'
He said there was 'no lasting solution that could stop the problem' along the coast here and in Britain, where migrants arrived and were ushered into camps and hotels.
On Thursday morning, the London Telegraph saw first-hand the limits of the policing operation. Gendarmes fired a salvo of tear gas into the dunes 300 metres from the shore, where hundreds of migrants had camped overnight.
Coughing and spluttering, they were led out onto the beach by the smugglers, away from the haze of white smoke and towards the shore.
There they sat and waited for about 10 minutes for the 'taxi boat', launched from the west on River Aa, which runs through the centre of Gravelines and leads out into the sea, to arrive.
The majority of the migrants were young men from the Middle East or Vietnam. An Iranian family of four – mother and father, Karwan and Sara, and son and daughter, Alina and Mohammed – were a rare sight.
Sara, one of only three women in the crowd, spoke in broken English of how her family had travelled nearly 9000 kilometres from Tehran and had journeyed through Turkey and Germany to reach Calais.
She indicated they had spent 10 days at one of the camps near Dunkirk. This was their first attempt at a crossing.
Sara dabbed tears from her eyes with her headscarf, watching Alina, her pink trousers pulled up to her knees, splash and dance joyfully in the water, oblivious to the perils around her.
Karwan gave no answer when asked what had made the family leave Tehran. He waded through the water as a 'taxi boat', already filled with 50 or so passengers, drew near to the shore.
Sara and Karwan walked through the surf holding each other's hands, also clutching life jackets. Around them, smugglers bullied their human cargo into place.
Alina and Mohammed were carried on the shoulders of smugglers and handed over to migrants already on board the boats, who hauled them in. They were followed by their mother and father, who sat in the centre of the flimsy dinghy.
The passengers cheered and waved to those left behind on the beach and sailed, under a police escort, towards the UK.
One of those left on the shore was Leo, a 25-year-old aspiring engineering student from Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan, who had paid smugglers €1500 ($2700) to ferry him across the Channel.
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He had hoped to join his sister, who had made it to the UK last week via a small boat and is living in Manchester.
'I left because of the Taliban,' he said. 'This was my first go. I will go again. I will go to London. My sister is married. The rest of my family, my papa, my mother, are still in Afghanistan.'
Leo had fled his home country at the age of 13, making his way through Iran, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, and now Calais over the course of more than a decade.
He followed the others up the hill towards the dune and back to the ramshackle, gang-ridden camp he calls home in Dunkirk.