Dozens of migrants cross Channel to UK on dinghies as smugglers take advantage of calm weather
Emergency services scrambled to rescue migrants crossing the Channel as people-smugglers took advantage of calm weather conditions to traffic asylum seekers from Europe to Britain.
Photographs taken on Tuesday afternoon captured the moment an RNLI lifeboat carrying a group of some 20 or more people arrived at a beach in Dungeness, Kent.
A HM Coastguard spokesperson said it ‘has been co-ordinating a search and rescue response to an incident involving small boats off Kent, working with Border Force, Kent Police and other partners’.
In Dungeness, a group wearing red life jackets disembarked the vessel via a ladder before they were led up the pebbled beach by Border Force agents. They were then searched and their possessions were bagged up before they boarded a coach, a photographer at the scene said.
Among those rescued, a man was seen grinning and later flashing a two fingered ‘V sign’, which can mean peace or victory, as the procession was led up the beach. In another photo, a young woman huddled in a blue blanket pulled close to her face.
The latest Home Office data up to Monday shows that no small boat crossings had been recorded since March 29.
The total number of migrants who crossed the Channel to the UK in the first three months of this year was 17 per cent below the figure for the same period in 2022.
PA news agency analysis of Government figures shows 3,793 migrants made the journey from France by the end of March 2023, compared with 4,548 in the first quarter of last year.
