Sue Reid: ‘I’ve Never Seen So Many Migrants Lining the Coast’

Ten years ago today, thousands of migrants were evicted from a sprawling shanty town in the port of Calais known as The Jungle.

The clearance was celebrated as a historic turning point, with hopes that it would finally halt the seemingly endless flow of people attempting to cross the 21-mile Channel to Britain without authorisation.

Shortly after dawn on October 24, 2016, bulldozers entered the vast 40-acre camp as charity workers watched in tears and disbelief.

In an operation ordered by the French government, the machinery tore through entire rows of makeshift wooden huts, many topped with corrugated iron and fitted with cardboard doors. The destruction also swept away tea rooms, tobacco shops, bicycle repair businesses, hidden mosques, an immigration lawyer’s office, barbers’ salons, drug dens and even a brothel.

The people living in The Jungle had travelled from sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East and almost every other region of the world. After the clearance, residents were loaded on to buses and relocated to destinations across France.

The small number of women and babies were taken to refuge centres nearby. Many children, meanwhile, were brought to Britain in one of the most disputed evacuations linked to the camp.

I have reported on migration in Calais for around 20 years. Yet I have never seen so many people gathered here as in recent days, with every one of them apparently intent on reaching England.

The official number of migrants assembled around the ferry port and in nearby Dunkirk is close to 4,000, according to Home Office border security commander Major General Duncan Capps, who provided the figure this week.

That figure excludes thousands more scattered along the 240 miles of French coastline stretching from the Belgian border to Cherbourg in Normandy. Most are sheltering in informal camps and waiting for the winds to ease, as forecast for next week, before attempting to continue their journey in boats operated by people smugglers.

The charities working with migrants have not forgotten The Jungle. Last weekend, 21 British and French organisations held a commemoration to mark the camp’s dismantling.

The programme included discussions about the case for open borders, a pledge to “keep alive the memory of a vanished camp” and deeply emotional accounts from people who said they had “survived” life there. Organisers also read extracts from London Calling, a new photo-reportage book documenting the “daily realities” faced by migrants waiting “in the cold and mud” for a crossing to England.

Despite the driving rain, the charities led two public walks up a steep slope to a lookout overlooking the former site of The Jungle. The area has since been transformed into a coastal wetland popular with nature lovers and bird-watchers.

The lookout sits above a former Second World War coastal artillery battery built by German forces. Pro-migrant activists have painted a message in large red letters on the concrete structure, visible from around a mile away: “SAFE TRIP 2”.

Together, the charities behind the weekend’s events receive total annual income of £840,000 from private donations, legacies and public funding. Some of that money is used to help migrants living in what are now officially described as “living sites” or temporary camps along the French coast.

The network supporting migrants remains active. At 8.45am on Monday, I stood near the Marcel Doret bus stop in the port’s industrial district and watched volunteers, many of them students or unemployed Britons, make their way to a nearby warehouse. The building houses the busy French charity L’Auberge des Migrants, along with other organisations including Britain’s Refugee Community Kitchen.

The location is kept confidential because of fears of a backlash from Calais residents. Many believe the city has been overwhelmed by people attracted by the food, water and shelter provided by charitable groups.

From 9am onwards, volunteers prepare and cook as many as 1,000 hot meals each day. The charity’s white vans then deliver them to “feeding” points across Calais, where later in the day I watched hundreds of young African men form queues.

Some hungry arrivals are kept behind metal barriers by charity workers until distribution begins, a measure intended to prevent the queues from descending into an uncontrollable melee.

Throughout the town we discovered charity leaflets in multiple languages posted up at feeding stations – even on street corners and trees. One was marked ‘New Arrival Guide, October 2026, Calais’. 

They tell migrants how to survive in France and gain asylum in Britain, with, for instance, a section on ‘how to look for a UK lawyer’ on arrival on the South Coast.

This arrival guide tells migrants how to call the British coastguard in mid-Channel for a Border Force vessel or RNLI lifeboat to pick them up. It gives the phone number and a reminder to give their exact location at sea so the British know where to find them.

Other charity leaflets tell them that ‘crossing to the UK is very dangerous, this information may save your life. Do not try without an engine, beware of winds over ten knots, stay far away from ships because they make big waves’.

The information made available includes addresses for charity medical clinics where girls and women in northern France en route to Britain can be treated if they have injuries from rape or female genital mutilation, or HIV or other serious sexual diseases. 

A free dental clinic at the Calais hospital, advertised by the charities in Arabic and English, was in operation on Wednesday as, one by one, young male migrants in hoodies came to the door.

It is no exaggeration to say that the word ‘UK’ is on the lips of every migrant I speak to here.

In a camp off the ring road, I find 50 Eritreans with their families living in squalor. In one small bell tent is Robel Tekle, 28, his wife Liwame, 25, and their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. I give them some food, and sweets for the little ones.

‘We don’t care if it is dangerous for our children to cross the sea,’ says Robel defiantly. ‘We have been here two weeks, and we will go to England. They can go to school. We will get a house.’

They are drawn to Calais, not just because of the traffickers’ persuasive talk and regular boat and lorry services, but because of the ever-generous charities.

One of the 21 organisations commemorating The Jungle’s closure was Secours Catholique (Catholic Relief Service) which runs an open-doors day centre near the port, handing out tents, clothes and shoes to migrants along with medical advice.

It says it offers migrants ‘information about their rights’ so they can take stock of their situation as they consider the next step in their journey to Britain, adding: ‘We have a genuine policy of hospitality.’

On its website, Secours Catholique declares that once The Jungle closed, ‘those who remained were relegated to irregular camps or squats on the margins of Calais. It was a deliberate attempt to make them invisible by the authorities’.

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The closure of The Jungle was preceded by demands from the then French president Francois Hollande for Britain’s Conservative government to ‘take their responsibility’ for hundreds of children living at the camp.

A large number of these children claimed to be unaccompanied by any family member, which increased their chances of being accepted by Britain. In reality, all the youngsters I interviewed over the years in The Jungle had an uncle, a cousin, or another relative with whom they had travelled.

I also reported at the time that many of those claiming to be 12 or 13 had deep voices and some had moustaches. I concluded then that we were being duped.

The UK nevertheless took in a first tranche of 300 ‘under-age’ youngsters in the week before The Jungle became a heap of rubble, followed by hundreds more under EU and French pressure.

The ‘children’ were selected by the Red Cross, Calais charity workers and Home Office officials. One in ten of those initially listed for travel went missing from The Jungle – and it was reported by French media that they did so to avoid being scrutinised for their age – racing to cross the Channel before the truth came out.

Tellingly, the people-smugglers’ price for a ride hidden in a lorry on a UK-bound ferry rose significantly to £13,000 a head as demand increased in the weeks before the camp was destroyed.

The first arrivals were bussed into Croydon, south London, on October 17, a week before the camp was shuttered.

Pictures of these ‘children’, allegedly from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Sudan, clearly showed men with heavy stubble, broad shoulders and often the same height as the Border Force staff accompanying them from France.

The public was highly sceptical. The Sun ran a front-page photo of a ‘child’ migrant with a headline: ‘My, haven’t you grown!’. 

The Home Office acted as the Home Office does, immediately putting awnings up at the Croydon immigration centre to prevent pictures being taken of the migrants alighting from buses. 

Absurdly, a spokesman said years of living in war zones had ‘probably toughened the children up so they’ve grown up a bit quicker’.

A total figure for ‘children’ from The Jungle given sanctuary by Britain has never been made public, but 2016 parliamentary records show that 3,000 under-age migrants from Europe – notably France at around the time of The Jungle closure – arrived that year.

Meanwhile, the camp was systematically cleared over three fraught days by French authorities. I remember seeing adult male migrants lined up to be put on buses to 460 resettlement centres scattered across this huge country. 

The centres had been prepared in every region, apart from Paris, which was already a giant staging post for ‘clandestines’ heading for Calais to then slip inside British-bound lorries (boat crossings were just beginning, with fewer than 100 people arriving on small dinghies on Kent beaches in 2016).

President Hollande promised Calais residents that the migrants would ‘never return’.

Christian Salome, the then head of L’Auberge des Migrants, however, predicted correctly that many dispersed across France would come back to Calais. 

Mayor Natacha Bouchart, who for years had called Britain a magnet for migrants seeking an ‘Eldorado’ of benefits and freebies, revealed that some adult camp dwellers left The Jungle to hide elsewhere in France because the exact date of the shanty town’s closure had been flagged beforehand by politicians in Paris.

After The Jungle’s migrants were bussed out, I followed them by car across France to speak to them. The Daily Mail took pictures of the men, with their permission, at a clutch of resettlement centres in Normandy. 

They claimed France was racist, the UK was a paradise of welfare handouts, and they would never stop in their quest to reach Britain.

Eighteen-year-old Rahmat Ahmadi, resettled in a holiday centre with a group of fellow Afghans, had this to say: ‘The French, they dumped us here in a place with no halal meat in the meals, no internet, and where we sleep ten to a bedroom and the kitchen is covered in flies.

‘The cows over the fence are better cared for than us. We were tricked. We are going to walk out.

‘I will reach London,’ he promised. ‘I will find work, even on the black market there. I have 30 relatives in Afghanistan, most of them children, who are relying on me to do that. There is nothing in France and never will be.’

Astonishingly, at these resettlement centres, I met Afghans who had already lived in Britain, been deported, then returned to France to try their luck again. One, Abdul, 29, had lived in Finsbury Park, north London, for six years and had a girlfriend in the UK.

The Home Office had flown him back to Afghanistan two years before The Jungle’s closure. Incredibly, he came back to Europe during the 2015-2016 migrant crisis – provoked when Germany’s then chancellor, Angela Merkel, threw open her country’s borders – and headed for Calais and The Jungle.

‘I don’t want to stay in France, and nor does any Afghan I know,’ he told me at the French resettlement centre. ‘We all want Britain. That is our right.’

So Calais quickly became a flourishing migrant hotspot again. This time, as the charities record, in the absence of The Jungle, the arrivals – many of them Jungle returnees – lived almost anywhere they could: In shanties all over the port, near the main hospital, in scrublands and forests off the ring road – even in empty warehouses.

In 2017, I found a group of Palestinian men six floors up a flight of stairs in an abandoned factory near the port, burning a fire in the middle of a room with the Union flag on the wall behind them as they waited to cross the Channel.

Jungle residents were lured back to beleaguered Calais by the traffickers’ extravagant promises of the rosy life in Britain awaiting them. 

But the charities, with deep pockets and many of them innately hostile to closed borders of any description, have by intention or through naivety played their part, too. 

Critics say they are enabling the smuggling gangs and that they should even face prosecution for assisting criminal traffickers. I wouldn’t disagree.

In May, a milestone was marked when the 200,000th illegal migrant since records began arrived by boat from northern France. In the intervening months, nearly 14,000 more have crossed the Channel on the traffickers’ dangerous rubber vessels – quite apart from the hundreds, if not thousands, arriving under cover in ferry lorries.

The truth is brutal. The demolition of The Jungle a decade ago did nothing to end the seemingly unstoppable flow of migrants into a financially broken Britain.

And as I found last weekend in Calais, it is business as usual for the traffickers – as well as charities that seem more determined than ever to encourage strangers to our shores.