Calais’ Jungle is gone, but the migrants keep coming

4 months ago 6

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CALAIS, France — It was the seventh time in two months that Shokhan Muhamed Ali and her family had attempted to leave France on a small boat and cross to the United Kingdom.

The seventh time they had tried — and failed.

Now, after a long, rainy night during which the police had confiscated the boat they were supposed to set out on, she was trying to keep herself and her sleepy eight-year-old daughter Aya warm with a cup of tea.

There was still at least an hour to wait before they and the dozens of other migrants in the neon-lit hall of the train station could take the first bus or train back to their camps scattered around the towns of Calais and Dunkirk.

“I’m tired, I’m just so tired, and so cold,” the 41-year-old Iraqi woman said, eyes darting toward her boys Ayad, 12, and Amir, 15, who were sitting on a bench, hoods on heads, eyes closed.

Outside the train station, three gendarmes in military fatigues and bulletproof jackets watched from the parking lot, one holding a tear gas canister in his hand.

Since authorities cleared the sprawling migrant camp known as the Calais Jungle in 2016, French and British authorities have been focused on deterring migrants from attempting to set up camps in the region or trying to cross the English Channel, the world’s busiest shipping route, often in overcrowded inflatable dinghies.

There’s little sign their efforts are having much effect. In the first half of this year, nearly 13,000 people managed to make the voyage — a record high for a similar period since data began being collected in 2018.

What the effort has done is make life more miserable for those planning to risk the crossing, according to the nonprofits that help them. Frequent raids on makeshift camps and squats push migrants into precarious and unsanitary conditions. Strict new migration laws and more aggressive policing have forced those looking to cross to take bigger risks.

The United Nations has documented 207 cases in which migrants have died or gone missing attempting to cross the English Channel since 2016, most recently on June 24.

While the crackdown has done little to reduce attempts to cross, it has forced many of those who do try to make multiple attempts before they succeed.

Muhamed Ali and her family lived in the German city of Cologne for two years after fleeing the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq due to a paucity of jobs and lack of proper healthcare for her husband.

It was only after German authorities declared they intended to deport the family that they decided to risk a crossing to the U.K, where Muhamed Ali hopes her children would be safe and get a good education.

“We don’t have a choice,” she said, looking down at her daughter. “I want to try again.”

The end of the Calais Jungle

In a scrubby patch of vacant land between Calais’ main hospital and a major highway interchange, Muhamed Omar was reattaching his blue tent to the ground. The area around him was dotted with other tents, scattered trash and plastic bags.

Around a dozen police vans and riot trucks had just driven away after carrying out one of their regular eviction operations. But the 22-year-old Sudanese man was relieved. “Sometimes, they throw away tents and take things but not this time,” he said.

Roughly every two days, police swoop into public lots in Calais to order anyone camping there to gather their belongings and go. Those who have left to buy food or take a shower at facilities provided by one of the nonprofit organizations risk having their things taken or thrown away.

When it comes to private property, the police have more limited authority. Owners of industrial buildings or empty houses must undertake lengthy and costly judicial procedures to evict squatters. For the last six months, around 500 people — mostly Sudanese men and teenagers — have stayed unbothered by police in a squalid warehouse near a Lidl grocery store on the outskirts of the city.

“The aim isn’t to screw with migrants,” said Philippe Mignonet, Calais’ deputy mayor in charge of security. “It’s to prevent the camps from growing because as soon as a camp gets too big, we’ve got fights, trafficking, smuggling and all that goes with it. “

Calais, a city with roughly 75,000 inhabitants, sits about 30 kilometers across the water from the white cliffs of Dover. It saw its first wave of migrants in the 1990s as people fleeing the collapse of Yugoslavia set their sights on the U.K.

Then in 2015, as migrants driven away by fighting in Afghanistan and Syria arrived in Europe, an encampment on a former landfill near a chemical factory on the outer edge of the city mushroomed into a massive shantytown. Dubbed “The Jungle,” its population reached about 9,000 people.

In September 2016, the French national government decided to shut the Jungle down and maintain “a substantial police presence” tasked with preventing a new encampment from forming. It was only a few months, however, before hundreds of asylum seekers had trickled back to the region. Mignonet estimated that despite regular eviction raids, the region usually has about 1,000 migrants at any one time, spread out in “little camps all over the place.”

That number can go higher, especially when the weather is good and crossings are more frequent, he said, adding that there were often camps authorities didn’t know about.

The nonprofits that work with migrants denounce the eviction strategy as cruel and ineffective. “There have been camps which moved around the same roundabout for six years,” said Pierre Roques, who leads l’Auberge des Migrants, a local nonprofit. “It doesn’t have any effect on the number of people who will transit along the coast or stay in the camps, but it does cause people to be in a state of perpetual anxiety.”

Some groups warn that their work, such as food distribution, is being disrupted by the raids. One organization, Human Rights Observers, has registered dozens of instances where police or cleaning contractors cut up tents or urinated on places migrants were staying.

“At one point, we were forbidden to distribute food in 49 streets of Calais,” said Yolaine Bernard, vice president of Salam, a nonprofit. “We had to hand [out] food while walking.”

The international organization Doctors Without Borders closed its Calais operation after The Jungle was dismantled. It returned in May 2023 to provide medical and psychological help to migrants passing through the city. Its medical staff now handle between 100 to 200 consultations every month.

Feyrouz Lajili, coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Calais, said her teams regularly treat fractures, cuts, sprains and eye injuries she said were “direct consequences of the flash balls [rubber balls fired at high velocity], tear gas and truncheon blows received by our patients” on beaches and during raids on makeshift camps.

Migrants also complain of mental health issues like post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression linked to “precarious living conditions,” violence, shipwrecks or the experiences they’ve had since leaving home.

Small boat trips have become more dangerous

Mohammed Ali and Musa Adam have lost track of how many times they’ve tried to cross over to the U.K. in the last nine months.

“England is better, English is easier and England has good schools and jobs,” said Ali, a tall 17-year-old teenager from Khartoum as Adam, a 16-year-old boy from Darfur, nodded in agreement.

The friends are both from Sudan but met in a squalid warehouse in Calais. They tried and failed once to cross on a small boat, but were foiled when the police punctured the inflatable vessel as it was setting off.

Without the money for another try, the boys have been attempting to sneak onto a truck, a technique that has become difficult with the introduction of border checks with high-tech scanners and the erection of dozens of kilometers of high walls and barbed wire around the entrance to the tunnel under the Channel.

For those in Calais, the lure of the U.K. remains strong. One of the reason for this: Brexit. Britain’s departure from the European Union gives migrants who have been flagged for deportation from the bloc a second chance at claiming asylum. “Paradoxically, Brexit will have resulted in more people wanting to reach the U.K,” said Roques.

Nor is the U.K.’s highly touted plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda doing much to discourage crossings.

More than 82,000 people have crossed the Channel since then Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced first proposed the Rwanda idea April 2022, twice as many as in the previous two years.

Some 7,000 have successfully made the trip in the weeks since current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government passed the proposal into law on April 22 — flights have yet to take off. “The Rwanda bill has had no impact at all,” said Mignonet.

The U.K. has paid France at least half a billion euros since 2014 to secure its shared border, according to an analysis by the library of the U.K. House of Commons. In 2023, London committed to send over another €541 million by 2026.

Some of the money has gone toward the deployment of more police officers equipped with night-vision glasses, infrared binoculars, all-terrain vehicles and drones. Dozens of cameras monitor key roads and paths to beaches along the coast.

Last year, French authorities said they had arrested nearly 800 smugglers and dismantled 49 networks.

“Our British friends … criticize us for doing a poor job of monitoring the 100-kilometer stretch of coastline affected by small boat departures,” said Mignonet. “If we wanted to monitor 100 kilometers of coastline 24 hours a day, we’d need a police officer every 100 meters, 24 hours a day. You can imagine what that would cost.”

In June, authorities announced that more than a thousand police and gendarmes would be deployed over the summer to fight clandestine migration along the coast.

The tougher enforcement is prompting migrants to make more dangerous trips. Some would-be crossers are casting off from beaches further along the coast, potentially doubling or tripling their time at sea. Others are launching into higher waves and bad weather, when police are less likely to be present.

Still others have tried putting in not at the heavily patrolled beaches, but in streams leading to the sea, prompting authorities to counter with floating barriers. A line of buoys set up in August 2023 more than 70 kilometers out to sea has already been cut several times.

Departures are a lot more chaotic now, said Salomé Bahri, coordinator of the Utopia 56, a group that patrols the beaches to help migrants who have fallen into the sea. “People will be rushing to try and get through, so they won’t inflate the inflatable boat tubes well enough, or won’t put in the rigid floor.”

Boats arriving in the U.K. have gone from carrying an average of 20 people in the first half of 2021 to 50 this year, according to U.K. Home Office data, putting the overloaded vessels at greater risk of capsizing. In April, at least five people, including a seven-year-old girl, died after falling from a boat carrying 112 people.

On occasion, fights erupt between migrants and the police. “It’s pretty terrifying to see how the situation is evolving,” said Bahri. “Sometimes people are on their way back to the camps from the beach and they just get teargassed.”

“People want to get through at all costs,” said Bahri. “The police want to stop them at all costs.”

Calais and the rise of the far right

“We’ve been abandoned. Since The Jungle, it’s continued,” said Denis Chatelle, a 61-year-old resident of Calais who lives next door to a house that’s been turned into a makeshift reception center.

“It’s even gotten worse,” said his wife Catherine, 63. Another couple from the neighborhood, Roseline and Philippe Fosseux, 72 and 69, nodded in agreement.

“There are squats everywhere now,” said Denis.

The stately two-story chimneyed house with broken windows and pots on a windowsill has been a stop-off point for migrants passing through town for the last two years, hosting as many as 50 people at a time according to a local paper. And it’s become the site of deepening tensions between locals and passing asylum seekers, particularly as support for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party has exploded.

A few days earlier, the house had been scrawled with graffiti: “Down with the tyranny of migration! For my land.” “Leave or burn.”

Since then, an activist group that had won a court case confirming its right to use the building to host migrants had cleaned the house up. The graffiti was painted over.

“Don’t hesitate to talk to us … This is our house,” they wrote on one of the building’s doors, laying out the penalties under French law for break-ins, physical violence and material degradation. “Any infringement against us will be the object of a complaint.”

The four neighbors had stepped out of their houses to watch as two men removed a faucet on the wall of the squat that activists had set up for passing migrants to obtain drinkable water. They then talked as the men drove away.

”At one point, I sent an email to the prefecture and sous-prefecture saying I was going to set the house on fire,” said Catherine. All four residents said they were not responsible for the graffiti.

For more than 16 years, the mayor of Calais has been Natacha Bouchart, a center-right politician who wrested control of the city from 40 years of Communist rule. In recent elections, however, Calais has veered toward the far right.

In the 2022 presidential election, 62 percent of the city voted for Le Pen, well above her national score of 41.45 percent. On Sunday, her far-right National Rally party obtained 48 percent of Calais’ votes in the first round of the legislative elections, leaving Macron’s party trailing far behind at 34 percent.

“It’s a very difficult balance to strike,” said Mignonet, the deputy mayor. “Most people in Calais are not racist. They say we need to find solutions for immigration, we need to curb immigration, but very few people will say, “I’m fed up with Black people.”

Mignonet said the city’s aim was to prevent possible camps and squats from settling in the city, particularly in the central public areas of Calais such as parks, but it could do little in cases in which private buildings had been turned into squats.

That hasn’t stopped the house from becoming a political issue. “The National Rally already came to campaign, adding fuel to the fire,” he lamented.

For now, said Mignonet, the migrants keep coming — and there’s little chance that will change any time soon.

“Some people have told us you should build a reception and accommodation center in Calais,” he said. “What’s the right size? Two hundred people, 2,000 people, 20,000 people? Two-hundred thousand people? Two million people? And what’s the purpose?”

“We say a reception center, why not?” he continued. “But not in Calais. It has to be 30, 40, 50 kilometers away, because the people who would come, why would they come? To go to the U.K.”

“It’s never going to stop,” said Mignonet. “Here we pay the heavy price of being across from the United Kingdom.”

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