100 Illegal Boat Migrants Escorted Again Into British Waters by the French Navy

UK Border Force vessel HMC Vigilant sits moored to the quayside in the Harbour in Ramsgate
Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Some 100 illegal migrants successfully reached the shores of Britain on Wednesday, again being escorted through the English Channel by French government ships.

Seven small rubber dinghies carrying between 80 and 100 illegal migrants were brought ashore by the British Border Force on Wednesday morning.

Local resident Chris Johnson captured video of migrants being brought ashore at Dover. The film shows seven migrant men being escorted onto British soil by two Border Force agents.

“It started at 5 am. The French were met by Border Force mid-channel on at least four migrant boats,” Mr Johnson told the local news outlet KentOnline.

Another witness, Chris Rolf, claimed that he saw UK Border Force ships and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) alongside French naval vessels gathering in the English Channel.

“There must be a large number (of migrants) going by the amount of authority vessels out,” Rolf said.

The migrant arrivals bring the total number of crossings close to the total number of illegal boat migrants for the entire year of 2019. To date, approximately 1,800 illegal migrants have been brought ashore by the British Border force in six months of 2020, compared to the 1,890 that were taken ashore in the whole of last year.

Despite the Chinese coronavirus lockdown that saw the British citizens under effective house arrest, a record 741 migrants landed in the country in May, with a total of 1,359 migrants reaching Britain since the lockdown was introduced in March, according to the Daily Mail.

The leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage — who exposed the scandal of the French Navy escorting illegal migrants into British territorial waters — said: “I have warned about the invasion and now it is happening.”

“People will be very angry with a government that pretends but never acts,” Farage said.

In an interview with the arch-Brexiteer, the former prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, said that “as long as the French facilitate their passage, France will have a problem as well as Britain. If it takes a bit of toughness on Britain’s part — Bojo has his mojo, let’s face it — let’s send them back.”

In May, Breitbart London revealed that the issue of French naval ships escorting migrants through the English Channel is more widespread than was initially thought.

Publicly-available GPS data from the French ship’s Automatic Identification System (AIS) that was filmed by Farage last month, documented that the vessel had indeed travelled into British waters where they met with the British Border Force. The data showed that the same ship had made a similar, previously unreported, trip the week prior.

Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka

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