It was raining heavily that day and the large white awning under which several dozen people had taken shelter was struggling to bear the weight of the accumulating water. It was almost 11 am, on Tuesday, March 12, on the outskirts of the northern French village of Loon-Plage, at the entrance to one of the many migrant camps that have existed for years now around this town near Dunkirk.

Ziko (people mentioned here by their first names have requested to remain anonymous), 16, has been living here for five months. The young Somalian man has already tried to reach the United Kingdom five times. Every time by boat, and every time to no avail. The police systematically intervened to stop the boat on which he and others were hoping to cross the English Channel. "Every time, they punctured the boat," he remembered.

About two weeks earlier, French police officers performed a maneuver in the water off the coast of the nearby town of Gravelines that the young man is unlikely to forget. The officers stopped the dinghy when it was already out to sea. "We were several dozen meters from shore when an inflatable boat with five or six policemen approached and punctured our boat." Ziko reported that he and the other 50 or so passengers all fell into the water. "I was up to my chest in water, it was very dangerous. There were children who were being carried by the adults with outstretched arms to keep them from drowning."

Of his five crossing attempts, that was the only one in which Ziko's boat suffered a puncture at sea. His testimony, a rare insight into the experiences of migrants crossing the Channel, contradicts the official version that authorities have put forward since the 2018 boom of small boats, the fragile vessels used to reach the UK. Officially, police are strictly forbidden from intervening when these small boats are already at sea. In a directive dated November 10, 2022, the French maritime prefect for the Channel and North Sea, Marc Véran, reiterated that "the scope of action for assets acting at sea (...) including in the 300-meter shore limit (...) is that of search and rescue at sea" and "does not permit coercive actions to be taken to combat illegal immigration."

These are the instructions, despite the constant migratory pressure on the coastline. While fewer than 2,000 people crossed the Channel in 2019, this figure rose to more than 45,000 in 2022 and almost 30,000 in 2023. And the enduring situation has become a major irritant in relations between France and the UK.

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