Migrants Taking Selfies In Packed Boat Goes Viral

Photos showing the extreme measures migrants would take to cross the English Channel have surfaced, exposing their desperate life-and-death attempts. Some, though, were seen taking selfies.

Today, a drone flew above a rigid inflatable boat carrying about sixty-five asylum seekers as they made their way from France to England. Just two days after the House of Lords blocked the Government’s Rwanda deportation bill and sent the proposal to halt the crossings back to the House of Commons, the newest group of asylum seekers is expected to bring the official tally for the UK to more than 3,000 in 2024.

Since October 2022, over forty thousand people have tried to cross the English Channel from France.

Hotels are costing the UK £8 million ($10,215,320) a day to house migrants, while troops are either forced to live in overcrowded barracks or put into shipping containers. The revelation that British military families were being compelled to live in substandard houses while migrants were accommodated in taxpayer-funded hotels last week led to accusations of dishonorable “double standards” on the part of authorities.

With 728 migrants apprehended in the 21-mile-wide Dover Strait on March 2 and 3, smugglers are capitalizing on the improved weather conditions after weeks of dire circumstances in the strait in the first two months of 2024. In the early hours of this morning, three different Border Force vessels—Typhoon, Ranger, and Hurricane—saw the English Channel.

Tragically, a little girl of seven years old lost her life at Watten in northern France this week, one of four migrants to perish as they attempted the perilous journey from Calais to Dover. On February 28, three further individuals perished after plunging into the ocean at Cap Gris Nez. Prosecutors in Boulogne-sur-Mer are still looking into last Wednesday’s tragedy.

On Monday, peers in the House of Lords dealt a hammer blow to the government’s Rwanda Bill, continuing their attack on Rishi Sunak’s ‘Stop the Boats’ hallmark measures. The Lords approved several amendments to the Bill by a majority of over a hundred votes, the worst setback Mr. Sunak had experienced as prime minister.