On a Monday evening in September, Melat roamed Calais Ville train station, looking for a line to Boulogne-Sur-Mer in northern France, a popular launch point just south of Calais for irregular boat crossings to England. Earlier, she had lost the group she was traveling with, and her train ticket, as dozens of people clutching life vests had crowded toward a train under the watchful eye of French police.
At 24, Melat, who preferred to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, wanted a new life. She was born and raised in Ethiopia and believed that her life in England would be better, although she had little idea of what to expect from her destination or journey. “It’s a new experience,” she said. “A whole new place.”
Since the early 2000s, France and the United Kingdom have cooperated on preventing irregular migration at the maritime border in Calais, the closest crossing point between the two countries across the strait of Dover. There have been walls, drones, and, now, a vast network of ground personnel charged with intercepting boat departures on beaches. Small boat crossings have been the most recorded method of irregular arrival to the UK since 2020. Boat departures were first detected in significant numbers in 2018, and reached a peak of 45,774 arrivals in 2022, prompting the UK to invest more in its border security and crackdown on smuggling gangs.
Like most people attempting the crossing, Melat didn’t know exactly where she was leaving from or when. She thought the boat might leave early the next morning, or perhaps the day after that. Her fate was at the whim of smugglers, who are increasingly choosing more discreet beaches, often further from England, and packing more people on board, as they adapt to an intensifying France-UK border operation, which has increased surveillance, boots on the ground, and capabilities to disrupt organized crime networks.
Melat was scared. Earlier that day, three people had died, likely by crushing, onboard an overcrowded vessel that attempted to cross the Channel from just outside of Calais. The fatal crossing attempt exemplifies what rights organizations working in northern France say are becoming increasingly dangerous journeys as a result of the UK paying France to prevent boat departures.
Under a three-year deal signed in April, the UK agreed to pay France £661 million (around $870 million) towards 1,392 personnel across police, intelligence, and maritime units, surveillance technology for detecting smugglers, and a detention center in Dunkirk. The funding marks a 40% increase on the £476 million ($626.8 million) the UK committed to the first iteration of the deal in 2023.
Boat crossings have become more precarious and more chaotic as police presence at the border has increased. Irregular arrivals to the UK are down some 40% on last year to just over 19,000 between January and September. But as fewer boats have made the crossing, the number of people per boat has increased to an average of 65 compared to seven in 2018, according to the UK Home Office. Meanwhile, deaths are increasingly being linked to suffocation on overcrowded boats, rather than drowning. The boats themselves have become more flimsy, often lacking a rigid bottom that risks passengers in the center being trampled.
Imagine 50 or 80 people all trying to board a boat at once, said Cecilia Brocca, who works at humanitarian organization Utopia 56. “Everybody is trying to be as fast as they can because most of the time there is police behind them.”
Passengers are also more frequently boarding boats from the freezing water, said Brocca, as smugglers have started using “taxi boats” that they prepare in more hidden locations before traveling along the coast to pick people up directly from the water.
“People are trying to get further away from where police are patrolling, and in going further away, they take bigger risks, and also rescue operations can be more dangerous,” said Brocca.
After years of cooperating on border controls and funding to prevent clandestine crossings of people stowed away in the backs of lorries, the UK switched its focus to stopping boats in 2019 and started to increase its investment in border security more broadly. In 2023, the UK funded 500 personnel in France and new equipment to help monitor a broader area, while both countries agreed to bolster capabilities for targeting organized crime and people smuggling by sharing intelligence and working with international partners to dismantle supply chains. When the Labour government came into power in 2024, it adopted the slogan “smash the gangs” and introduced a slew of measures targeting people smuggling, which it called a “global security threat.”
These efforts have been meaningful in terms of arrests and disruptions of bigger gangs, and the emergence of overloaded dinghies might indicate successful attempts to disrupt the supply of boat parts, said Mihnea Cuibus, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. But it’s harder to say what impact these measures have had on arrivals, he said.
“As long as it’s a profitable activity, it’s going to be relatively easy for new gangs, new units, new smugglers to come in and replace those that have been disrupted,” said Cuibus. Efforts to reduce Channel Tunnel crossings were successful, he said, but that contributed to the increase in boat departures.
Intercepting crossings directly on the beach, on the other hand, seems to be less about disrupting smugglers than stopping people from making the crossing, he said.
More than 600 police are deployed daily in the region to target illegal immigration, with officers patrolling beaches to intercept crossings, search for hidden boats or engines and disperse groups of migrants preparing to board with tear gas. Since the end of 2025, France has adopted new interception techniques, and police have been slashing boats with knives and box cutters in shallow waters. From the end of April to early August this year, police prevented 185 boat crossings, 61% of all attempts in this time period.
Hassan, a 34-year-old migrant from Lebanon, said he tried to make the crossing twice but turned back both times because police were on the beach. “I saw them cut the boat with a knife,” he said. “So we didn’t go.” But it wouldn’t stop Hassan, who had been sleeping outside in Calais for two months, from trying again. “What am I supposed to do?” he said.
The increase in police has also caused an uptick in violence, according to Utopia 56. The organization reported that over a third of the people they supported between May and August this year reported experiencing police violence — an increase of nearly 40% compared to the same period in 2025.
“I’ve met with so many men, especially, but also kids who were hit on their faces or sometimes in their eyes,” said Brocca, who said the police have been firing rubber pellets to disperse groups of migrants.
Working from a community space in the center of Calais, Ambre Argney and her organization Human Rights Observers have been collecting and recording data on abuses against people on the move in the region. They have also been trying to track UK spending on the border. “It’s really hard to get any information on how much money is involved in what,” said Argney.
Since 2014, the UK has paid France millions each year, in addition to at least £3.77 billion (($4.96 billion) in private contracts for border management, according to a 2025 study. The UK and France regularly assess the impact of their cooperation and funding through joint reviews, according to the UK government, but the outcomes are not published.
This year, a French parliamentary inquiry into France-UK border collaboration since 2004 was published, providing some clarity for Argney and her colleagues. It found British funds are spread across six main areas — equipment, human resources, infrastructure, intelligence capabilities, and support for detention — and criticized the lack of transparency on financing. The review said that complex funding allocations through different budgetary programs, sometimes retroactive payments or reallocations, and a lack of data made funding hard to trace.
The lack of transparency makes accountability hard, because despite the UK wanting to take ownership of the border, they defer to French decision making when probed on tactics, said Lily MacTaggart of Humans for Rights Network, a UK-based organisation documenting rights abuses in border and asylum policies in northern Europe.
When asked for comment, the UK Home Office told Inkstick to seek a response from the French government. The French interior ministry has not responded to comment.
The Parliamentary review also found that despite the increase in funding, UK money has not covered all of the expenses incurred, leaving France to cover the entire humanitarian cost, and a portion of the costs to host the enlarged number of security personnel. It concluded that the UK has funded a security system that carries out everything from preventing departures from the coastline to dismantling informal camp settlements.
Ever since French authorities cleared a camp, known as the “Calais Jungle,” that hosted thousands of people waiting to cross the Channel ten years ago, a convoy of police, riot police, and a cleaning team carries out regular evictions of smaller sites where migrants have settled, according to Human Rights Observers.
“They will do everything they can to not let people settle down, not have any routine, and make them way more tired,” said Argney. But while it’s also becoming harder to cross, not only are people unable to stay, they can’t leave, she said.
