Channel–boat migrant Hassan, who hails from Egypt, feels cheated by England. He complains his free Home Office house in Plymouth is overcrowded and says the British don’t give him enough pocket money for beer, pizza suppers or his favourite cigarettes, which cost nearly £20 a packet.
Last week, the disgruntled 31–year–old ran away from his home in Devon to the ferry port of Dover in Kent, from where he happily returned to France, hidden by smugglers in the back of a lorry.
We spoke as he hid in bushes near the British port before finally leaving in the small hours of Wednesday morning.
‘We migrants can’t live on what your asylum system gives us,’ he said, grinning through yellowing teeth. ‘The £49 a week is not enough, especially as I like to smoke.’
Hassan is just one customer of a huge new ‘in and out’ people smuggling racket based at the heart of Britain’s biggest ferry port.
In Dover, we found discontented asylum seekers from myriad nations who are now so desperate to leave England, they are sneaking back to continental Europe on board cross–Channel trucks, while our Border Force and local police appear to turn a blind eye.
The migrants want to avoid French border controls. They are also determined to escape a UK asylum system which does not permit them to work and is currently ramping up deportations of criminal and bogus refugees.
Some of the ‘escapees’ we spoke to in Dover last week had arrived in Britain just a few months ago. They’d expected to receive a house, the chance of a job, and the right to stay in England for ever.
Migrants are seen jumping out of a lorry after being discovered by French gendarmerie officers as they attempt to cross the English Channel
A Group Of Migrants aiming to leave the UK by lorry are pictured. L-R Hassan (Egyptian) Unnamed, Burkino Faso, Mohammed Musa And Grok. Pictured In Dover near the Outreach Centre
Ali Essa Noor (pictured) admitted that he has himself become a middleman or fixer who connects ‘customers’ fleeing Britain with the Dover gangs
‘We were told these false promises by the trafficking agents and the charities in France,’ two young Sudanese men told the Daily Mail.
Mohammad Musa, a 32–year–old we met wandering on the beach, said he had travelled to Dover from a migrant hotel in Hendon, north London. Later, he explained by text: ‘I have been a long time in UK. I have no papers to work. Nothing is good for me here. I want to go back to France.’
Our month–long investigation reveals gaping failures in our border security. It also exposes an asylum system so thoroughly broken that even illegal migrants can’t wait to get away.
The Dover trafficking rings operate from Channel View Road, which is set back from the main thoroughfare near the seafront.
The narrow street winds past a huge lorry park for trucks waiting to board overnight Channel ferries to France.
Hidden away under a bridge is a small encampment of tents where migrants sleep and use their mobiles to rendezvous with drivers of outgoing and incoming lorries.
On Tuesday night at 11.30pm, we watched as a white Belgian–registered lorry drew up directly opposite the encampment. The driver got out of his cab and opened the vehicle’s two back doors.
He then returned to his cab as four migrants – Mohammad, Hassan, a man from Burkina Faso and a second Egyptian – crept out of the bushes and climbed aboard.
Five minutes later, the driver shut the lorry doors before pulling away in the darkness towards the ferry port.
By early next morning, the same quartet had arrived safely in Calais. Their clandestine journey, we were told, was arranged by a mystery man from West Africa who is, allegedly, a volunteer worker at the charity–run former Sunrise Cafe, adjoining the Dover Outreach Centre for the homeless and migrants, a seven–minute walk from Channel View Road.
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‘I gave this West African man the £150 money for Mohammad’s place on the lorry myself,’ we were told by 34–year–old Ali Essa Noor, a Sudanese migrant waiting in Dover to leave on a lorry, during a series of calls recorded by our team.
Noor, as he likes to be known, let us photograph his official paperwork showing he is on Home Office bail awaiting deportation.
He admitted that he has himself become a middleman or fixer who connects ‘customers’ fleeing Britain with the Dover gangs.
‘The migrants want to leave. I help them to get to France by talking to the traffickers,’ he explained. ‘I plan to go myself one night soon.
‘I am not allowed to work. I am homeless living under a bridge in Dover. I want to say goodbye to England. The Home Office, they will not give me a house.
‘I beg the Dover police and the charity workers to help me go anywhere, even Egypt or Somalia. They tell me if they assist me to go it would breach my human rights.’
Noor, who arrived on a lorry in 2016, has a criminal record.
He was convicted for threatening to kill a fellow migrant and sentenced to four years in prison.
Before then, he’d worked for five years in Manchester as a delivery driver for an international company. ‘I paid my taxes to the UK but got nothing from your country in return,’ he says angrily.
Noor has been in Dover, waiting to leave, since before Christmas and has watched as the traffickers successfully embedded themselves in the port.
An inflatable ‘small boat’ is seen carrying migrants crosses the channel after leaving northern France
Our investigation, which took place over several weeks, has uncovered a truly chaotic situation (file image: a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to the Border Security Command compound in Dover, Kent)
‘Every few weeks, 20 migrants go on lorries to France using the gangs. They are young men who are desperate to leave,’ he said.
When we interviewed migrants waiting for lorry rides, we heard no end of reasons why they’re going. Hassan mentioned the high price of cigarettes and alcohol.
Others, like Noor and Mohammad, are listed for deportation and want to get away before they are put on a plane.
It’s not clear what, if anything, awaits them across the Channel. But as Mohammad, now in France and hiding among the Sudanese migrant community in Paris, told the Daily Mail by mobile phone: ‘You put me in a hotel in London, you give me some pocket money and then nothing to do all day.
‘Then you want to deport me to Sudan which is the dangerous place I left at the start. Now I never want to see your country of England again.’
A 25–year–old from Sudan calling himself ‘Grok’ is still in Dover. He came in by boat only last autumn but now relatives in France are waiting for him.
‘Your asylum system does nothing for us,’ he said. ‘I was living in a Birmingham hotel, not allowed to work, so I ran away here to Dover to be free.’
On Tuesday night, as we watched the four migrants clamber aboard trucks to France, Grok was out of luck. ‘The police arrested me,’ he said on Wednesday afternoon.
‘They took me to a police station in another town by car. There, I was fingerprinted, kept overnight, before they put me out on the road outside. I walked three hours back to Dover.
‘I’d left Home Office accommodation which was paid for. But they didn’t seem to know what to do with me. They let me go to keep trying on the lorries.’
Our investigation, which took place over several weeks, has uncovered a truly chaotic situation – with a stream of illegal migrants continuing to arrive in Dover from the continent on board trucks.
The same busy lorry park on Channel View Road is the arrival point, before they take buses to the train station in town.
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This trafficking hub is a few minutes’ walk from the Border Force terminal, where nearly 70,000 migrants have been brought ashore after crossing the Channel in small boats since Labour came to power in July 2024.
While the spotlight has been on traffickers’ small boats bringing thousands in each year, immigration enforcement officials at Dover told the Daily Mail that in–bound stowaways continue to be a major problem. And both the ‘in and out’ migrants are using trafficking gangs based in Britain.
The going price per person coming in is up to £10,000; the outward cost on offer is considerably lower, ranging from £150 to £400.
On Monday night last week, a tall young man, thought to be from Africa, was stopped by a police car as he walked up Channel View Road from the lorry park towards the centre of Dover.
He was interviewed by officers for half an hour as he stood by their vehicle. ‘We have a migrant who has just come in from France on a lorry,’ said a policeman in a loud call on his radio as we photographed the scene.
This man was caught, put in the police car, and driven away. But we have also seen incoming illegals jumping from trucks in the Channel View Road lorry park and walking off.
Last month we photographed three men who had climbed off lorries running through a pedestrian underpass leading to a sea–front council housing estate called Aycliffe at the edge of Dover.
There, the trio, thought to be Albanians, waited at the King Lear’s Way bus stop on the estate for a ride into central Dover, from where fast trains run to London.
‘Some get off their lorry at Dover as you have seen,’ said an immigration officer. ‘Others stay on the lorry as it goes inland.
‘The migrant inside can be in his hiding place for miles before the rogue driver stops to let him out at an agreed place without CCTV cameras. He will be picked up later by members of the same trafficking gang.
‘It is all meticulously planned. We think 100 migrants a week are smuggled into Britain at Dover alone. They want to avoid the asylum system and will pay huge sums to the traffickers.
‘It is paid back by working on the black market, often in construction or as delivery drivers, even earning cash from criminal networks running suburban cannabis farms.’
In the course of the past month, we have watched a cat–and–mouse game played out in Dover, night after night.
It’s clear the police and Border Force are fighting a losing battle. The people smugglers have got Dover in a stranglehold.
It makes a mockery of the Labour Government pledge to smash the gangs.
The shameful reality is that this famous ferry port, a place known throughout the world for its picturesque cliffs – which, on a clear day, can be seen from the migrant camps of northern France – has become a hotspot for the trafficking of migrants.
Not just into Great Britain, but out of our country, too.
