Many people told us today that the problem with the shelters is that they cannot take their tents with them, and if they go, the police come to the sites and confiscate those tents. Today during our distribution the police turned up and took at least two tents from a site. I spoke with people as we watched it happen, and they how aggressive the police are, and how they always turn up whatever the weather.

Refugees here have no respite from the harassment and brutality, not even when the world is frozen.

This afternoon, thanks to your support, we distributed 289 pairs of warm joggers. These are so important because so many of the people we meet are wearing just thin, ripped and wet trackpants or jeans. The guys we gave them to were incredibly relieved to have them, and many people went off the change straight away.

Although there are newly-arrived people wearing too-thin summer clothes and damp, falling-apart shoes, we saw lots of people wearing the warm fleeces, coats and boots we’ve been able to share. Seeing that we’re having an effect and supporting people gave us an extra shot of determination to keep going and help people keep off the cold as much as possible.

The ground everywhere now is covered in white frost most of the time, and frozen hard as iron. The cold pinches your skin and makes you hungry in the day, and people today told us it’s so cold at night they can’t sleep.

No one should be living like this, and our fantastic volunteers are doing all they can to help.

The post Calais Brutality Continues Despite Weather appeared first on Care4Calais.

His brother was 14 years old.

In the biting cold and dark, you could feel how Sunday’s tragedy, together with numerous other rescues and near-fatalities along the coast, has hit Calais hard.

Perhaps that’s because of the awful way these young people died in the icy cold sea.

Perhaps we’d all begun the year subconsciously hoping 2024 would somehow be better.

For me it’s all this, but it’s also the growing awareness of the violent forces behind this tragedy.

It is impossible to say for certain how many people waiting to cross from north France to the UK die in each year, but most of those who try to keep count put the figure at around 30. They would also roughly agree on that being a 30% increase on 2022.

That’s a similar figure to the 36% decrease in the number of people arriving in the UK safely by small boat in 2023; somehow it seems not entirely coincidental.

Since last summer the authorities in France have been more aggressive and intimidatory in their evictions, harassment of refugees and aid workers, and prevention of departures in small boats. We meet people whose boats have been slashed in the water. We know people have died in panics instigated by riot police. We know groups are leaving from less-policed places, making longer and more dangerous journeys.

People take greater risks, and suffer worse attacks. Hardly surprising, then, that the death and injury counts rise.

The UK and French authorities sanitise all this by crediting technology. The UK paid France €72.2m to police its border in 2022-23, and last Louis-Xavier Thirode, Prefect Delegate for Security, claimed it was new drones, vehicles and night-vision tech that had allowed him to reduce the crossings. It sounded so much nicer than beatings and boat-slashing.

To us here it seems very much that any reduction in small boat crossings is being bought with old fashioned violence and intimidation towards Calais refugees. And that makes it clearer than ever that the only way of ever reducing them safely will be by introducing safe routes.

Until that happens, I am deeply sorry to say, we will continue to gather at vigils in the cold and dark in Calais, listening to laments for brothers and sisters and friends among the Calais refugees who sought only a safer and more normal life.

Imogen Hardman, Care4Calais Senior Operations Manager, Calais

Support our campaign for safe routes for refugees: care4calais.org/safepassage/

The post The Significance of the Refugee Deaths at Wimeraux appeared first on Care4Calais.

On November 24th, 2021, a group of people – each unique and dearly loved – slowly froze to death in the icy waters of the English Channel while waiting for a rescue that never came.

Twenty-seven bodies were recovered and four are still missing, adding to the pain of the families  –  twenty-one men, seven women including one who was pregnant, and three children.

Today, two years on from this tragedy, we remember and honour them, alongside many more precious lives lost on dangerous journeys to the UK – we may never know exactly how many.

On that catastrophic night, their flimsy boat left France at around 10pm, but close to midnight, it began to deflate and sink in the middle of the Channel.

Between 2am and 4am, the passengers called the French and English authorities many times begging for help. But no one came.

The French authorities told them they were in British waters, and British officials told them they were in French waters. The transcripts of those desperate calls make for difficult reading – one passenger indicates that they are literally “in the water”. “Yes, but you are in English waters, Sir,” is the reply.

At around 3am the boat overturned, tipping all passengers into the water, where some drowned because of the waves. Over time, others resigned themselves to letting go as they were overwhelmed by the cold.

Eleven hours later – at 2pm the next day – a French fisherman spotted the bodies in the water and raised the alarm. When the French coastguard finally arrived, they found only two survivors.

We will never let the lives lost that night, or those of loved ones lost since, be forgotten. And for their families, we demand justice and change.

We long for people seeking safety on British shores to be seen as human beings, deserving of rights, compassion and dignity. Tragedies like this occur because of the ‘othering’ our politicians insist on – of the dehumanising of sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, friends and family members.

This rhetoric must change.

And so must this government’s policies.

Humans in search of safety deserve just that. This means safe routes for all refugees wishing to come to the UK – we need to improve resettlement and refugee family reunion schemes and make it easier for people to travel to the UK to claim asylum. That is the only way these tragedies will end.

We stand alongside the families of the victims, as they demand answers as to why French and British authorities failed desperate people who came asking for help. They also need to know when the results of the Article 2 Inquiry will be made public. The families have already waited two long years and deserve answers.

As a society that values compassion, we know that people fleeing the worst the world has to offer should be met with kindness. So, we demand that the division and fear of anti-migrant rhetoric used by some political leaders, is replaced with the empathy and respect that many people and communities across Britain show to refugees every day.

We can, and must do better : people’s lives depend on it.

The post Channel Tragedy: We Can and Must Do Better appeared first on Care4Calais.

John, the South Sudanese refugee on the left in the photograph, told me this story at a distribution of bags and chargers one afternoon in Dunkirk. He seemed sad as he remembered home and how he had left with his friend Bato (right) to escape to the UK. As two young men , they knew the militia would come back and either press them into service, or kill them.

They made their way through Libya, crossed the Mediterranean sea in a “very scary” boat, and then trekked through Italy and France. “It was tough,” said Bato, in an understatement that brought a lump to my throat. Enduring the long, hard wait to somehow find a way to the UK as the winter drew in, John, said they now faced the big challenge of keeping up their spirits.

“We have to be strong,” he said. When I asked how, he laughed kindly.

“You start by knowing there are two choices. You live, or you die. You decide you are going to live. You look into your heart, and you make yourself believe it. Then you believe in each other. That’s all.”

It was moving to hear such hard-learned words from such young men, particularly ones who had been so cheerful and friendly. But as I learned as a volunteer that refugees so often have this incredible understand, strength and humour. We were there to support them, but in my week in Calais I learned more than I can say. Good luck, John and Bato; the UK will be all the richer if you finally get there.

B, volunteer

To volunteer in Calais and support refugees like John and Bato, go to https://buff.ly/47uMZ7T

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At former RAF base in Wethersfield, Essex, they are

• surrounded by security fences
• monitored with 24/7 surveillance by on-site security guards and CCTV
• prevented from leaving except by an infrequent bus service
• kept on a remote site with no pedestrian access or public transport

This is a form of segregation.

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, is obliged by law to ‘provide accommodation that ‘ensures a standard of living adequate for the health of the claimants and capable of ensuring their subsistence’.

At Wethersfield she isn’t doing that.

She is also separating asylum seekers from the local community.

At Wethersfield, they are segregated from the mainstream population in ways that and stigmatise and degrade them, and eat away at their dignity.

Wethersfield residents have consistently told our volunteers that living at the site ‘feels like being imprisoned’.

This is not just about Wethersfield.

The issues of segregation and quasi-detention have implications for the Government’s use of other sites such as the Bibby Stockholm and RAF Scampton.

We are also challenging the lack of an effective screening process for selecting asylum seekers for Wethersfield.

The Home Secretary has acknowledged a high risk of physical and mental vulnerability in asylum seekers, making sites such as Wethersfield and the Bibby Stockholm unsuitable.

The suitability criteria for these sites say survivors of torture or modern slavery, or those who suffer from serious mental health concerns, should not be sent.

But over asylum seekers who have experienced these ‘vulnerabilities’ routinely being sent to Wethersfield.

This has to stop.

Under previous Governments, asylum seekers were integrated into UK communities through dispersal accommodation.

But this Government has given up any pretence of trying to integrate asylum seekers into society by putting them in de facto prison camps and barges.

Falsely imprisoning asylum seekers behind barbed wire fences, placing them under 24/7 surveillance, restricting their liberty and separating them from any semblance of community, is now the chosen policy of this Government.

And we believe it is unlawful.

So today we are putting the Government on notice.

Stop imprisoning asylum seekers in camps and barges, and close these sites of segregation.

Start tackling the REAL problems in the UK’s asylum system.

If they don’t we will see them in court.

Please donate to support this legal challenge to segregation: crowdjustice.com/case/c4cwethersfield/

The post Our legal challenge to Government segregation of asylum seekers appeared first on Care4Calais.

Her husband, who was with her, told French reporters that the woman was trampled while in the boat. While unconscious, she was lifted out of the boat and dropped in the sea. Her husband leapt in after her, and brought her back to the beach. However emergency services were unable to revive her.

Another refugee who can come ashore was also treated.

Recently boats attempting to cross the Channel have been filled far beyond their capacity, with some veteran commentators suggesting the overcrowding has now reached levels previously unseen.

The overcrowding and increasingly dangerous risk taking is thought to be partly driven by refugee’s fear and uncertainty about EU and UK refugee policies.

This young woman’s agonising death on the Britain’s border follows the deaths of six Afghans in the Channel on August 12.

The suffering of this woman, and of her husband, is unimaginable.

For it to come on the same day that the UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman made a speech vilifying and demonising refugees makes it all the worse.

Let us not forget, this awful death of a young woman on a French beach in the early hours of an autumn morning was entirely preventable. A modern, sensible system of safe passage would have meant she didn’t have to get in the boat in the first place.

If Suella Braverman really wishes to reform refugee law for the better, she could begin there.

The post Female refugee tragically dies on Calais beach appeared first on Care4Calais.

I’ve supported refugees here in my home of Liverpool for years. I’ve begged, borrowed and robbed my friends and relatives for essential stuff. I’ve helped countless people who were in desperate need.

Over that time my fellow Care4Calais volunteers and I have gotten a good sense of what’s most needed here. And today, we’ve realised that for the first time, the thing we’re going to need most is tents for people to live in.

It is shocking. It is abhorrent. It’s the reality of life under this Government.

The Home Office’s abhorrent seven-day eviction policy for some of the most vulnerable among us is the cause of the problem. Suella Braverman’s Home Office is now telling people – people it has accepted deserve sanctuary here – to leave their housing knowing that they stand no chance of finding work, banking or a job in time, and therefore will be destitute.

We have already seen that for so many refugees in this position, the street is the only option, and a tent the one chance of keeping dry.

It’s now clear that this autumn, the Home Office is going to create camps like those in Calais and Dunkirk in your neighbourhood. It will be young men first but it will soon be families, women and children second, whole communities in tents pitched on city scrubland. In Britain, in 2023.

I believe the Government is creating these camps deliberately. They can do it because they simply won’t accept that all humans need personal safety and dignity, a roof and food. For them, those things are deserved only by a select few which includes, of course, themselves.

The affected people have come here to ask for help. The Government tells these frightened refugees it’ll help them – and then just kicks them out on the street. Just a few years ago it would have been unthinkable; now we dread how bad they’ll make it.

There is something we can do that may yet mean we don’t have to hand out tents on our streets, though.

Our volunteers are now working all hours to try to find accommodation, and get people off the street. It’s hard and we need more people, but it does save people. Please join us, donate and resist the Government policies that create this grotesque horrorshow: care4calais.org/get-involved/

The post Why is the Home Office is making refugees homeless? appeared first on Care4Calais.

This morning, it emerged that unsafe levels of Legionella pneumophila bacteria had been found in the barge’s water supply. If droplets of water containing this bacteria are inhaled, it can cause Legionnaire’s disease, which has a mortality rate of 10-80 per cent, depending on the health of the sufferer. Because of this risk, everyone on the barge should have been evacuated immediately.

However this did not happen.

At lunchtime we were contacted by three men on the barge who had not been informed of the outbreak, nor warned to avoid the water. The men were unable to find staff to supply information. It transpired that other refugees were on the barge, but none knew of the danger.

The men were given a letter of explanation, but were not due to be moved from the barge until the early evening.

Our volunteer Dr David Thomas is a Fellow of the Institute of Chemical Engineers. He commented “This is very serious situation. People die from exposure to legionella bacteria, and you are at greater risk if your immune system is compromised, which we know is the case with some of the refugees.

“Everyone should have been evacuated as soon as the legionella was discovered.”

The bacteria is typically found in old heating systems that have been unused for several months. Government and Health & Safety Executive guidelines say that such systems should be carefully checked and cleared before anyone is allowed to use them. The Government must now explain:

• When the results of the legionella testing, which took place on July 25 were known.

• If it followed its own guidelines in re-commissioning the heating and ventilation systems on board the barge.

• Why people were not told about the risk to their health once the authorities were aware of it.

• Why people were kept on the barge, and why more transfers were attempted, when the presence of the bacteria was known.

• If everyone who was aboard the barge has been tested for Legionnaire’s disease.

Steve Smith, CEO of Care4Calais said “We have always known our concerns over the health and safety of the barge are justified, and this latest mismanagement proves our point.

“The Bibby Stockholm is a visual illustration of this Government’s hostile environment against refugees, but it has also fast become a symbol for the shambolic incompetence which has broken Britain’s asylum system.

“The Government should now realise warehousing refugees in this manner is completely untenable, and should focus on the real job at hand – processing the asylum claims swiftly, so refugees may become contributing members of our communities as they so strongly wish.”

It should be remembered this affects not only refugees, but also the staff and other contractors who have worked on the barge.

The Government has shown an appallingly cavalier attitude to other people’s lives and safety – an attitude to which the Bibby Stockholm will forever be an ugly, shameful monument. It must be permanently closed down, and ministers must explain how it has come to such a dangerous and disgraceful end.

The post When exactly was the bacteria discovered on the barge? appeared first on Care4Calais.

Ali had spent all weekend reading about the Illegal Migration Bill becoming law. “Why doesn’t the UK want me?” He asked. “Why don’t they understand?”

Ali fled Sudan when his family were killed, and he knew he would be killed too if the militia found him. All he wants is to be safe. But now he’s in an impossible situation. In France, the police take his tent every few days. He thinks if he goes to the UK, he will be imprisoned in a barge or sent to Rwanda. “I can’t go to Libya because I was kidnapped and kept in prison there. I can’t go back to Sudan because they might kill me.”

He was close to tears. “Where can I go?” he said. “Tell me, where can I go?”

All the volunteers in Calais have been shocked by the huge amount of difficult conversations we’ve had with refugees this weekend. The people we support here in Calais are terrified.

Everyday you hear stories from people of the violence, persecution and suffering they have escaped in their home country. You hear about dangerous journeys they have made to reach Europe. In France, many have been harassed and abused simply for being refugees.

Despite all of this, they are even more scared of what will happen now because of the new law in the UK.

Because of this, people in Calais are taking even more risks to get to the UK before these laws are acted upon. In the last few days there has been a lot of talk about the picture shown here, taken by a photographer called Johan Ben Azzouz from La Voix Du Nord newspaper. It shows a dinghy overloaded with refugees setting off from the beach in Boulogne in broad daylight, in full view of holidaymakers.

Boulogne is much further from the UK than Calais, so the journey is more dangerous. Boats like this has not been seen setting off like this before, and it’s a sure sign that refugees, desperate and out of options, are now taking more and more risks

That means more people are likely to die from dangerous journeys in the weeks and months ahead.

When people have no other choice they do desperate things. People like Ali have no other choice.

I, volunteer

The post Panic and fear now gripping refugees in Calais appeared first on Care4Calais.

Shon dreamed of being a pilot when he was a little boy growing up in Kenya. After leaving education there he worked in cyber security, and then had to flee to the UK. His dream went hold for a while, as he felt “very down” when he arrived, but then he met a wonderful Care4Calais volunteer called Pauline. “Pauline encouraged to believe in the future again. Without her, I would not have been able to do anything. She is an angel.”

Eventually he was given permission to stay here, and began to do all sorts of jobs, from fork-lift driving to IT, all the time secretly saving up so he might be able to afford flying lessons. He somehow also found time to volunteer to help people suffering from addiction.

He began flying this summer, and loves it. “I love to look down and see the world. It looks so beautiful. I film it on my phone so I can watch later.

“It’s changed the way I see things. Up there you can see that things that look so big to us on the ground are really very small. Now I think of my challenges like that. They might feel big, but really they’re tiny so I can overcome them. It gives me a really positive vibe.”

Shon would love to get his pilot’s licence and fly passenger planes. In fact he feels that it’s his life’s calling, because it would mean “I can take people safely from one place to another. I can’t think what would be better. Freedom is paramount to me, and this is about freedom.

“I’m not learning to fly just for me, that would be selfish. I’m doing it because I’d like to make a positive impact on people’s lives.”

Care4Calais volunteers like Pauline really do change people’s lives every day. To volunteer with us, or to donate to support our work, please go to care4calais.org/get-involved/

Some images have been changed

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