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

The post John and Bato’s story 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.

Under the brutal plan, any refugee who came to the UK but was deemed “inadmissible” by the government could be deported to Rwanda with no chance of ever returning to the UK.

Since May 9 that year, we had been aware of 130 shocked and traumatised people being taken into detention. Our team worked closely with many of them, speaking to them daily to show support, whilst also connecting them with lawyers who could argue their cases.

The atmosphere during that time was tense, as exhausted men – some of whom were just miles from their UK relatives – soon realised why they were being held in detention, and they were frightened.

Whilst talking with one man, a caseworker recalls being told, “I have five friends

around the phone, we are listening,” as she carefully explained to them the Rwanda plan.

“You need to check all your paperwork for a mention of it. R, W, A, N, D, A,” she spelled out.

 As she listened to their shuffling papers, she told them, “the government wants to do this to you, but we are going to try to stop it. You understand? You are not alone, we are with you.”

Care4Calais had already been working to stop the unfair Rwanda plan long before it became “real”. We had already joined with the PCS Union and Detention Action to challenge the entire policy in the High Court, and the law firm Duncan Lewis were already preparing a case against the government to be heard at the Royal Courts of Justice that July.

We had hoped the government would wait to ascertain whether their plan was legal or not before taking further action. We were wrong.

In June, when the government issued actual tickets to those inside, panic and desperation filled the detention centre. Our caseworkers became support systems for men (many who were torture and trafficking victims) who were utterly demoralised.

Hunger strikes started, as did suicide attempts – by any means possible – one man drinking a bottle of shampoo, and when that didn’t work, trying to hang himself.

Behind the headlines, and the government’s insistence that this should go ahead, we

saw the human cost.

By June 14, after round-the-clock work, our amazing lawyers had achieved the cancellation of many of the individual tickets issued.

The number of tickets had reduced to five, and then late in the evening, the European Court of Human Rights intervened to stay removal for one of the asylum seekers.

With less than an hour before the chartered plane was due to take off at 10pm, barristers used this ruling to obtain an injunction, taking the remaining people off the plane. The last man disembarking just 30 minutes before scheduled departure.

This was an indescribable relief for everyone. Everyone connected with C4C was so happy that no one would be sent, and it seemed to some that the Rwanda plan was dead.

But it wasn’t. And it isn’t.

The terrifying thing is that, despite stopping the plane a year ago, the Rwanda plan is more dangerous than ever.

Ministers had every intention of cheering that plane as it took off in June 2022, and they’re even more determined for it to happen now. The Illegal Migration Bill is built on agreements with third countries who will accept our deported refugees, but we have only one – with Rwanda – and no prospect of any others.

We currently support 650 people who have been issued with Rwanda notices. Their numbers have included two pregnant women, trafficking and torture survivors, fathers with sons in the UK, and many more who have every right to have their claims heard here.

We will not stop fighting this cruel, ineffective and unfair plan, nor supporting those people affected by it. But we can only do this with your help. Please donate if you can – any amount large or small will make a difference to a refugee’s life bit.ly/C4CAccessTeam

The post Why we must not forget the Rwanda plan appeared first on Care4Calais.

When we’re giving out food and clothing, we also provide big banks of charging points, and sometimes we give out charging packs too.

This afternoon Adil, a 17-year-old refugee, asked to borrow my phone while his was charging. “I will show you a picture of my home,” he said. I thought he just wanted to show me where he was from. In fact he found Facebook and showed me a photograph a ransacked and damaged house.

It was his actual home in Sudan.

Staring at the awful picture, he was tearful and overwhelmed. He asked if he could use the phone to call his family, as he had not been able to get through on his own. To his mounting anguish, though, he couldn’t.

“I know my home looks like this,” he said. “But I have not been able to speak to any friends, any family.”

He looked through more photographs, shaking his head. “My home, my home my home…” All this at 17 years old; his bravery was something I will never forget.

The Sudanese refugees’ mood in Calais is changing

We’re not yet seeing a large influx of people here who have fled the current outbreak of armed conflict, but Sudan has been dangerous for many people for many years, and the threats people have escaped, and the journeys they have been on, are always terrifying. The main difference now is the worry and concern; the charging board we provide have never been more important.

There are a lot of Sudanese people at the site where we were. The atmosphere is often very positive, but right now there’s a sense of worry under the surface. When you talk to the refugees there, you often get a sense of the anxiety over the situation at home.

We listen and support people, and help with the services we provide and essentials we give out. Last week we gave out 150 hygiene packs here, and today it was 125 waterproof coats. These are so important, because although it’s getting warmer, it rains a lot in Calais. It’s so hard for refugees to get dry again if they’re wet.

Adil showed me more pictures and videos from Sudan, some of them of horrific things. Bombed hospitals. Bombed out homes. Thousands of families escaping with a few belongings. It’s terrible to think that people fleeing this to the UK could be sent to Rwanda.

Adil had left Sudan before the new outbreak of violence. He just wanted an ordinary life, and was keen to learn English so that he could study and work when he got to the UK. Having seen his resilience, I really hope he makes it, and get the safety he deserves.

Can you help?

It’s amazing how people manage to stay cheerful in the face of it all; today towards the end of the distribution we put on music and some were even dancing. Playing football, or on the games tables, listening to music and just talking to people is an escape from the harsh monotony of life as a refugee. As a volunteer, it can be challenging some days, but then on others, seeing the sheer resilience of people can inspire you as well.

We help refugees like Adil everyday with phone charging, support and other essential items and services – but we can only do this together with you. Could you help by being a donor? Any amount, large or small, makes a big difference: to donate, go here

The post Helping refugees affected by the Sudanese war appeared first on Care4Calais.

“Then we ran for our lives.”

“My name is Fadi, and I am 20-year-old Syrian refugee. Until recently, I was living in the Suites Hotel in Knowsley on Merseyside, which was attacked in February.

“My ordeal happened a few weeks after that. My friend Abbas and I were walking near some shops when we noticed five men watching us. They were between 18 and 22, drinking from plastic bottles. One of them was on a bike. To lose them, we went into a supermarket, but when we came out they were waiting for us.

“We headed back to the hotel, trying not to look worried. They followed, talking about us loudly so we could hear, and shouting insults.

“We couldn’t understand well, so they started spitting at us instead.

“By now we were in a park. They finished off their drinks, and threw the plastic bottles at our backs. We were scared now. There were only two of us and five of them. It wasn’t just fear of being attacked. We were worried that if something happened the police would come and support the local men because we were refugees. We thought we would be in trouble.

“I wanted to tell the boys we just wished to live peacefully with them. I had to leave Syria to escape fighting in the war. I just want a safe, normal life, that’s all.

“I was thinking about that when the cyclist jumped off his bike, picked it up and threw it at our backs.

“It really hurt. I could see Abbas’s hand bleeding. We ran.

“They gave chase. We ran for 15 minutes, and they got closer and closer. My heart was pounding so hard in my chest, I thought we wouldn’t make it.

“But then, suddenly, they realised we were approaching our hotel, and stopped.

“The manager called the police, and a doctor came to treat us. We were safe, but still terrified. I never went out again after that. A few weeks later, the authorities moved me to a new hotel in Manchester and I feel safe here, so that’s good.

“I know that most people are kind and a minority causes problems for other people – you know this if you come from Syria, believe me. But I talk to the friends I left behind in there Knowsley hotel, and they have the same problems as I had. It’s just not a safe place for refugees to be.”

For the sake of Fadi and Abbas and countless others like them, it’s time the hotel in Knowsley was closed and all the people there were moved to a safer location.

For the full Independent report, go here: https://bit.ly/KnowsleyReport

Names and image have been changed.

The post Refugees abused and attacked in Knowsley appeared first on Care4Calais.

Hard-right protesters visited hotels housing asylum seekers 253 times last year amid a surge in anti-migrant activity across the UK,

Dame Sara Khan, the government’s commissioner for countering extremism, said a neo-Nazi group behind some of the anti-migrant protests had been allowed to flourish owing to inaction from ministers.

The government failed to respond to a warning by Khan and Sir Mark Rowley, now the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, that new laws were needed to stop such organisations preaching white supremacy, radicalising young people online and fomenting hatred.

Extremism strategy must be urgently overhauled

“Why is it that such hateful extremist organisations have been able to brazenly operate with impunity? Sadly, it is because we lack the legal, non-legal and operational means to stop them” Dame Sara Khan writes.

“In my former role as counter-extremism commissioner I independently reviewed the government’s 2015 counter-extremism strategy, whose purpose was to tackle extremism outside of terrorism. As noted in my report, Challenging Hateful Extremism, I called for an urgent and complete overhaul as the approach taken was too broad and was failing to tackle extremism. In 2020 the Home Office decided to scrap the strategy and nothing has replaced it.

My 2021 report called Operating with Impunity and co-authored with Sir Mark Rowley, now Met Police commissioner, undertook a review of the law and hateful extremism. We showed how the two areas of law most relevant are hate crime and terrorism — both of which are illegal. Hateful extremism falls between both, and this gap in legislation is allowing extremists to operate lawfully. Hateful extremism is a distinct activity outside of terrorism and hate crime and requires its own legislation to deal with it, yet our laws have failed to deal with this threat.

In the absence of a legal framework on hateful extremism, an operational infrastructure is lacking. Hate crime and counterterrorism policing, as well as regulatory bodies such as Ofsted and the Charity Commission, told us they faced significant operational challenges in countering hateful extremism due to the lack of criminal, civil and regulatory mechanisms.

Sir Mark wrote how horrified he had been not only at the scale of hateful extremist activity but how this was lawful. As a society we have decided hate crime and terrorism are sufficiently harmful that we have built a legal and operational framework to counter these crimes. The same is now needed to tackle hateful extremism. Other western democracies have outlawed such activity and, consistent with our liberal democratic values, we showed how it was possible to distinguish legitimate, offensive and dissenting speech from this dangerous anti-democratic extremist activity taking place in Britain.

Yet despite this, the government did not respond to our recommendations and have done little to address this problem as identified recently in the Prevent review. This must urgently change.”

Nick Lowles, chief executive of Hope Not Hate, blamed the rise in anti-migrant activity around hotels on the “repeated demonisation and scapegoating of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees by the government and the media”. He said: “This rhetoric shapes hostile public opinion and encourages the far right. There is a very dark side to this anti-migrant activity. Hope not Hate’s research shows that the Dover firebomber consumed migrant-hunter content before he attacked a migrant-processing site and we saw 400 people demonstrating in Kirkby, setting a police van on fire and letting off fireworks.”

Videos collected by the migrant hunters, usually on mobile phones, is shared on social media and far-right websites to stir up hatred among communities with hotels that are housing asylum seekers. They also film themselves leafleting the area unveiling, banners and trying to expose the locations of hotels in online forums.

Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate has found content from far-right activists involved with anti-migrant protests in the UK has been viewed nearly 44 million times on Twitter and YouTube. In a sign of how recent the surge in activity is, an account that posted about a protest in Kirkby has had more than 38 million views on Twitter in the past two months

The most prolific of the migrant hunters last year was Amanda Smith, a member of the hard-right English Constitution Party.  An account run by Smith named Yorkshire Rose received more than five million views for a video of herself harassing Serco staff and residents outside a hotel.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/migrant-hunts-double-in-one-year-9rjf8p82c

The post Surge in anti-refugee activity: new analysis appeared first on Care4Calais.

And so he packed his dreams and a few possessions, and set off to make the long journey to Europe, where he believed he would be able to lead the life he wished for.

I met him in Calais when he settled with a few others around the “English Learning station I was running on a distribution.

Picking up books from the pile, they enthusiastically ran their fingers over English words that accompanied pictures and spelt out what they saw. 

Faisal pointed to his elbow and asked me hopefully, “Eyebrow?” 

“Elbow”, I said. 

“I learn, but I forget. English not easy”. 

He spent two hours sitting next to me, spelling out words, and reading out sentences. I downloaded an English-Pashto translator on my phone and we made some progress in learning sentences like, “My English is not very good”, “I need to see a doctor”, “I want to call my family”. 

Sentences he would need to use most frequently so he could survive in this new world.

He told me the story of how he had left home overnight, and made his way from Taliban-occupied Afghanistan to Calais, via Iran, Turkey and Greece. It had been hard: once, he pointed to a big open wound on his right leg and to a few boys at the other end of park playing football. “I like football,” he said, “but no play now”.

I had organised donations for Care4Calais over the past few years, but this was my first time at the camp and I was keen to make it count. Nothing could have prepared me for the faces, stories and lives that I saw at the make-shift camp in Calais that day. Young boys from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan – their full, normal lives as students, workers, part of happy families ravaged by war, famine, and takeover by the Taliban and so many other dangers.

Over six hours at make-shift camps at Calais and Dunkirk that day and the next, my friend Aji and I must have met several hundred people. As we began packing up to get back to the warehouse on our lost day, it suddenly hit me that the semblance of a normal life the refugees had had over those few hours was on borrowed time. 

It me determined to go back again next year for a longer period. We must keep on trying, for the sake of Faisal and all those like him.

The post Meet Faisal, refugee and aspiring journalist appeared first on Care4Calais.