Human Traffickers, Drug Smugglers and the British Channel

While the number of refugees who cross the British Channel to get to the United Kingdom has been increasing, arrests of human traffickers are also on the rise. Police and criminal investigation agencies in Britain and France continue their efforts to reveal the strategies employed by human traffickers to bring people to the UK — and suspect that they are often the same strategies used by drug smugglers.

The head of the Invigor task force, part of the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA), recently stated that traffickers were planning to bring people across the channel in groups of small boats, a tactic that has been on the increase. The idea is that a large amount of individuals are sent to the desired destination in the hopes that, while some people will be unsuccessful in their journey, others will successfully arrive in the country in which they hope to settle — just as smugglers distribute drugs between a large group of people, knowing that some might get caught and arrested but hoping that some of the drugs will make it to intended destination for sale. “There is evidence of some degree of coordination," Steve Reynolds told the Observer newspaper. "There have been some quite large events, surges, where there have been nine or 10 boats. Depending on the availability of the boats, the weather and other factors that smugglers consider relevant, we believe there is a pent-up demand that gets released in a mass departure." On September 10, British border patrols arrested 86 women, men and children traveling on their own in just one day. 

“There’s no specific intelligence to suggest that they operate like cocaine couriers, where they maybe send 10 people on the basis that two are going to get caught and the other eight get through, but there might be — we just don’t know for sure,” Reynolds told the Observer.

In the last few months, thousands of refugees have arrived in the United Kingdom, the majority of them coming across the channel via small boats in groups. 

On September 23, authorities intercepted six Iranian men off the coast of Kent, just a few hours after French authorities rescued four migrants who tried to cross the channel on a stolen boat.  A few days before these arrests, on September 15, authorities stopped four small boats carrying 41 refugees in the channel.

A network of traffickers is said to be responsible for the recent arrivals of refugees, rather than individual traffickers working on their own — and the task force working on the problem says some of the traffickers could be from Iran, though they could not confirm this. But there have been rumors that Iranian traffickers were behind the new tactic of sending groups of small boats from France to Britain, which started in October 2018. Although Steve Reynolds said there was no strong evidence that the traffickers were French, British, or Iranian, authorities do know that the majority of refugees have been Iranians.

The increase in the number of refugee boats arriving in Britain led French and British authorities to step up joint efforts to crack down on trafficking, and to call for tougher requirements for refugees to claim asylum. At the beginning of January 2019, the Royal Navy patrol vessel HMS Mersey was deployed to stop refugees crossing the channel by boat. 

Refugees have tended to cross from Calais in France, but have also used routes from Belgium and Germany. Human traffickers send refugees to all three countries, hoping to get them to their desired destination: Britain. 

False Rumors and the “Brexit Trick”

Many of these refugees have heard false rumors that the United Kingdom will not deport them, one of the reasons why so many people try to flee to the country. But, in line with the Dublin Regulation, British police have announced that they will deport refugees who arrive in boats back to the European countries from which they traveled. However, many of these refugees have also been denied asylum from those countries, and so are sent back to the country they first arrived in, which is often Greece.

At the same time, French police have arrested thousands of refugees in the northern regions of the country, where they had been taking refuge. Most of them end up in temporary camps, where they then apply for asylum — a long and bureaucratic process.

Some traffickers have used the “Brexit trick” to put pressure on refugees, encouraging them to give them money to transport them now, rather than wait for Britain to leave the European Union, which is scheduled for October 31. They argue that the channel will be completely closed after this time.

But traffickers IranWire talked to said they believed traffickers wouldn’t be needed so much after Brexit, because intensified border control would mean that goods vehicles and vessels would face longer waiting times at ports and borders waiting for entry permits, giving migrants more opportunity to sneak on them and get to Britain that way. 

So far, British police have no firm proof that human traffickers and drug smugglers are using similar tactics, but they acknowledge that such methods are being used at Greek borders. Traffickers send small groups of refugees with illegal or fake papers to airports in the hope that some of them make it through, even though some will be arrested. 

In the meantime, police, activists and lawyers working to support refugees’ rights believe that human trafficking networks are primarily working from Turkey and Greece. But it is a tough job tracking the leaders of these groups down, and the people who get arrested are usually individual refugees who agree to work with trafficking networks to pay for their own passage or earn money for themselves or their families. Ultimately, they are not the people behind the large-scale operation of trafficking, but they are the ones who pay for it. 

Related Coverage: 

Meeting With a Human Trafficker in Istanbul

Sex Trafficking and the Iranian Women Working in Istanbul Nightclubs

The Love of my Child kept me Alive in the Mountains of Iran and Turkey