UK-France border: dying by the ferries at the Port of Calais

“Everyone is waiting to cross the border and go to England,” Hicham said. “I came all the way to Calais from Morocco. I assure you I'm going to burn that border right now.”

Mariam Guerey, a Caritas France employee, remembers Hicham's words well. It was autumn 2015, when nearly 10,000 people were crammed into a shantytown known as the Jungle on the outskirts of the city.

“Hicham had only arrived in Calais a few days earlier, but he sounded confident when he talked about the border,” Guerey said. “One evening he set off with a friend to try the passage. They had two life jackets, but one was defective. Hicham took it.”

Hicham and his friend climbed over the barriers surrounding the port and slid into the water. A few hundred metres away were the lights of the ferries, less than 50 kilometres beyond that was England. By boat the crossing takes an hour and a half.

The two swimmers soon found themselves in trouble, and in the darkness their silhouettes were barely visible. “It was a port employee, out for a cigarette, who saw Hicham's friend in the water and alerted the emergency services,” Guerey remembered. “He was saved.”

The fire department searched for hours, but found no trace of Hicham. His body was fished out five days later off the northern port of Gravelines, some 20 kilometres to the east.

Hicham died on 15 September 2015, at age 22. He is one of 391 migrants who died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, and whose lives and deaths are recounted in this series.

The beginning of a tragedy

The water killed Hicham, but to understand why he entered it we must go back much earlier.

Migration, and migration control, in Europe entered a new phase in 1995, when European countries implemented the Schengen Agreement – a mobility treaty that abolished internal border controls between participating states. The British government chose not to be part of Schengen, and as a result the English Channel transformed overnight into an external border with a large (and rapidly expanding) area of free movement.

Suddenly, it was easier for people from much further away to make it to the UK’s doorstep. Some arrived without papers, and in response the English police at Dover began returning an increasing number of people back to France.

“At the time, they were mainly people from the Baltic States, Poland and Romania,” said Olivier Clochard, a geographer who studies this border. “Turning back migrants became more systematic with the creation of the Schengen Area.”

Those refused entry found themselves back in the port terminal at Calais.

Those turned away from Dover got lost in the streets of Calais, and the port was padlocked behind them

Abandoned to their fate by the port authorities but supported by a few local residents, they survived as best they could on the second floor of the ferry terminal. They were without proper food or sanitary facilities, and they slept on the ground near the counters of the shipping companies.

In 1999 they were joined by people fleeing the war in Kosovo. The terminal became more crowded and tensions rose. On 30 March 1999, an altercation between two groups of Kosovars ended with a gunshot. Allkushi Kastriot was 25 years old and born in Gllave, Albania. He was the first border casualty to be identified by name for this series.

The policy response to the killing was quick. A prefectural decree a few weeks later prohibited “any use of the public parts of the Transmanche terminal for purposes other than passenger traffic.”

Those turned away from Dover were now expelled from their makeshift home as well. They got lost in the streets of Calais, and the port was padlocked behind them.

The first walls go up

“Given the risks of intrusion, we strengthened the protection of the site with fences and by installing a network of cameras,” Benoît Rochet, general director of the port of Boulogne-Calais, explained. “This development was linked to international safety standards, but also to a particular local context.”

According to Clochard, the top of the fence “was angled to prevent people from gripping it, and above that was concertina wire”.

Inside the port enclosure, new control devices also appeared. A video surveillance network was installed and security agents began inspecting heavy goods vehicles. Carbon dioxide detectors were also deployed to find migrants hidden in trailers. The cost for these initial investments was around €6 million.

These obstacles complicated the Channel crossing, making it risker. But they did not deter migrants from trying to reach England.

Some adapted by moving upstream. They began boarding lorries earlier, at freeway rest areas in northern France, to try to avoid the heightened scrutiny of the port. But they still had to pass through the ferry terminal, where the guards were on the lookout. Sometimes they were caught. Sometimes they were dead already.

In October 2009, following a positive carbon dioxide test at the ferry terminal, border police discovered three men in the trailer of a heavy goods vehicle. One was unresponsive. The autopsy later determined that Singh Gursharan, an Indian man aged around 25, died of asphyxiation.

Others tried to reach the ferries by sea. In October 2013, Robiel Habtom, a 25-year-old Eritrean, and a fellow traveller attempted to swim across the harbour. Habtom's friend was rescued in a state of hypothermia, but Habtom was lost. His body, inert and unrecognisable, was found at sea several weeks later.

And then more walls

Between 2014 and 2015, the number of migrants in Calais rose from a few hundred to several thousand. Driven out of the city centre by the municipal and prefectural authorities, they survived in a dune area along the port ring road to the east of the city. Once a playground for local hunters and an old landfill littered with asbestos, the site became a shantytown for between 7,000 and 10,000 people in the summer of 2015. It was known as the Jungle.

Around the same time, in September 2014, France and England signed a bilateral agreement that primarily sought to “strengthen security, both around the port and in the port areas, ensuring greater protection against migrant incursions ”.

The next spring, two rows of fencing topped with barbed wire were erected along the ring road leading to the port area. Between them was an infrared detection area. “Part of these developments were financially supported by the United Kingdom,” Rochet said. The approximate cost of the project: €15 million.

Yet people continued to die.

As living conditions became more perilous, more migrants put their lives at risk to get to where they wanted to go

In September 2015, Omar El Zouhairi, a 19-year-old Iraqi, was found dead in the trailer of a heavy goods vehicle near the port’s car-ferry exit. He had most likely been crushed by the cargo. And in February 2016, the body of Mohamed Islam, 36, was found floating in the port’s waters. Before his death Islam had run a small grocery store in the Jungle. He had a wife and three children.

Shortly after Islam’s death the French authorities began to move against the Jungle. At the end of February 2016, then-interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve ordered the evacuation of its southern section, located closest to the residential areas of Calais. The rest would be cleared by the end of the year.

The people, however, remained. And as living conditions became more perilous, more migrants put their lives at risk to get to where they wanted to go. In response to the new fences, people erected barricades on the ring road to slow down the lorries so they could jump inside. They were rudimentary obstacles – no more than tree trunks, mattresses or garbage cans, sometimes set alight. The Sudanese call these traffic jams “dougars”.

Six more died between May and July 2016: Hussain Initzar, 24, from Pakistan; Zamat Ahmadzai, 25, from Afghanistan; Mokontafé Dembélé, 16, from Mali; Samrawit Fisehatsion, 19, from Eritrea; Ibrahim Mubarak, 28, from Sudan; and an unidentified person. All were hit by vehicles on the port ring road.

And even more walls

In August 2016, the Pas-de-Calais prefecture announced the construction of a new wall. It would cost £1.9 million, paid for by the UK, and be four metres high, one kilometre long, and green.

According to the prefecture, this new structure was to be “both anti-intrusion and anti-noise“. It would “protect local residents from repeated attempts by migrants to attack them,” and would be “fully in keeping with its environment, combining vegetated, striated, and honeycombed sections.”

The wall took four months to build, and in that time two more migrants were killed: Raheemullah Oryakhel, a 14-year-old boy from Afghanistan, and Gebrinsae Hailé, a 37-year-old man from Eritrea. Both were hit by vehicles.

In late October the authorities closed the Jungle entirely. In a press release published soon after, the Port of Calais stated that “no attacks on the port ring road have taken place since the end of the dismantling of the 'Jungle' on October 28,” and that “the number of trucks checked with migrants on board has fallen by 87.5%”. It concluded that “dismantling [the Jungle] has had an immediate positive impact on the operation of the Port of Calais.”

According to Rochet, the general manager of the Port of Calais, this was the result of “teamwork” between the French state, the British authorities, and the port police.

Shifting death around

Any claim of success, however, was short-lived. Since these works, which profoundly altered the urban landscape of this part of the city of Calais, the list of deaths in and around the port area has continued to grow.

Two minors, Abdulah Dilsouz, a 15-year-old Afghan, and Mhretab, a 16-year-old Eritrean, were killed by vehicles in December 2017 and March 2018, respectively.

In October 2018, Raphaël's body was found in the port, a week after he had drowned while trying to board a ferry with two other people.

In March 2019, Adam Usman Kiyar, a 19-year-old Ethiopian, was found dead in the trailer of a truck parked in the port compound, the victim of cardiorespiratory arrest.

And in May 2020, another body was fished out of the port of Calais. The body was too degraded to allow identification, but a cell phone, a pendant and a bracelet bearing the inscription “S. Camara” were found on the victim.

The body was laid to rest in the indigent section of Calais’ south cemetery. Despite the existence of her bracelet, she was buried anonymously.

Explore the rest of the series

1. INTRODUCTION | 391 deaths in 25 years at the UK border
   MEMORIAL | Our cemetery of 391 migrant deaths
2. PORT | Dying by the ferries in Calais
3. TUNNEL | Drivers said Eurotunnel ‘a picture of war’
4. HOMICIDE | Punitive killings in Calais overlooked
5. POLICE | Police violence ‘rarely punished’ at the border
6. LORRIES | 20 years of dying in lorries but still ‘no change’
7. BOATS | The path to the ‘small boats’ crisis
8. SUICIDE | A border designed to create despair
9. REMEMBRANCE | 25 years of victims: ‘Your borders, our dead’
10. EXPLAINER | Channel border violence from a UK perspective