Migrants hurl stones at French riot police after officers slash and deflate dinghies in Dunkirk

Migrants hurled stones at French riot police in anger after officers slashed and deflated dinghies being prepared for English Channel crossings this morning. 

The group clashed with police in the village of Gravelines near Dunkirk after hundreds of migrants headed to the area on Friday. 

Public officers from the French CRS – the general reserve of the French National Police – slashed and deflated at least two of the migrants’ rubber dinghies before they could launch, according to GB News. 

Frustrated, migrants began to throw stones and tree branches at the officers, who used the riot control agent CS spray.  

Migrants hurled stones at French riot police in anger after officers slashed and deflated dinghies being prepared for English Channel crossings this morning

There are around 6,000 makeshift camps in the Dunkirk area, reported GB News

The clash is a result of a new police presence across the French coast between Dunkirk and Calais

There are around 6,000 makeshift camps in the Dunkirk area, reported GB News. 

The broadcaster said the majority of the migrants in the area are young men, although there are one or two women and children.

The clash is a result of a new police presence across the French coast between Dunkirk and Calais, ahead of an expected announcement of a new channel security deal between the UK and France. 

The UK has agreed to pay an extra £60million to help authorities bolster the security presence along the French coast. 

Large numbers of small boats were expected to launch this weekend after poor weather put a stop to all channel crossings since October 31.

Groups were pictured in the early hours of Saturday at Border Force facilities in Dover, Kent, for the first time in a fortnight. 

Families and women with young children were among those pictured disembarking from Border Force vessels, after being picked up from the Channel. 

Women carrying young children were among those picked up in the English Channel on Saturday morning

Those who made the crossing early on Saturday morning wait to be processed by Home Office officials

It comes as Home Secretary Suella Braverman is under increasing pressure to get a grip on the crisis, with huge backlogs in processing asylum claims and horrific conditions reported at migrant detention centres.

Ms Braverman told the House of Commons last month that the UK’s asylum system is ‘broken’. 

It has been revealed that the Home Office deported 350 people in October, more than 100 of whom were Albanian nationals. 

The figure included 22 people who arrived after crossing the Channel in small boats and were removed directly from Manston processing centre in Kent.

Ms Braverman said the removals would ‘send a clear message’ to people she says have no right to be in the UK.

Those deported in October included a Jamaican rapist who was sentenced to 14 years in jail, an Albanian jailed for more than nine years for violent crime and a Malaysian murderer who had received a life sentence.

Of the 347 people returned during October, 118 were to Albania, 39 to Brazil, 38 to Romania, 26 to Poland and 20 to Lithuania, the Home Office revealed. The majority – 230 – had previously committed offences in their own countries. 

But the remaining 117 were immigration offenders including two people who were removed within 24 days of arriving by small boat across the Channel. A third was sent back within 27 days of arrival. 

Almost 7,000 people arrived in the UK via small boat crossings in October, many of whom are vulnerable asylum seekers. 

There are rising tensions in Dover as Manston processing centre, designed to hold 1,600 people for around 24 hours for processing, was revealed to be housing 4,000 people, including families who had been sleeping on floors for up to 30 days.

The provisional total of arrivals for 2022 had been 39,913 ahead of the weekend, with the figure inching closer to 40,000.

Official figures are expected to be released by the Ministry of Defence on Sunday. 

The number of people reaching the UK in small boats from France after navigating busy shipping lanes has increased steadily in recent years.

August 22 saw the highest daily total on record, with 1,295 people crossing in 27 boats.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is understood to have made an agreement with Emmanuel Macron this week which will allow UK Border Force officers into French control centres to help combat small-boat departures across the Channel.

The deal will also see the largest-ever sum handed by the UK taxpayer to France for escalated anti-dinghy patrols.

After meeting with Mr Macron at the Cop27 conference in Egypt, the Prime Minister said he had ‘renewed confidence and optimism’ that deals could be struck with Paris and other European partners to combat illegal immigration. 

The map that shows the scale of Britain’s asylum crisis and reveals the rise in the number of hotels used by the government to house migrants at a daily cost of £6.8 million to taxpayers

BY SUE REID FOR THE DAILY MAIL

This map of Britain reveals the drama-tic rise in the number of hotels requisitioned by the Government to house migrants at a £6.8 million daily cost to taxpayers.

Cities, towns and villages from London to rural Lincolnshire, Wales’s Snowdonia to Devon seaside resorts, are providing emergency rooms, at up to £150 a night per person, for thousands of arrivals needing a roof over their heads in the growing immigration crisis.

It is thought at least 200 hotels have now been taken over by the Government, housing some 37,000 migrants. Approximately a third are marked on this map, including a cluster of 20 in the West Midlands, housing hundreds of migrant guests.

The Mail has discovered that some state-requisitioned hotels, now closed to the visiting public, have given sanctuary to young men earmarked for deportation after slipping into the UK on traffickers’ Channel boats within the past few weeks.

We have interviewed a young Albanian who paid £4,500 for the clandestine journey to Dover from France, and was then sent to Manston processing centre in Kent for initial identity checks.

He was placed on immigration bail — meaning he was liable to be dispatched back to Albania — yet was still given a room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Basingstoke, Hampshire, where he was free to come and go.

He has since walked out of the hotel and is in hiding somewhere in the UK (from where he gave us an interview) despite being a suspected illegal immigrant.

This map of Britain reveals the drama-tic rise in the number of hotels requisitioned by the Government to house migrants at a £6.8 million daily cost to taxpayers

He told us: ‘I arrived on October 25 in Dover. I was sent to a place called Manston processing centre and put with 300 other Albanians in one building.

‘They took my fingerprints. We were surrounded by guards. Thanks to the big scandal about this centre being overcrowded, I was let out without asking anything more about who I was. I was put on a bus with black-tinted windows in the middle of the night and brought to a hotel with other Albanians.

‘If you do not return to the hotel, you are listed as a missing person. That is all. I am no longer there. I am with my relatives in the UK.’

But the lack of security regarding hotel ‘guests’ — as Border Force staff are instructed to call migrants — is not the only issue. In other hotels, some have protested over conditions.

At the Holiday Inn, Colchester, two visitors staged a roof-top protest last week which was recorded on video and went viral online. The men shouted their demands in Urdu — the language of Pakistan — and were brought down to safety by police.

Meanwhile, hotels in the most picturesque parts of the country now have migrant ‘guests’ as MPs complain of a lack of consultation by the Government over the take-overs.

A young Albanian was placed on immigration bail — meaning he was liable to be dispatched back to Albania — yet was still given a room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Basingstoke, Hampshire, where he was free to come and go (pictured: Crowne Plaza Heathrow migrants)

At Snowdonia’s Hilton Garden Inn, which overlooks an ornamental lake, a staff member on the reception desk told the Mail: ‘All reservations and events have been cancelled while we take in refugees. We will open again next February, maybe March.’

Local MP Robin Millar said this week: ‘I am concerned about the impact on local communities and the suitability of this property, in this location, for this purpose. It is a hotel, not a detention centre’.

In Blackpool, where the Illuminations season is bringing thousands of visitors to the Lancashire seaside resort, MP Paul Maynard spoke out in Parliament about the famous Metropole Hotel being requisitioned. He said the promenade site was unsuitable for them or the community as it stood in an area which already had social problems.

The Great Hallingbury Manor (pictured) has been taken over to house 50 male migrants

Difficulties of a similar kind have emerged in Essex where the four-star Great Hallingbury Manor has been taken over to house 50 male migrants aged under 40 from North Africa, with two staff looking after them, according to locals.

The Tudor-style property has 44 double rooms, 20 in chalets in its wooded grounds near a lake, a picnic area, and barbecue site. A sign on the door states clearly: ‘Our hotel is closed to the public. Apologies for any inconvenience.’

A member of staff reportedly told a visiting journalist: ‘They have the run of the hotel, the bedrooms are very comfortable. There are three meals a day, but some have complained about what is served. They spend their days walking about or playing football.’

Another Home Office-requisitioned hotel causing controversy — at least among disgruntled locals — is The Dolphin Hotel beside the Great Ouse river in St Ives, Cambridgeshire.

It has glorious views of a 15th-century bridge, and there are big-screen TVs for the migrant visitors to enjoy. However, one local — who asked not to be named — said: ‘People used to spend a fortune to stay here or live nearby overlooking the river. It is more like a student halls of residence now.’ Meanwhile, people living near the Holiday Inn Express, Rotherham, have complained about the noise. They say that men housed at the hotel play ‘really loud music all night long’.

Local MP John Healey said the hotel is ‘unsuited’ as accommodation for 130 refugees. He said this is because the area is far from the town centre and there is already a shortage of NHS capacity, adding that using hotels in this way was the result of a failing and unfair asylum system.

Joe Theaker, an HGV driver who lives nearby, called for a curfew as his children cannot sleep.

In Bristol, a group of migrants living at the Holiday Inn near the airport have said they are ‘cut off from shops, people, and asylum seekers’ services’. The 100 young men from Sudan, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Somalia, have to take buses into the city for medical or legal appointments.

Living in finer style near Grantham in Lincolnshire are migrants at another four-star hotel, Stoke Rochford Hall. Advertised as a luxury Victorian country mansion, set within formal landscaped gardens, the establishment has been criticised for cancelling weddings while migrants have been given residence. During a parliamentary debate this week after the ‘Downton Abbey-style’ hotel’s use was highlighted by The Mail on Sunday, Edward Leigh, a Conservative MP in the county, said the hotel normally charged £400 a night. He described it as a ‘farce’ compounded by the swift way migrants found themselves in hotel accommodation after arrival.

Living in finer style near Grantham in Lincolnshire are migrants at another four-star hotel, Stoke Rochford Hall (pictured)

In Shakespeare country, the picturesque Grosvenor Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon, has been taken over for families of asylum seekers. And in Melton Mowbray, a country house hotel that was once the hunting lodge of the creator of Colman’s mustard, one Colonel Colman, is now earmarked to be the home of migrants for a second time.

Last year when it was used for the purpose, an enraged would-be visitor wrote on a travel webpage that he had not been informed that he would be staying in a ‘hotel full of migrants’.

Disturbingly, at a migrant hotel in the outer London borough of Waltham Forest, an investigation is now under way over a child and a teenager who were allegedly both sexually assaulted. The hotel holds 450 migrants, including 150 children.

The Metropolitan police said a 17-year-old boy had been charged with one count of sexual touching of a 13-year-old. In a second incident a man in his 30s has been questioned and bailed for a New Year court appearance regarding the rape of a teenage boy.

This week the Home Office admitted using hotels to house migrants was ‘unacceptable’ and that it was a short-term solution.

Yet, it has to be said that with more illegal migrants expected across from France in boats this weekend, it is highly probable that still fewer hotels will be open to visitors wanting hospitality at Christmas or New Year.