London records record entry this year of 781 migrants in one day

A decision was made after an inflatable boat arrived on the coast of Folkestone on Monday morning, marking the first arrival not detected in more than a year, followed by a similar incident the next day.

According to the records of the British Ministry of Interior, before this incident, no migrant boat arrived on the coast of the United Kingdom without escort since September 6, 2025.

Normally, vessels crossing the English Channel are detected halfway by the French or British Coast Guard, or by rescue ships, which then escort the migrants safely to the port of Dover.

In this case, the boat managed to bypass the radars, the surveillance drones and the patrol fleet, reaching the beach without any control of the authorities.

In a statement, the minister described the undetectable crossings of the two small vessels as “unacceptable” and recalled that “enhanced surveillance made crossings without control extremely rare.”.

Yet “one was too much,” he said, stating that he ordered an urgent investigation into the circumstances of the incident and the necessary measures “to ensure that this does not happen”.

According to Shabana Mahmood, “people traffickers are organising illegal crossings with new tactics” and “taking migrants on increasingly long and dangerous trips to the UK coast.”.

The Border Security Command has detained 21 people so far after the boat arrived at Samphire Hoe Beach in Dover.

The crossings of the English Channel in improvised vessels began in 2018, and this year several records of people rescued or on board small boats have been recorded.

In early August, British teams registered the arrival of 752 irregular migrants via the English Channel, which was until now the record number of arrivals in a single day.

The record of irregular entries through the English Channel is 1,305 people, verified in early September 2022.

The accumulated number of migrants crossing the English Channel this year in small and precarious vessels exceeds 13,300 people, although this indicator represents a fall of about 45% compared to the same period of 2025.

The United Kingdom and France have a mutual return agreement for migrants (“one in, one out”), which is in force until October, and which implies that migrants without documents crossing the English Channel from the French coast are returned to France provided that, in return, the United Kingdom welcomes, through legal routes, another refugee or asylum seeker on French soil.

The objective of this agreement, adopted last year by then British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, aims to combat human trafficking networks, demonstrating to migrants that irregular crossing will result in their immediate return to France, and that there are legal and safe ways to enter British territory.

Most migrants crossing the English Channel on small vessels come from countries marked by armed conflicts or authoritarian regimes such as Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran or Somalia.