Out in the cold

Sarah O’Regan volunteers with a UK charity in Dunkirk supporting refugees

“You must help them!”

The man, drained with cold and exhaustion, gestured at a father holding a baby as he spoke urgently to me. 

“Why aren’t you helping them?”

 

The clothes of the refugee carrying the baby were wet. The air temperature was close to zero. The inflatable dinghy used in the previous night’s attempt to cross the English Channel had developed a leak and everyone, including the baby, had fallen into the freezing, dark water. This morning, the adults were still in wet clothes – the only ones they owned. The baby, at least, looked dry and warm in its father’s arms. Another man told us that when he removed his trousers to dry them, the salty fabric ripped a layer of skin off.

 

Later, we learned that two lifeless bodies had been found in the sea. 

 

It is February, and I am on a patch of scrubland near Dunkirk in northern France, volunteering with a refugee charity, Calais Light. Thirty miles and 108 years away, four million men and boys died violently in the mud on the Western Front. A century later, another grotesque humanitarian crisis is playing out, exacerbated by the British government, possibly in direct contravention of international law. Children, women and men in extremely vulnerable circumstances, without the protection of their own countries and already facing immense challenges to their survival, are dying on our border. These deaths are caused by the UK government’s refusal to provide safe routes, refusal to fulfil their humanitarian responsibilities, and refusal to honour international law. If this doesn’t make you, my reader, angry, you are not paying attention.

 

There is currently no safe passage to the UK for asylum seekers; refugees are forced to traverse the Channel at night, either through the Eurotunnels, or in small, overcrowded boats - usually inflatable dinghies cheaply made in China, shipped to Turkey, delivered to Germany, Belgium, or the Netherlands, and driven to northern France just hours before an attempted crossing. Thanks to the Kafkaesque absurdities of immigration laws on our bucolic isles, one can only claim asylum on British mainland soil. This is particularly unjust and nonsensical given that the UK border is in France at Calais and Dunkirk, not on the UK mainland.

 

It is important to note that there is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. Under international law, refugees are allowed to seek sanctuary — that is, claim asylum — in any country of their choosing which has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention. This Convention, signed by 149 countries including the UK and France, on whose borders hundreds of refugees have died, recognises that people fleeing persecution may need to use irregular means to escape. It prohibits their return to danger, and compels member states to treat refugees with dignity. It also states that refugees should not be penalised for entering a country without permission. However, UK Home Office measures brought about in February 2025 now mean that British citizenship will be refused to anyone who has arrived using irregular means, and deems entering the country without permission an offence.

 

"Paddington Bear was a refugee with a label — 'Please look after this bear. Thank you.'”

- Michael Bond, author of Paddington Bear

 

It has been a cold, wet winter, and the Dunkirk site wallows in a shallow pool of mud, which splatters palely over my warm hiking boots and up my legs. An Afghan boy wearing thin socks and flip-flops points at his feet and speaks to me in Dari. I tell him via Google Translate to come back tomorrow to ask for shoes from Mobile Refugee Support, the refugee charity which takes bespoke orders with next-day delivery, who will have a team here the following day. When he reads the translation on my phone, he gives me a bright smile, creasing the worry lines already carved into his young forehead. Another boy asks me for a plastic ziplock bag to protect his phone when he crosses. I tell him I’ll bring one from my luggage tomorrow. The next day I bring the bag but I don’t see him on site, and later I cry tears of frustration that I couldn’t help a child without a sandwich bag to his name.

 

The winter storms have scattered rubbish far across the scrubland and into the swampy grasses. We, the volunteers, spend time litter-picking, scrutinised by people in passing cars. A big yellow litter skip is provided and managed by the local council, while plastic oil drums serve as bins. A metal oil drum with hand-carved decorations gives out a bright heat from the deadwood and broken pallets burning within. One person stands so close to it for warmth that the flames lick her back, and I urge caution. She seems numb to the danger; she has weathered worse. Later in London I pass a discarded wooden pallet awaiting refuse collection and am struck by the wastage, thinking, that could provide warmth in Dunkirk for half a day.

 

Several organisations are here, many British, providing different services: medical aid, food, hot tea, meals, charging banks, wifi, distribution of emergency supplies. All are volunteer NGOs relying on donated money, time, and energy. Nothing is provided by the UK except vast amounts of funding to deliberately create a malevolently hostile border. The British government has committed to send £476m of taxpayers' money from 2023-2026 to the French government to police the coastal areas of Pas-de-Calais and Nord. This is the latest in a series of financial agreements with France. 

 

Much of the Pas-de-Calais and Nord départements is semi-militarised, patrolled by the French CRS riot police whose presence on the beaches, in the towns and urban areas, and around the ports, is directly funded by British public money. The CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) is a heavily-armed force issued with military-grade equipment, including a tear gas and stun grenade considered a ‘war weapon’ which they have used on civilians. The current force’s predecessor, the GMR, was created in 1941 by the collaborationist Vichy government in Nazi-occupied France, and the CRS is widely unloved by the French populace. The disproportionate use of violence used by the CRS against protesters during the era of the 2018-19 gilets jaunes demonstrations caused two deaths; one a young man attending a music festival, the other an 80 year old woman shot in the chest and face whilst in her own bedroom. Many protesters remain mutilated from the attacks: the brutality inflicted by CRS officers irreparably damaged 24 eyes, five hands, and one testicle. These body parts were not 'lost' in the passive voice, as reported in the links I have shared. They were forcibly taken.

 

That the armed riot police, a force which has killed and maimed civilians, is deployed around the coastal areas near the British border is a disproportionate show of force towards a community of non-violent, vulnerable, displaced people who are seeking sanctuary and who have the right to be protected under international law. These officers perform routine and violent evictions of the refugees’ sleeping areas and often remove already-displaced people to other parts of France, far from the northern coast. The CRS destroy the tents, sleeping bags, wash stations, and the refugees’ few possessions, to create a hostile and inhumane environment. This is a violation of the right to adequate housing under international human rights law. It’s not to say that a donated pre-loved tent is an adequate permanent abode for any human, but it can, in harsh weather, mean the difference between life and death. 

 

As well as funding CRS presence in northern France, British taxpayers’ funds are spent on high-tech surveillance, daily beach patrols, dense-mesh fencing, razor wire, and installation of anti-human architecture, such as ferrying large boulders to distribution sites to render them unusable by volunteer NGOs. The Great Wall of Calais alone cost us, the UK, £2.3m. 

 

“We shall fight on the beaches.” 

- Sir Winston Churchill, House of Commons - 4 June 1940

 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s election manifesto to “smash the gangs” smuggling people into the UK on small boats ignores the very need for such journeys. Last year was the deadliest on record for deaths in the Channel, with 82 fatalities. This year at least 15 people have died attempting to cross.

 

Officials blame the deaths on mercenary traffickers cramming too many people onto too few, unseaworthy crafts, but by both refusing to provide safe routes and also carrying out violent evictions every 48 hours, catastrophic overcrowding onto boats is inevitable. Overcrowding leads to leaks, trampling (because the floor of the boat collapses like the inside of an umbrella and people fall underfoot), capsizing, sinking, and very often, hypothermia and drownings. Crossings often take place at night so when a disaster occurs everyone ends up in the water, in the dark, and often with no buoyancy aid. 

  

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

- Warsan Shire, ‘Home’, 2009

The Chair of the National Independent Lifeboat Association, Neil Dalton, interviewed by the BBC, says he wouldn’t go in a “duck pond” in these vessels. Describing one as a “death trap”, he says it would be “appallingly dangerous” to pack dozens of people onto these boats for a Channel crossing, because of the “tremendously flimsy” design.

In November 2021, 27 people in a single boat died attempting to reach the UK, after some 15 distress calls were ignored by the authorities. It was the worst Channel disaster in history. Five women and a child were among the dead. Most of the deceased were young men, travelling ahead of their families to find a safe haven. The media usually reports on distinct numbers of women and children, and overlooks or dehumanises male refugees, but there are more men and boys because they are often targets of violence in their home country. They tend to be physically stronger and less at risk of sexual assault than women, and therefore more likely to survive the brutal migration journey. Men and boys deserve safety and survival too.

 

The number of refugees crossing in small boats is relatively few; to date there have been around 165,000 arrivals in England on small boats over the last seven and a half years (2018-2025). Compare this to 267,200 visas granted to Ukrainian nationals in two years and nine months (March 2022 – December 2024), who were granted safe passage on boats, planes and trains, via the Ukraine Visa Scheme and Ukraine Family Scheme. Safe passage for refugees can be easily granted if the UK government chooses to offer it. These figures indicate that far from these small boat crossings being a ‘swarm’, as claimed by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, the UK refugee crisis is, unequivocally, a systemic racism issue.

Refugees who choose the UK for sanctuary often do so because they have family here, or because of a common language. Our colonial legacy imposed English on the world and often caused the destabilisation in the countries refugees are now being forced to flee. The UK refugee crisis is caused in no small part by our own savage history of colonialism, our involvement in the partition of Africa and of India and Pakistan, and ongoing, deeply-rooted systemic racism at home. To misquote Taylor Swift, “It’s us, hi, we’re the problem, it’s us.” It is incumbent upon us - the UK as a nation - to alleviate the crisis that we have contributed to, with compassion and humility. Providing safe sea routes now to avoid  the “death trap” of a dinghy crossing should be the least of it. We could solve the migrant crisis if we wanted to.

 

The UK refugee crisis is set to worsen. Those fleeing for their lives have travelled vast distances on foot, facing enslavement, rape, forced pregnancy and birth, assault, death, and an unmarked grave in every country from there to here. Some have been travelling for up to seven years. They are not going to turn around in Dunkirk and head south just because some inhumane CRS officer chooses to follow cruel orders to tear down their tent and pour water on their only spare piece of clothing. These refugees are some of the most resourceful, resilient, and courageous people on the planet. It is a privilege to receive them. 

 

“I want to go back to school. Will they let me join when I get to England?”

- A fifteen year old Sudanese child travelling alone, Dunkirk site, February 2025

 

Under a bank of freezing rain many people sit on plastic camping chairs inside the gazebos, charging their phones at the power stations provided by Roots, the charity I am partnered with through Calais Light. Shrek the movie is showing on a TV screen, next to the tables of games and English language lessons. These community hubs provide a space to connect with volunteers, and with family ahead and back ‘home’, to seek warmth by the oil drum fire or inside the gazebos. It is a few hours of mental respite from the events that have happened and the dreadful thing to come. That’s why we, the volunteers, are here: to show the refugees we care. They must face the crossing alone, but their lives matter to us. Over eighty percent of refugees asked said that they felt less isolated and that the help they received from Roots made a difference to them. We do not ask their stories; it is not our place to risk retraumatising them. We help them with their English, play games, talk about football, and what they liked doing in their previous lives.

The low sun comes out in the afternoon and turns the sky a pale winter white. A line of men join hands and dance, slowly turning in a circle. They gather a laughing crowd of refugees and volunteers; humans with humans. Word goes around: someone is looking for a chess partner! I introduce myself to Hasan, a young Palestinian man with clean, elegant hands. My king’s pawn opens, and he replies with a Sicilian defence. We do not talk much; he is focused on the board, but I can feel his spirit brighten as he handles the muddy pieces. By the middlegame I feel confident that I am in control; I have an abatis of pawns he can’t breach, and my knight and queen are bothering his defences. Hasan looks up and says softly, “You haven’t played much chess, have you?” I am part nettled, part alarmed by his jibe: what have I missed? I soon find out. In a single brutal move my stratocracy falls: he has fatally trapped my queen, who takes out an enemy rook as she dies, and one by one my pieces are methodically slaughtered until my useless king is forced to capitulate. 

 

I gave a good fight, and I was glad that Hasan deservedly won. It could be his last game.

 

I think a lot of the two bodies found in the sea. I am relieved to know Hasan is not one of them; nor the young Afghan boy in flipflops, the father and baby, or the Sudanese schoolchild who looked much older than 15 after living a life on the road. Then I feel guilty for feeling relief. The bodies until yesterday encased two complex, beautiful, human lives; they were bigger on the inside than the out. They were someone’s most important person. Now they are a statistic on a page; they don’t even have a name.

 

The man with the baby wants to reach Belgium, where he has family. I point him towards the Roots leaders for advice on emergency accommodation where he can get warm and dry, but he says he has a place in the women’s shelter with his wife and child. He finishes his tea, heavily sugared for the calories, and drifts away across the mud, his child sleepily snug against his chest, unaware of the human cost of uncaring politics and the years of hardship ahead. 

 

All names and personal details have been changed.

 

The views expressed in this article and website solely represent those of the author, and not necessarily those of Calais Light or the partner NGOs mentioned.

 

_____________

 

What can I do?

 

If you want to help but, like me, sometimes find yourself adrift in this increasingly absurd and dystopian world, anchor yourself to one or two achievable actions.

 

Volunteer your time and energy with a tiny but fierce refugee charity like Calais Light which organises weekend convoys to France, to partner with local NGOs such as Roots, Mobile Refugee Support, and Care4Calais. 

 

Volunteer in the UK. There is much work to be done to help refugees on this side of the Channel, when they reach our shores. See here for how you can help: https://www.calaislight.com/volunteer-in-the-uk

 

Donate money to refugee charities so they can use it to make a direct impact on the refugee population in northern France. Check out Calais Light’s new Survival Shop, or choose a one-off or monthly donation here. Calais Light has always had a strict no-hoarding policy: every surplus penny benefits refugees.

 

Donate items - but please check the lists here first: https://care4calais.org/get-involved/collect-donate/

 

Sign up & campaign for safe passage here: https://www.safepassage.org.uk/campaign

 

If these steps all feel overwhelming, start by reading, watching, and absorbing. One of the most important impacts we can have on this humanitarian crisis is to engender empathy and compassion for refugees, and this starts with self-education. 

I have included a books & films list below, with thanks to the team and volunteers at Care4Calais for its compilation.

 

Books, poems & articles:

Home, poem by Warsan Shire

The ungrateful refugee: ‘We have no debt to repay’ – Dina Nayeri’s article published in The Guardian (2017) 

The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, by Dina Nayeri

The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee, by Gulwali Passarlay

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After, by Clementine Wamariya

A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster, by Hugo Slim

Water will find its way, by Bronagh Slevin

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, by Maya Goodfellow

The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis, by Patrick Kingsley 

Hope Not Fear: Finding My Way from Refugee to Filmmaker to NHS Hospital Cleaner and Activist, by Hassan Akkad

Dear World: A Syrian Girl's Story of War and Plea for Peace, by Bana Alabed

A Fort of Nine Towers, by Qais Akbar Omar

Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey Of A Desert Nomad, by Waris Dirie

The Crossing, by Manjeet Mann

The Beekeeper of Aleppo: A Moving Testament to the Human Spirit, by Christy Lefteri

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, by Christina Lamb

Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference, by William MacAskill

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, by Harsha Walia

Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian, My Story of Rescue, Hope and Triumph, by Yusra Mardini

The Boy At the Back of the Class, by Onjali Rauf

A Long Way Gone: The True Story of a Child Soldier, by Ishmael Beah

The Kabul Beauty School, by Deborah Rodriguez

Refugee Boy, by Benjamin Zephaniah

Doro: Refugee, hero, champion, survivor, by Brendan Woodhouse

Asylum Speakers: Stories of Migration From the Humans Behind the Headlines, by Jaz O'Hara

Mur Méditerranée, by Louis-Philippe Dalembert

The Naked Don't Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground, by Matthieu Aikins

Conversations from Calais: Sharing Refugee Stories, by Mathilda Della Torre

My Fourth Time, We Drowned, by Sally Hayden

A Hope More Powerful than the Sea, by Melissa Fleming

Refuge: A Novel, by Dina Nayeri

Lights In The Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, by Daniel Trilling

 

Films, TV series, documentaries:

The Swimmers (2022), directed by Sally El Hosaini

Welcome (2009), directed by Philippe Lioret

Fire at sea (2016), directed by Gianfranco Rosi

Flee (2021), directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), directed by Jasmila Zbanic

Exodus (2023), directed by Abbe Hassan

Farha (2021), directed by Darin J. Sallam

Shadow Game (2021), directed by Eefje Blankevoort & Els van Driel

Midnight Traveller (2019), directed by Hassan Fazili

Humanity Last: Refugees Still Hope (2018), directed by Molly Calliste

The Other Side of Hope (2017), directed by Aki Kaurismäki

Black Earth Rising (2018), directed by Black Earth Rising

Edward Lovelace (2022), directed by Name Me Lawand

On Our Doorstep (2023), directed by 

For Sama (2019), directed by Waad Al-Kateab & Edward Watts

Born in Gaza (2014), directed by Hernán Zin

The Old Oak (2023), directed by Ken Loach

The Fourth World War (2004), directed by Rick Rowley & Jacqueline Soohen

Human Flow (2017), directed by Ai Weiwei

Thank you for reading! If I have missed any good recommendations let me know in the comments below.