French spend £1m a year to f ly migrants away from Calais ... then let them come straight back!
PRIVATE JETS TO DEPORT ASYLUM SEEKERS
FRANCE is spending more than £1 million a year ‘clearing’ UK-bound illegal migrants from Calais via private jet – but then allows them to come straight back again.
The scandal throws new light on farcical policies that have pushed the port town to breaking point.
There are 6,000 migrants sleeping rough in the Calais area as they try to board trains and ferries to Britain – almost twice as many as three weeks ago. But instead of putting funds into finding a long-term political solution to the crisis, the French are pouring money into dispersing them around France using Beechcraft 1900 turbojet planes.
Hired privately at a cost of £2,500 an hour, the aircraft land at a small airfield in Calais, and take ten migrants at a time to other parts of France.
‘Police take migrants to the tarmac. Then border police take them as far as their next destination. Then other police are used to transfer them to a detention centre,’ an official source told French investigative news site Street Press. After spending a few hours at a centre, the migrants are free to go, and almost always return to Calais, because it is the best staging point to get to Britain.
Karim, one migrant arrested in Calais on August 27, was transferred from Calais to Hendaye – 680 miles away in south-west France.
He returned to Calais, and was then told he was being transferred back to Hendaye by private jet, but would again be free to go back to the northern port town
Court documents contain a personal statement from Karim, who said: ‘I don’t want to go to Hendaye. I’ve already been there.’ An interior minis- try source confirmed that ‘ at least three flights a week have been organised’, and that so far 100 migrants had been ‘ displaced’ to Hendaye, Metz, Toulouse, Nimes and Perpignan.
The scheme costs a minimum of £1 million a year.
The Mail reported last week how the UK spent £14 million in just 18 months to deport failed asylum seekers on chartered flights, many of which were half empty.
One special flight costing £250,000 carried a lone Moroccan deportee. In another case an entire airliner was used to return 11 Afghan illegals to Kabul.