Towards a return of the migrant roadblocks on the Calais bypass?
Makeshift roadblocks have been organized on the Calais harbor bypass for two nights in the last 4 days. According to the police, these facts are to be attributed to migrants who use this dangerous strategy to board trucks bound for Great Britain. Does this mean the return of a phenomenon that was recurrent in the days of the “jungle” to avoid the difficulty of crossing the Strait of Pas-de-Calais in “small boats”? Not really, actually.
During the night of January 3 to 4, a roadblock made up of various connections placed across the A16 motorway, near Calais, was cleared by the police. A new intervention of this type took place on the night of Wednesday to Thursday for another dam, this time installed in the area of garbage cans, planks and tanks. If no arrest has taken place in both cases, the Pas-de-Calais police say that the perpetrators are migrants.
A question of “weather” or “means”
If this practice was common until 2019, it then faded with the resurgence of crossings to England on makeshift boats. So much so that in 2021, a record was set with more than 28,000 people having reached the British coast by this means. However, the authorities and associations agree in recognizing that migrants have never really abandoned the illegal crossings in trucks.
According to the Pas-de-Calais prefecture, the police counted 83 roadblocks on the bypass in 2020 and 44 last year. “It really depends on the weather, when they can’t cross by boat, they answer each other on the trucks passing by the bypass. Nevertheless, it is still much less frequent than at the time ”, assures a police source to 20 minutes. In addition to the weather, our source also recognizes that in the event of “a strong presence on the coast, they try to cross to the other side”.
Pierre, coordinator at the Auberge de migrants, makes the same observation but with different arguments. “It is above all a question of resources. The exiles who do not have the money to finance a boat crossing will try their luck by getting into trucks, ”he explained to 20 minutes. For him, however, the use of roadblocks has become rare: “We saw a lot of this in the era of the ” jungle ” since it is very close to the highway. Today, the exiles are instead trying to get into the trucks on the roundabouts ”.