In the previous three years over 27,800 people have been arrested on suspicion of trying to enter Britain illegally.
The figures were reported by the BBC and indicate the huge numbers of people trying to find their way onto UK shores and the strain they are putting on security services.
The total number does not take into account people caught at ports and airports, who are dealt with separately by the Border Force. Also people who have overstayed longer than their visa entitlement are not included in the 27,800 figure.
The 27,800 figure was gathered from almost forty police forces across the UK and the stats reveal a 25 per cent rise in arrests from 2013 – 2015.
This news comes as around six and a half thousand migrants have just been rescued off the Libyan coast, by Italian coastguards, in one of their biggest operations since the migrant crisis began. There are still a huge number of migrants willing to take on the perilous journey, which has claimed the lives of thousands of people in the past few years.
A sizeable proportion of migrants uncovered in the UK were found at truck stops and service stations on motorways after they were hidden in the back of lorries to reach British soil.
Keith Vaz, Commons Home Affairs Committee chairman, called for “urgent action” to tackle the on-going problem.
The figures, released under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, show officers made 7,709 arrests for illegal entry in 2013. It was 7,913 the following year and increased dramatically to 9,600 in 2015.
There have been numerous reports that migrants are now trying to access the UK at secluded areas of the coastline, away from border checks and immigration control. Ensuring these people are discovered before they are able to enter the general population is much harder to control, as only a tiny fraction of the UK’s coastline can be patrolled at any one time.
Officials at ports in France, Belgium and the Netherlands intercepted 145,157 would-be migrants to the UK from 2013 to the end of March 2016.
Nicolas Sarkozy, running for French president for a second time, has called for the Calais migrant camp to be moved to England. He also called for the Burkini ban, outlawed by the French High Court, to be rolled-out across the entire country if he was re-elected.
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