Ten years after I watched the infamous Calais Jungle camp being torn down, I've never seen so many migrants lining the coast - all hell-bent on heading to Britain: SUE REID

Ten years ago today, thousands of migrants were thrown out of a shanty town nicknamed The Jungle in the port of Calais. 

Their eviction was hailed as a historic moment that would bring an end to the never-ending stream of foreigners determined to cross the 21-mile Channel illegally.

Just after dawn on October 24, 2016, bulldozers moved into the giant 40-acre camp as weeping charity workers watched in despair.

In a brutal operation ordered by the French government, the machines destroyed entire streets of rickety timber huts with corrugated iron roofs and cardboard doors alongside tea houses, tobacco stores, bicycle repair shops, secretive mosques, an immigration lawyer's office, barbers' salons, drug dens and even a brothel.

Those who had been living in The Jungle came from the sub-Sahara, North Africa, the Middle East and almost every other nook and cranny in the world. Residents were sent on buses to be resettled throughout France.

The few women and babies among them went to nearby refuge houses, while, as we shall see, many children were brought to Britain in the most controversial evacuation.

I have been reporting on migrants in Calais for some 20 years. But I have never seen more of them here than in recent days – each and every one planning to get to England.

The official tally of those massing at the ferry port and in neighbouring Dunkirk is nearly 4,000, the Home Office's border security commander, Major General Duncan Capps, said this week.

But this does not account for additional thousands spread along the 240 miles of the French coast from the Belgian border to Cherbourg in Normandy, most of them waiting in informal camps for the wind to die down – as it is expected to do next week – so they can continue their journey by traffickers' boats.

As for the charities supporting migrants, 21 of them – British and French – staged a commemoration last weekend mourning the dismantling of The Jungle.

There were talks on the merits of open borders, a stated determination to 'keep alive the memory of a vanished camp', heartrending testimonies from those who 'survived' life there, and a reading from a new photo-reportage book called London Calling that details the 'daily realities' of migrants today waiting 'in the cold and mud' for a crossing to England.

In driving rain, the charities led two public walks up a steep hill to a viewing area looking down over what was once The Jungle, now turned into a coastal wetland for nature lovers and bird-watchers.

The viewing area is perched on top of a former Second World War coastal artillery battery, built by the Germans. The side of the concrete edifice has been marked by pro-migrant activists with a message in large red letters, visible from a mile away: 'SAFE TRIP 2'.

Between them, the charities organising the weekend events have a total income of £840,000 a year from private donations, legacies and public funds, a proportion of which is spent on assisting their clients cope in what are now termed 'living sites' or temporary camps on the French coast.

The migrant industry is alive and well here. On Monday morning at 8.45am, I stood by the Marcel Doret bus stop in the port's industrial zone to watch volunteers, many of them students or unemployed Britons, walking to a big warehouse nearby that is home to the thriving French charity L'Auberge des Migrants as well as other like-minded organisations, including Britain's Refugee Community Kitchen.

The address is kept secret for fear of a backlash from Calais residents, many of whom believe the city has been taken over by those drawn here by the food, water and shelter offered by charities.

Starting at 9am, the volunteers prepare and cook up to 1,000 hot meals a day – meals that are distributed by the charity's white vans to 'feeding' stations around Calais where, later in the day, I watch hundreds of young African men queuing. 

Some of the hungry arrivals are held behind metal fences by charity workers until serving time to prevent an uncontrollable melée.

Throughout the town we discovered charity leaflets in multiple languages posted up at feeding stations – even on street corners and trees. One was marked 'New Arrival Guide, October 2026, Calais'. 

They tell migrants how to survive in France and gain asylum in Britain, with, for instance, a section on 'how to look for a UK lawyer' on arrival on the South Coast.

This arrival guide tells migrants how to call the British coastguard in mid-Channel for a Border Force vessel or RNLI lifeboat to pick them up. It gives the phone number and a reminder to give their exact location at sea so the British know where to find them.

Other charity leaflets tell them that 'crossing to the UK is very dangerous, this information may save your life. Do not try without an engine, beware of winds over ten knots, stay far away from ships because they make big waves'.

The information made available includes addresses for charity medical clinics where girls and women in northern France en route to Britain can be treated if they have injuries from rape or female genital mutilation, or HIV or other serious sexual diseases. 

A free dental clinic at the Calais hospital, advertised by the charities in Arabic and English, was in operation on Wednesday as, one by one, young male migrants in hoodies came to the door.

It is no exaggeration to say that the word 'UK' is on the lips of every migrant I speak to here.

In a camp off the ring road, I find 50 Eritreans with their families living in squalor. In one small bell tent is Robel Tekle, 28, his wife Liwame, 25, and their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. I give them some food, and sweets for the little ones.

'We don't care if it is dangerous for our children to cross the sea,' says Robel defiantly. 'We have been here two weeks, and we will go to England. They can go to school. We will get a house.'

They are drawn to Calais, not just because of the traffickers' persuasive talk and regular boat and lorry services, but because of the ever-generous charities.

One of the 21 organisations commemorating The Jungle's closure was Secours Catholique (Catholic Relief Service) which runs an open-doors day centre near the port, handing out tents, clothes and shoes to migrants along with medical advice.

It says it offers migrants 'information about their rights' so they can take stock of their situation as they consider the next step in their journey to Britain, adding: 'We have a genuine policy of hospitality.'

On its website, Secours Catholique declares that once The Jungle closed, 'those who remained were relegated to irregular camps or squats on the margins of Calais. It was a deliberate attempt to make them invisible by the authorities'.

The closure of The Jungle was preceded by demands from the then French president Francois Hollande for Britain's Conservative government to 'take their responsibility' for hundreds of children living at the camp.

A large number of these children claimed to be unaccompanied by any family member, which increased their chances of being accepted by Britain. In reality, all the youngsters I interviewed over the years in The Jungle had an uncle, a cousin, or another relative with whom they had travelled.

I also reported at the time that many of those claiming to be 12 or 13 had deep voices and some had moustaches. I concluded then that we were being duped.

The UK nevertheless took in a first tranche of 300 'under-age' youngsters in the week before The Jungle became a heap of rubble, followed by hundreds more under EU and French pressure.

The 'children' were selected by the Red Cross, Calais charity workers and Home Office officials. One in ten of those initially listed for travel went missing from The Jungle – and it was reported by French media that they did so to avoid being scrutinised for their age – racing to cross the Channel before the truth came out.

Tellingly, the people-smugglers' price for a ride hidden in a lorry on a UK-bound ferry rose significantly to £13,000 a head as demand increased in the weeks before the camp was destroyed.

The first arrivals were bussed into Croydon, south London, on October 17, a week before the camp was shuttered.

Pictures of these 'children', allegedly from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Sudan, clearly showed men with heavy stubble, broad shoulders and often the same height as the Border Force staff accompanying them from France.

The public was highly sceptical. The Sun ran a front-page photo of a 'child' migrant with a headline: 'My, haven't you grown!'. 

The Home Office acted as the Home Office does, immediately putting awnings up at the Croydon immigration centre to prevent pictures being taken of the migrants alighting from buses. 

Absurdly, a spokesman said years of living in war zones had 'probably toughened the children up so they've grown up a bit quicker'.

A total figure for 'children' from The Jungle given sanctuary by Britain has never been made public, but 2016 parliamentary records show that 3,000 under-age migrants from Europe – notably France at around the time of The Jungle closure – arrived that year.

Meanwhile, the camp was systematically cleared over three fraught days by French authorities. I remember seeing adult male migrants lined up to be put on buses to 460 resettlement centres scattered across this huge country. 

The centres had been prepared in every region, apart from Paris, which was already a giant staging post for 'clandestines' heading for Calais to then slip inside British-bound lorries (boat crossings were just beginning, with fewer than 100 people arriving on small dinghies on Kent beaches in 2016).

President Hollande promised Calais residents that the migrants would 'never return'.

Christian Salome, the then head of L'Auberge des Migrants, however, predicted correctly that many dispersed across France would come back to Calais. 

Mayor Natacha Bouchart, who for years had called Britain a magnet for migrants seeking an 'Eldorado' of benefits and freebies, revealed that some adult camp dwellers left The Jungle to hide elsewhere in France because the exact date of the shanty town's closure had been flagged beforehand by politicians in Paris.

After The Jungle's migrants were bussed out, I followed them by car across France to speak to them. The Daily Mail took pictures of the men, with their permission, at a clutch of resettlement centres in Normandy. 

They claimed France was racist, the UK was a paradise of welfare handouts, and they would never stop in their quest to reach Britain.

Eighteen-year-old Rahmat Ahmadi, resettled in a holiday centre with a group of fellow Afghans, had this to say: 'The French, they dumped us here in a place with no halal meat in the meals, no internet, and where we sleep ten to a bedroom and the kitchen is covered in flies.

'The cows over the fence are better cared for than us. We were tricked. We are going to walk out.

'I will reach London,' he promised. 'I will find work, even on the black market there. I have 30 relatives in Afghanistan, most of them children, who are relying on me to do that. There is nothing in France and never will be.'

Astonishingly, at these resettlement centres, I met Afghans who had already lived in Britain, been deported, then returned to France to try their luck again. One, Abdul, 29, had lived in Finsbury Park, north London, for six years and had a girlfriend in the UK.

The Home Office had flown him back to Afghanistan two years before The Jungle's closure. Incredibly, he came back to Europe during the 2015-2016 migrant crisis – provoked when Germany's then chancellor, Angela Merkel, threw open her country's borders – and headed for Calais and The Jungle.

'I don't want to stay in France, and nor does any Afghan I know,' he told me at the French resettlement centre. 'We all want Britain. That is our right.'

So Calais quickly became a flourishing migrant hotspot again. This time, as the charities record, in the absence of The Jungle, the arrivals – many of them Jungle returnees – lived almost anywhere they could: In shanties all over the port, near the main hospital, in scrublands and forests off the ring road – even in empty warehouses.

In 2017, I found a group of Palestinian men six floors up a flight of stairs in an abandoned factory near the port, burning a fire in the middle of a room with the Union flag on the wall behind them as they waited to cross the Channel.

Jungle residents were lured back to beleaguered Calais by the traffickers' extravagant promises of the rosy life in Britain awaiting them. 

But the charities, with deep pockets and many of them innately hostile to closed borders of any description, have by intention or through naivety played their part, too. 

Critics say they are enabling the smuggling gangs and that they should even face prosecution for assisting criminal traffickers. I wouldn't disagree.

In May, a milestone was marked when the 200,000th illegal migrant since records began arrived by boat from northern France. In the intervening months, nearly 14,000 more have crossed the Channel on the traffickers' dangerous rubber vessels – quite apart from the hundreds, if not thousands, arriving under cover in ferry lorries.

The truth is brutal. The demolition of The Jungle a decade ago did nothing to end the seemingly unstoppable flow of migrants into a financially broken Britain.

And as I found last weekend in Calais, it is business as usual for the traffickers – as well as charities that seem more determined than ever to encourage strangers to our shores.