Source: New York Times
Officials tried to ease public anger by penalizing networks run by gangs and organized crime. Experts and critics say the actions are unlikely to make much impact.
July 23, 2025
British authorities on Wednesday imposed sanctions on more than a dozen people and organizations suspected of smuggling migrants into Britain, cutting them off from the country’s financial system and barring them from entering.
It was the first use of a new legal authority aimed at disrupting the human-trafficking networks run by gangs and organized-crime syndicates that transport desperate migrants into the country. The migrants’ journeys often conclude with the dangerous crossing of the English Channel in small, rickety boats.
It was also the latest attempt by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government to confront growing political anger about the rising number of migrants trying to cross the channel. While overall migration, including foreign students and workers, is down, the number of migrants arriving in small boats has spiked to about 42,000 this year as of June 30 — a 34 percent increase over the same period last year.
The British Foreign Office said the 25 people and criminal organizations targeted on Wednesday had been supplying the small boats, producing fake passports and specializing in moving money outside traditional financial networks to facilitate the illegal movement of people.
Among them were a person who the government said ran safe houses along the smuggling routes and seven people reported to be involved with the Kavac Gang, a Balkan-based group that it said created fake passports.
Refugee advocates and experts on migration applauded the government’s actions but said that the effort addressed only a small part of the problem and was unlikely to substantially stem the flow of people seeking shelter around the world.
David Lammy, the British foreign secretary, has called the crackdown part of his country’s moral duty to stop the crossings.
“From Europe to Asia, we are taking the fight to the people smugglers who enable irregular migration, targeting them wherever they are in the world and making them pay for their actions,” he said in a statement Wednesday morning.
Mr. Starmer’s Labour government has been under increasing pressure since he promised during his campaign to reduce the flow of illegal migration. Small boats account for only about 5 percent of overall immigration into Britain, but the images of migrants jumping off the boats onto the beaches have become a potent political issue.
Conservative politicians and their supporters have seized on the growing presence of migrants to attack the prime minister. In Epping, a town at the edge of London, several angry protests erupted in recent weeks after an Ethiopian migrant living in a hotel was charged with sexual assault.
Chris Philp, the member of Parliament who speaks for the Conservative Party on migration issues, called the sanctions an ineffective and insufficient response and said the government should immediately deport anyone arriving in the small boats.
“The truth is you don’t stop the channel crossings by freezing a few bank accounts in Baghdad or slapping a travel ban on a dinghy dealer in Damascus,” Mr. Philp said.
Advocates for migrants welcomed the new efforts, in part because they targeted traffickers and not migrants themselves. But they also cautioned that the relatively modest sanctions would probably do little to dissuade people desperate to leave their homes.
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, a British-based organization that works with refugees and asylum seekers, said that people do not cross the channel “unless what lies behind them is more terrifying than what lies ahead.”
Ugochi Daniels, deputy director general of the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations, said that she welcomed the British measures intended to “put a dent in the business model of the criminals who smuggle and traffic vulnerable migrants.”
But she said that such efforts were only one small part of addressing irregular migration and that more should be done to deal with the root causes of poverty, war, climate change and economic insecurity that caused people to flee their homes.
British officials said the new sanctions were part of a broader effort to return more migrants to their home countries if they did not qualify for asylum or refugee status. Since Mr. Starmer’s election last summer, the British government has returned 35,000 migrants, according to the Foreign Office, an increase of 13 percent over the previous year.
This month, Mr. Starmer announced an agreement with President Emmanuel Macron of France to bolster enforcement to prevent the small boats with migrants from leaving French beaches in the first place. But migration experts say all of Mr. Starmer’s efforts face significant challenges and may have little impact on the flow of people.
Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said that many smuggling networks operated almost entirely in other countries, outside British jurisdiction, where the sanctions would have little real-world impact.
He also said that Mr. Starmer’s promise to “smash” the gangs would be difficult to fulfill because the groups rely heavily on intermediaries working in the informal money-transfer network known as hawala, which operates outside traditional financial systems.
“The gangs are pretty difficult to smash,” Mr. Walsh said. “They are highly decentralized. They are highly adaptive.”
Martin Plaut 