Migrant dies in Good Friday channel crossing as hundreds of others attempt to cross to UK

The Border Force vessel Hurricane arrived in Dover around an hour and a half later.

GB News filmed as a Coastguard team boarded the Typhoon, carrying a backboard stretcher.

Border Force disembarked 51 migrants before the Hurricane moved position to the nearby Dover RNLI station.

GB News’ Kent producer watched as a team of coastguard personnel carried the stretcher off the vessel.

The body was taken up a main gangway and into a blue forensics tent next to the lifeboat station.

The cause of this latest migrant tragedy is not yet known.

• Britons need to 'fight back' against efforts to erase Easter and support British culture
• Two British tourists confirmed dead after Naples cable car crash
• ‘They’re in panic mode!' Reform slams ‘lying’ Labour after voters receive fake £75k medical bills

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a UN agency, tracks the number of people who died attempting to cross the Channel.

IOM estimates that at least 78 migrants died in 2024, making it the deadliest year on record.

At least 225 migrants have lost their lives in the Channel since the small boat crisis began in 2018.

This year alone, 11 small boat migrants have died in the Channel.

Although many of the deaths in recent years have been attributable to drowning, increasing numbers of fatalities are linked to crushing and suffocation on dangerously overcrowded vessels.

There has also been an increase in the number of migrants seriously injured by other migrants, while trying to fight their way onto the small boats.

Injuries have included serious stab wounds.

Elsewhere in the English Channel, Border Force and the Dover lifeboat are responding to at least three other migrant boats which have crossed into UK waters.

A Home Office spokesman said: "We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security.

"That's with this Government is investing in border security, increasing returns to their highest levels for more than half a decade, and imposing a major crackdown on illegal working to end the false promise of jobs, used by gangs to sell spaces on boats."