Protests

Ms Cooper said: “We are taking strong and clear steps to boost our border security and ensure the rules are respected and enforced. Our new Border Security Command is already gearing up, with new staff being urgently recruited and additional staff already stationed across Europe.

“They will work with European enforcement agencies to find every route into smashing the criminal smuggling gangs organising dangerous boat crossings which undermine our border security and put lives at risk.

“And by increasing enforcement capabilities and returns, we will establish a system that is better controlled and managed, in place of the chaos that has blighted the system for far too long.”

The extra 290 detention spaces would be created at the immigration removal centres at Campsfield in Kidlington, Oxon, and Haslar in Gosport, Hants, to “support the higher pace of removals,” said the Home Office. Officials are also studying options for further expansions of detention capacity, which currently stands at 2,300.

Eddy Ferrar, the deputy of security at Grand-Fort-Philippe’s town hall, said police are the only ones who can stop people smugglers sending migrants, often ill-equipped, out to sea.

“We can’t let people like that, children and whole families, go out to sea at the risk of drowning and certainly of being stranded at sea. It’s simply saving their lives,” he said.

Utopia 56, a migrant aid association, has a different take. Thomas Chambon, a spokesman for the group, points out that many of the deaths this year happened within 1,000 to 1,300 feet of the shore.

It is a new pattern that can be explained by clashes with police on the beach which create chaos and panic.

The subject has divided the town. On the community Facebook page he administers for his 9,000 followers, some express sympathy for migrants, while others take a more hard-line approach.

“It breaks my heart to see little children walking down the road, to try and reach El Dorado in England,” Mr Paillart said.

“We live happily. These people are just looking for their own happiness, and we’re preventing that from happening.”