Almost 200 small boat migrants have crossed the English Channel today, on the day the Labour leader announced his plan to stop the boats.
As Sir Keir Starmer held a news conference in Deal to announce an additional £75 million for a new Border Security Command, GB News can reveal that further along the coast Border Force vessels ferried migrants taken off four small boats to Dover.
The first group of migrants made the illegal crossing overnight, and were brought to the Border Force processing centre in Dover just before first light.
Just minutes before Starmer began his keynote address, the Border Force vessel Defender brought another 113 migrants to Dover harbour.
The border patrol vessel Ranger arrived with an additional 26 migrants just before noon.
Alongside the 461 migrants who have made the crossing since Monday, GB News can confirm that 650 have now arrived in UK waters so far this week.
The figure takes the total number of small boat migrant arrivals this year to more than 9,200.
That figure is 35 per cent above the 6,691 who made the Channel crossing at this point last year.
In his small boats speech, the Labour leader vowed to end the Government’s Rwanda scheme and concentrate instead on doing more to tackle the criminal people smugglers.
Starmer also promised to recruit hundreds more case workers to process the high number of asylum claims more quickly.
He said Labour would end the unacceptable situation where more than 38 million a day is spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels as they wait for their claims to be processed.
