A spearhead in the fight against migrant smugglers, the French interior ministry's Office for the Fight against Illicit Trafficking of Migrants (OLTIM) tracks illegal migration networks across France. Established in 1993 and recently renamed, the service is set to expand further due to a territorial reform. Working in collaboration with the border police (PAF), OLTIM will see an increase in the number of civil servants from 132 to 180 in the coming months, including a judge designated for these cases.

In light of the unprecedented number of Channel crossings in 2022, the head of the Office, Chief Superintendent Xavier Delrieu, 57 years old, agreed to speak to InfoMigrants about the business of migrant smuggling, which generates tens of millions of euros at the national level. 

InfoMigrants: France is expected to try 19 men on October 15 over a people-smuggling plot that in 2019 led to the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants who were found in the back of a lorry in England. France is the last country to organize a trial for this case after England and Belgium. What does the trial represent for your services?

Xavier Delrieu: This is an extremely important case for us because it is an extreme example of what migrant smuggling can lead to – the discovery of 39 Vietnamese asphyxiated in a refrigerated truck.

The bodies were found in England but they boarded the truck in northern France. We regularly work on this network. At the time, we had several elements that allowed us to target the traffickers. OLTIM concentrated a large amount of resources on this case, with 20 full time investigators.

It was important for us to see the investigative phase lead to a judicial phase. Courts handed over heavy sentences to some of the defendants in Great Britain and Belgium. The French side needs to be judged. We hope for heavy convictions for those who were the most involved.

Are many Vietnamese migrants involved in human smuggling?

The Vietnamese networks are still very active. Vietnamese can pay between €20,000 and 24,000 for the full trip to Britain. The preferred mode of transport was the refrigerated truck before the aforementioned case. They later resorted to truck driver's cabs, and now we regularly find them in the "small boats".

OLTIM is reinforcing its staff. Has human smuggling increased in France in recent years?

There has been a slight increase in the national average of 300 illegal immigration networks dismantled per year, including entry, support, movement inside the territory and the production of fraudulent documents.

With the Office’s expansion, the goal is to dismantle more sectors and do more qualitative work. Smugglers are frequently tried in front of local courts but our work focuses more on the traffickers, or the people who employ smugglers to carry out their trafficking.

It is important furthermore to develop a partnership with the URSSAF [the Organizations for the Collection of Social Security and Family Benefit Contributions, editor’s note] in order to have a fiscal response beyond the penal response.

What is the typical profile of the smugglers you arrest?

There are three types of smugglers. First, there are the "smugglers of opportunity". They say to themselves at the Franco-Italian border that they want to "make some money” in Ventimiglia, by hanging around the station. For several hundred euros, they bring migrants across the border, but they do not necessarily work for networks.

The smugglers who work with the networks are either migrants who have arrived in our country in an irregular situation and who are exploited to reimburse their passage, or members of the small, local mob.

We had a file ... on young people from the projects who went to look for migrants from the Balkans to bring them back by car to France. They rented cars on Leboncoin [a classified ads website in France], which they drove to Austria or Hungary where they picked up the migrants. This phenomenon is rather new.

Who is directing these networks?

The traffickers are either smugglers who have risen in rank and who set up their own network or traffickers established abroad who bring people from their community to France as illegal immigrants.

From a financial point of view, they use the Hawala system. There is little money circulating other than the money used to cover short-term, local expenses. It would be difficult to seize property or assets remaining in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Iraqis rely on intermediaries almost everywhere all the way to France for passages, organization, financing. They (the intermediaries) make it easier for migrants to stay in France by shops, agriculture, hotels, restaurants, and even prostitution.

There is little porosity between these criminal networks and organized crime in France. The only exception is the Vietnamese who cultivate cannabis. They build farms and bring in Vietnamese migrant gardeners to reimburse their passage and engage in drug trafficking.

What are the main difficulties you face in your investigations?

These networks work like drug traffickers: they do not communicate over the phone; they are familiar with our beaconing and shadowing techniques, as well as our video surveillance, etc. They are adaptable and they know how to thwart our investigations.

Sometimes international cooperation is complicated. Most of the nautical equipment used to cross the English Channel is imported from China, and then later from Turkey before being stored in Germany.

We launched an important operation in July 2022 to dismantle a network, but storing boats in large quantities on behalf of criminal networks located in France is not an offence in Germany. They cannot open an investigation if you do not have (cases of) migrant smuggling attached.

Despite the unprecedented reinforcement of police personnel and resources at the British border, there have never been as many irregular crossings of the Channel as in 2022. Is it a failure on the part of your services?

No, because we do not deal with maritime control devices. The year 2023 looks rather positive: the interception rate increased, reaching around 63%. Since the beginning of the year, we have 15% fewer boats that have crossed the Channel, i.e. 250 crossings over the first six months. In terms of the number of migrants, we are at 5 or 10% fewer, or around 12,000 migrants who managed to cross the Channel.

We are also improving in terms of the dismantling of networks. There were 32 "small boat" sectors dismantled in 2022 compared to 27 in 2021. Over the first six months of 2023, there have been 16. The phenomenon of Channel crossings in 2023 will be less significant compared to last year.

How have the networks developed their techniques?

Traffickers used to bury the nautical equipment on the beach, and they inflated the boat just before the crossing in order to avoid interception. The migrants boarded the boat the moment it set off at sea.

Smugglers now use taxi-boats, which are inflated and launched on rivers that join the sea. The smugglers then go up the coast and load the passengers at a specific spot; this allows them to avoid interception on the beach. From the moment the migrants are in the water, it is no longer a police operation but a rescue at sea.

How many smuggling networks have you identified?

We are aware of about thirty networks, mainly Iraqi-Kurds who have gained control of the market. They were in charge of loading trucks before, but with Covid-19 and the shutting down of borders, they realized the "small boats" were more profitable, and it became the main means of ferrying migrants to Great Britain.

The average price of a crossing is between €2,500 and 3,000, but can go up to €4,500 because some nationalities such as Vietnamese and Albanians have much more money. If you multiply an average of 50 migrants per boat by €3,000, you get €150,000 per boat, for a net profit of around €100,000. If you multiply this result by the number of migrants who crossed in 2022, you get €150 million. It is not as much money as the drug trade, but it is still an extremely lucrative business.

Also read: A look at the deadliest migrant suffocation incidents

A group from OLTIM works exclusively on cases linked to unaccompanied minors. Why?

This is really about exploiting human misery. There are the unaccompanied minors from West Africa who come to France to be taken in by social assistance for children (ASE), with many who are above the age that would qualify them as minors. However, they don’t usually disturb the public order.

On the other hand, there are the North Africans who live clandestinely, employed by criminal networks to carry out burglaries and bag snatching, and they represent a high percentage of delinquency in France.

We dismantle about four or five networks out of 300 networks every year, but it is a real subject because they have lost their bearings and they have no limits, and they can become extremely dangerous in the long term. It is vital to make them exit this spiral of crime, which often leads them to further violence in the future.

Read more: Law for the protection of unaccompanied minors in Italy: 'Critical issues persist'

Many now recruit on TikTok where they sell their services for a few thousand euros. Have social networks become an essential field of investigation for you?

Traffickers increasingly use social media to advertise. We now have files on them and we are going to create a cyber-watch group to try to identify the people who promote migrant smuggling.

The difficulty is having platforms that agree to collaborate. IP addresses are often located abroad, which does not facilitate the task when carrying out judicial requisitions.

In addition to assistance with irregular entry and staying in French territory, many sectors are involved in the supply of labor for "illegal work". What are the main employment sectors concerned?

There is prostitution, hotels and restaurants and agriculture. It is mainly North African networks which bring migrants to France to work, especially in southern France. They use seasonal visa to bring migrants to France who end up never leaving.

There is also the construction industry. We have dismantled large Pakistani structures that had set up fake companies, often with fraudulent documents, which later provided services in the construction industry. This generates enormous damage for the social security system in France and for taxes. Hence the value of an inter-ministerial Office like ours.

Also read: People smuggling from Vietnam to Europe: The facts