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The National Crime Agency (NCA) established that the gang trafficked drugs, packaged in colour-coded parcels and hidden behind false panels in the ambulances, from the Netherlands to the UK.

Sources within the NCA said they believed 20 different gangs around the UK relied on the ambulance racket for supplies of class A drugs.

He said: “The prosecution suggest this was a top-level, audacious, and – up to the point of interception and the arrests – a successful and lucrative criminal conspiracy.”

Inside the back of the ambulance, concealed behind panels in six “hides”, were neatly stacked, colour-coded packets of class A drugs, including cocaine with a street value of more than £30m and heroin worth £8m. Officers also found 60,000 ecstasy tablets.

The court was told that the company’s records showed the fake ambulance journeys had been “going on over weeks and months”. In all, at least 45 trips were made in 14 months.

Bijlsma was described in the court as Schoon’s right-hand man. The prosecution told the jury that a rivet gun was found with Bijlsma’s DNA on it. It said this gun was used to fasten the panels inside the ambulance.

I had the most affectionate wife. I took my family out of Syria to escape the killing. My children could have had a future in Europe. Now I have lost my family, my world,” he said.

this week, another group of migrants, including six Afghan children, drowned after a rubber dinghy carrying them to Greece sank in the Aegean.

They are among more than 3,500 people who have died or been reported missing this year while trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.

Ankara has stepped up a crackdown on people smuggling, arresting thousands of refugees, after it promised to curb the flow of refugees to Greece in exchange for financial aid from the EU.

The EU’s pledge of €3bn (£2.1bn) in aid for the 2.2 million Syrians now in Turkey is intended to raise living standards and persuade migrants to stay in the country rather than attempt the journey to the EU via the Greek islands.

, Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, recently told the Guardian that refugees arriving in Europe should be detained for up to 18 months in holding centres across the EU while they are screened for security and terrorism risks

Here are some of the reasons the Mediterranean crossing has become increasingly dangerous.

The sharp rise in fatalities — 3,740 people died through this week — can be attributed in part to the changing tactics used by smugglers. They are loading thousands of people at a time and using less seaworthy boats, including inflatable rubber rafts that do not last the crossing.

So far this year, 327,800 people have crossed the Mediterranean, about half the number who crossed in the same period last year.

Most migrants are heading to Italy,

The Italian Navy and Coast Guard rescued more than 6,000 migrants in a single day early this month and on Monday pulled 2,200 more to safety in the course of 21 rescue operations.

The Libyan Coast Guard has denied any involvement in the incident, but Sea-Watch, a rescue organization that retrieved four bodies and rescued around 120 people in the incident,

Some European leaders are warning of a fresh migration crisis when sea waters warm again and more people choose to put their lives in the hands of smugglers.

Pope Francis is demanding that "every possible measure" be taken to protect young refugees as he marks the church's World Day of Migrants a day after the latest Mediterranean migrant shipwreck.

Italy's coast guard says only four people survived the sinking of a migrant ship off Libya's coast on Saturday. An estimated 100 people were aboard and only eight bodies have been recovered.

"How can Italy possibly deal with all of these people by itself?" he asks adding: "You're a journalist, please tell the world, we need help."

the term “unaccompanied minor refugee” was not even part of his vocabulary. Now, this city of 50,000, one of the most popular gateways to Germany on the migrant trail, has an administration dedicated to them.

The files on Mr. Schacherbauer’s computer tell of 16-year-olds who can sleep only with the lights on, like toddlers.

More than 1 million migrants entered Europe last year.

At least 3,695 either drowned or disappeared last year as they attempted to cross the sea on unseaworthy boats, according to International Organization for Migration figures. That's a rate of about 10 deaths or disappearances a day.

Denmark, for example, recently adopted a controversial law to seize asylum-seekers' valuables to help cover their expenses.

Many Iraqis have stayed in Europe, of course, especially those who were displaced from lands controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The International Organization for Migration said it helped almost 3,500 Iraqis return home last year — just a portion of the overall number coming back

He quickly spent the $8,000 he brought, mostly paying smugglers, and found himself almost broke. He hated the food (milk and toast for breakfast, he said, and cheese sandwiches for lunch). And obtaining residency and finding a decent job would take months

“It was 99.9 percent different from Baghdad. People here all talk in a sectarian way: He’s Sunni, he’s Shiite, he’s Kurdish.”

More than 25,000 migrants have been left stranded in Greece by a tightening of border controls to the north, raising fears of a humanitarian crisis.

On Thursday, a group of migrants blocked a railway line on the Greek side of the border with Macedonia to protest at the restrictions.

After meeting Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens on Thursday, Mr Tusk said he was appealing to "all potential illegal economic migrants", wherever they may be from.

Do not come to Europe," he said. "Do not believe the smugglers. Do not risk your lives and your money. It is all for nothing."

After the talks in the French city of Amiens, Mr Hollande warned of "consequences" for management of migrants heading to Britain if the UK voted to leave the European Union in a June referendum.

In fact, while Beirut was once synonymous with violence, when it went through a grinding civil war a generation ago, this was the deadliest suicide bombing to hit the city since that conflict ended in 1990. Lebanon has weathered waves of political assassinations, street skirmishes and wars; Israeli airstrikes leveled whole apartment blocks in 2006. But it had been a year of relative calm.

To be sure, the attacks meant different things in Paris and Beirut. Paris saw it as a bolt from the blue, the worst attack in the city in decades, while to Beirut the bombing was the fulfillment of a never entirely absent fear that another outbreak of violence may come.

Meanwhile, Syrians fretted that the brunt of reaction to both attacks would fall on them. There are a million Syrians in Lebanon, a country of four million; some have become desperate enough to contemplate joining the accelerating flow of those taking smugglers’ boats to Europe.

“This is the sort of terrorism that Syrian refugees have been fleeing by the millions,” declared Faisal Alazem, a spokesman for the Syrian Canadian Council.

“Imagine if what happened in Paris last night would happen there on a daily basis for five years,”

“Now imagine all that happening without global sympathy for innocent lost lives, with no special media updates by the minute, and without the support of every world leader condemning the violence,”

The government can’t protect us,” he said. “They can’t even pick up the trash from the streets.”

At that moment a large wave overturned the overloaded boat, and those who could not swim had little chance. Eighteen died, some before the rescuers took away the women, and some after.This was back in November 1997, but it is a scenario that has been repeated again and again in the intervening years.

Thousands of people have died on the journey to Mayotte from the other Comoros Islands - Anjouan, Moheli and Grande Comore - since Mayotte voted to remain part of France in 1975, and the other islands voted for independence. It's a carbon copy of the situation in the Mediterranean, where people make the crossing from North Africa or Turkey, in search of a better life - except that few in the West have paid the slightest attention to this crisis in the waters between Mozambique and Madagascar."We have the mournful reputation of having the largest marine cemetery," the Governor of Anjouan, Anissi Chamsidine, said in May. "More than 50,000 Comorians have perished amid a deafening silence from the international community and France…

The problem became acute in 1995, when the French government, under prime minister Edouard Balladur, put an end to visa-free travel.

islanders from the villages often do not have the papers needed for a visa application, so nearly everyone travelling to Mayotte from other Comoros islands goes illegally, by fishing boat, or kwassa-kwassa.The kwassa-kwassa are not intrinsically dangerous - they are a normal form of transport between the other Comoros islands and considered by the Comorians to be quite safe.But the migrants take round-about routes, nearly always travelling at night to dodge patrol boats - and all-too-often the smugglers overload the boats, just as they do in the Mediterranean.

The scale of the traffic is illustrated by the numbers picked up by the French authorities in Mayotte and sent home - about 20,000 in 2014 - and by the flood of applications made each year for residence permits - about 100,000, including renewals (of which only about 18,000 are approved).

Libya is an example of the long reach of Italian imperialism. Libya was for a brief period an incorporated province of Italy, on the model of French Algeria, and Libyan families still feel the devastating effects of the fascist dictatorship's persecution of those who resisted Italian occupation.

Over 100,000 Libyan men, women, and children were deported to concentration camps deep in the desert in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and much of the ruling class was exiled or exe

Until his death in 2011, despite deals with Italy and the European Union to control departures from his borders, Gadhafi intermittently used European fears of mass arrivals of migrants from Libya as a political weapon.

This climate has encouraged those who wish to rehabilitate the "heroes" of fascist imperialism. In 2012, the town of Affile built a publicly-funded memorial to General Rodolfo Graziani, known as "the butcher of Fezzan" for his brutal repression of Libyan resisters in the 1920s -- and for the massacre of Ethiopian civilians he ordered in response to a 1937 attempt on his life.

“If the funds in national budgets and the European budget aren’t enough, let’s agree, for example, to raise a levy on every litre of gasoline,” Mr Schäuble told the daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “Why not agree this at the European level if the task is so urgent?”

Mr. Kim said the new barriers in Calexico are replacing solid metal panels that sat as high as 18 feet in some areas. But smugglers and border crossers have cut holes in them thousands of times in recent years, requiring near-constant repairs.

The new bollard-style barriers are likely to be harder to breach and will offer agents more security, because they will be able to see what and who is on the other side. The Border Patrol has established a “First Amendment zone” for potential protesters, Mr. Kim said, but so far the area at the western edge of the project hasn’t been used.

Through an interpreter, Rida says that he used his share of his family's land to pay his passage to the islands — 2,000 euros ($2,380). But the people smuggler tricked him, taking his money and leaving him stranded.

"They eat in the camp, breakfast lunch and dinner. And us? We're hungry. Hungry and ashamed, because it can't go on like this," he says. Pockets of xenophobia have bubbled here since the crisis began. There have been anti-migrant marches and reports of organized groups attacking Moroccans.

As the Spanish government struggled to accommodate the surge of arrivals, hotels left empty because of the pandemic were used as temporary solution. Now it is opening six new migrant camps for 7,000 people on the islands.

Rida wants to earn money for his mom's diabetes medicine. He says the family is poor and there's no future for him in Morocco. He's not alone. Moroccans make up one of the largest immigrant groups in Spain. And according to a recent survey by Arab Barometer, an independent research group, 70% of young citizens consider emigrating due to frustrations over a lack of economic opportunities.

Aday Arbelo, an out-of-work welder from Gran Canaria, is also eating at the soup kitchen. "We're all afraid!" he says. "Every day there's police around here, every day there are fights and robberies." "It's awful. One day this is going to explode because there's no solution at all. The government promises and promises and nobody helps."

"The main problem is not the migrants arriving but the local authorities and the government," Carlsen adds, "the image they are giving in front of the Canarian people — they feel like they are abandoned."

"Life in Senegal is very hard. There's no work or money," he says. "We're fishermen, and the government has sold the sea to foreign boats. To European boats!"

Cristina Taisma Calderín, a 19-year-old student from Las Palmas, has come to offer food and friendship. "This country is not only for us, they are people!" she says. "They have the right to live well in good conditions. And if other people come, let them come."

Spain's Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has said that the government wants to minimize transfers to the mainland in order to "prevent irregular entry routes into Europe." The center-left government's junior coalition partner, the leftist United We Can party, demanded migrants urgently be allowed to travel, condemning what it considers the "repeated infringement of human rights" in the Canaries.

A spokesperson from Spain's Interior Ministry told NPR that all undocumented migrants without international protection under asylum law face deportation. After the pandemic halted repatriation flights for months, deportations to Morocco, Senegal and Mauritania are now underway.

She said the president is committed to building a fair immigration system, but cannot undo the damage of the Trump administration “overnight”.

There were nearly 29,000 family units or unaccompanied minors in February. The last time it was higher was in October 2019.

The Biden administration is turning back nearly all single adults, who make up the majority of border-crossers, under a public health order imposed by Trump at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

And the administration is temporarily holding children and families, mostly from Central America, in government and private facilities for several days while it evaluates claims for asylum or determines if they have any other legal right to stay in the US.

She also argued that the election of Biden allowed human smugglers to spread disinformation about migrants’ ability to enter the US immediately.

Jacobson said the US is also restoring a program, ended under Trump, that reunited children in the three Central American countries with parents who are legal residents in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security has also begun processing the asylum claims of thousands of people who were forced by the Trump administration to stay in Mexico, often in dangerous conditions for a long time, for a decision on their case.

For years, the world watched in horror as man-made humanitarian and political crises turned Venezuela into a failed state,” the senators said in a joint statement. “Despite these disastrous and dangerous conditions, Venezuelans were still forcibly deported ba

“It gives us protection,” he said, “but also reminds us that we’re here because there’s a dictatorship in our country.”

The immigrants also will be allowed to work legally in the United States as part of the temporary protective status the administration issued as it considers the next steps in a yearslong American pressure campaign to force Mr. Maduro from power.

Venezuela is mired in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises under Mr. Maduro, who, through a mix of corruption and neglect, oversaw the decay of the country’s oil infrastructure that had propped up its economy. The United Nations has estimated that up to 94 percent of Venezuela’s population lives in poverty, with millions of people bereft of regular access to water, food and medicine.

The United States has been at the fore of an international campaign to force Mr. Maduro from power since disputed elections in 2018. It is one of the few foreign policy priorities that has been advanced by both the Biden and Trump administrations, each of which recognizes Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader and former head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the country’s legitimate leader.

Roberto Marrero, a Venezuelan opposition leader who moved to Florida after spending a year and a half in jail in Venezuela, called Monday’s decision a “bittersweet victory.”

“I came looking because I didn’t know where to go, and they can also rob or kidnap me or something,” he told the agent.

President Biden had long complained about the humanitarian consequences of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced asylum seekers to wait for the their court hearings in Mexico. Many of them were kidnapped and abused during their months waiting.