More than 1,000 small boat migrants have crossed the English Channel since yesterday morning, GB News can exclusively reveal.
After the arrival of more than 600 on Thursday, a further 400 have either already crossed or are currently heading toward UK waters.
The arrivals are the first migrant boats to cross for a fortnight, after bad weather prevented people smuggling operations in the Channel.
Throughout Thursday, more than 600 migrants had arrived in UK waters and were taken to the Border Force processing centre at Dover harbour.
Boats continued to arrive into the early hours of this morning, with around 200 migrants picked up by Border Force and the Dover and Dungeness lifeboats.
By lunchtime today, more than 200 other migrants had either arrived in Dover or had reached UK waters and been picked up by Border Force vessels.
At just after 12.30, GB News counted 75 people as they were taken off the Border Force vessel Ranger at the Western Jet Foil in Dover harbour.
Half an hour later, the Border Force vessel Defender docked in the harbour with 76 people on board.
Migrants were pictured boarding small boats in northern France this morning
|PA
Border Force has since picked up more than 100 others as they arrived in UK waters early this afternoon.
The latest arrivals take the number of small boat migrants who have made the illegal crossing so far this year to more than 38,000.
The figure is already well beyond the 36,816 small boat migrants who arrived in the UK during the whole of last year.
The Home Office said it disputed the figures that GB News had gathered of the latest arrivals.
But the People's Channel stands by the numbers published, after GB News counted those individuals arriving in the UK.
Our Standards: The GB News Editorial Charter