The side of the migration crisis you've never seen

Wow. Oh my goodness. I cannot believe the size of this. It's like if you're going on a bouncy castle. This is rubbish material. To think that people are paying thousands of pounds for this is really extraordinary. The world is watching as Europe struggles to put a lid on its migration crisis. This immigration is killing Europe. The sight of small boats carrying men, women and children onto European shores has dogged leaders across the continent. In the UK, our attention focuses on the Channel, where rickety dinghies make the perilous journey from Calais. But the Channel is merely the final stop in a vast criminal enterprise that spans the whole of Europe. Border police, they check for hidden immigrants. I've come to the front line of the migration crisis to find the shocking secrets behind the people smugglers. We're here at Capitan Andravo, which, as you can see, is really where Asia, where the Middle East, meets Europe. It's right on the Turkish border with Bulgaria. Once you pass that checkpoint, you have entry, you have access for thousands of miles. As far as Calais, for example, you're in the Schengen zone. It's borderless. so this really is the frontier into the criminal gangs and them starting to operate within the continent. Captain Andreevo is watched over by the Bulgarian customs police and they've got their work cut out with over a million heavy lorries coming through here every year. Captain Georgi Gospodinov leads the team's efforts here and wastes no time in showing me one of their extraordinary catches oh my goodness i cannot believe the size of this so they've they've pumped up one of these inflatable boats for us to show us the sort of scale of it it is massive but i dread to think how many people are crammed in there it's it's like a sort of trampoline material i mean it's it's like bouncy castle it's like if you're going on a bouncy castle it's this is rubbish material it is a rubbish material this is the cheapest material which can be used for this type of product you see the boat for the engine how cheap is it it's not even waterproof or whatever this boat in five six hours they already lose maybe 70 60 percent on here this is this was inflated just 15 minutes ago so in two three hours it will be unusable on this really looking at the size of it you could get 10 people yeah and you'll say obviously because they're people smugglers they're six 60 would get on that they would try this boat is created for not more than 10 people but they're trying to have 60 80 even on some of the bigger boats up to 100 people right yeah and they're charging thousands of pounds for each person yeah that's the information we have my goodness i was gonna have a little feel of that i mean it's that is extraordinary that's just your run-of-the-mill duct tape there this rope is i mean it's to think that people are paying thousands of pounds for this it's really extraordinary and these i read are often manufactured in turkey and back streets for example definitely they are not manufactured in uh factories as you say it's back streets basements and so on and so on very low quality very low material from may till now we have more More than 457 guns. 457 guns? Yeah, just for a few months, which indicates that the criminal groups are trying to be active. What do we know about the gangs who are smuggling in guns or boats like this? One thing is always true for the criminal gangs, and this is that they are trying to do a lot of money from illegal actions. So what gives them a profit and a lot of money is important for them. The people smuggling gangs operate on an international scale. Before their boats arrive on the UK's beaches, they're made on the back streets of Turkey, propelled by Chinese-made engines. But Europe is cracking down, capturing kingpins like Adam Savas, who was the National Crime Agency's most wanted man. He was jailed for 11 years for smuggling equipment over the Turkish-Bulgarian border, which was used in half of all channel crossings in 2023. three. Gangsters like Savvas have been running rings around the border force for years but now a key part of their strategy is being targeted. Now at this crossing they've seized 280 boats basically all like this 80 percent are this size or very similar in size some are even bigger some are two meters larger in some ways and if you think here I mean it hardly feels safe and I'm sitting here on land the thought of having a hundred people packed into this vessel doesn't really bear thinking about i think what's interesting is we are 1500 miles away from that frontier that we all know when it comes to Calais and Dover and yet really this is where the battle starts this is where the National Crime Agency the authorities here in Bulgaria are really having to crack down because it's not just the boats it's the engines it's the life jackets it's even drugs it's even weapons it's cash that is getting over the border and once they cross in from Turkey they're free to go to the rest of Europe the Bulgarian customs police have x-ray machines on site and regularly check buses and lorries coming across this border but there are other methods that may surprise you as part of the 1.2 million that the UK has invested into this border crossing point they've gained a new member of staff here Adele was trained in the UK to sniff out the rubber on these illegal boats, as well as the guns, drugs and cash usually found alongside them. Always ready to work, Adele was more than happy to give me a demonstration. Ah, frozen. Totally frozen, which I presume means that's where the substance is. Well done. And it gets a ball to say well done. Adele will just stop when she has found something. So what was that in that case? Marijuana. It was drugs, was it? Yeah, marijuana. Right. Can I have a look in? Oh, yeah. So there is. Right. The team have just carried out a successful operation here called Balkan Bridge 2. Georgi took me through the startling seizures his team had made. It was a very serious operation. We had also more than 60 kilos of narcotics, more than 20,000 fake textiles, more than 10,000 perfumes, and a lot of other stuff, also undeclared cash. but yeah the main focus was the rubber boats and we were succeeded we had two rubber boats in a bus they were declared as a tent but it was actually two rubber boats used for bringing migrants and our security services MI5 talk about Russia in particular being behind some of these gangs both the state and also operatives within the Kremlin is that what you see this is something which I can confirm, but we are working very hard on these cases. Progress is being made here on the Bulgarian-Turkish border, but this crisis is not going away and people are still making their way through this gateway to Europe illegally. Leaving the border crossing and driving through Bulgaria, the political tension caused by the migrant crisis is palpable. Just half an hour away from the border is the town of Harmanli which is home to Bulgaria's biggest refugee camp where there have been riots now these paintings and murals go on for miles because the reality is behind those walls is the largest asylum and refugee camp in the whole of Bulgaria we're just a stone's throw from that crossing with Turkey people have come from Syria they've come from Afghanistan. These are the people who made it over the border. But you look at those murals, contrast that with the barbed wire fence at the very top. The reality is when they do make it across, this is where they end up. My time in Bulgaria revealed the sheer scale of the battle for Europe's borders, a fight complicated further by the possibility that gangsters are now working hand in hand with nations hostile to the West. And if the tensions we're seeing across Europe over the migration crisis are to ease, then the work of border force officials here on the hidden front line are essential.