Aden shivers in the arms of a firefighter. The 4-year-old child’s clothes are soaked and his eyes are staring into space. The sun is barely rising over the dunes of the Côte d’Opale. At dawn on July 29, 2026, his family, originally from Somalia, tried to board a “taxi boat” that came to pick them up from the beach at Wimereux, in Pas-de-Calais. “We went into the water, but the boat was already full and too far from us. We didn’t manage to climb, we don’t know how to swim,” breathes Haroun, the father. Arriving in France two weeks ago with his wife and their two sons, they were trying to reach the United Kingdom for the first time.
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