The trip out of Khartoum began with a smuggler, a 22-year-old Ethiopian man tells me. We are in Calais, France. He was crammed in a lorry with 30 people. They traveled across the Sahara Desert to Libya. “That is long,” he says. “Twenty days.” Vehicles get lost, or stuck in the sand. “We have no water, no food.”

It so crowded that everyone had to take turns hanging off the back, in 20-minute shifts. When migrants fell off, the driver didn’t stop. They were left for dead.

In Libya, he was thrown in jail for two months.

“You are tired you are hungry. You do not speak. If you speak, they hit you. Some died.”

Calais is a port city in northern France, the point where mainland Europe connects to England via the “Chunnel,” a 50-kilometer rail tunnel underneath the English Channel. For months, it has been one of the most dramatic scenes in an unprecedented global migration, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, the horn of Africa, and Iraq into the European Union.