There is a horrific and untold story of human rights abuses on the doorstep of the UK. A friend and I, both No Borders activists based at Cardiff University, spent most of our summer doing humanitarian and human rights work for sans-papiers migrants in Calais, and now I want to set the record straight and to expose as lies and misinformation, the widespread perception of these desperate people.

Unrecognised by the mainstream media, who would rather paint the French authorities’ clearance of ‘the Jungle’ as some sort of solution to the ‘problem’ of international migration in Europe, migrants in Calais are being systematically persecuted by the French police, with the support and blessing of the UK Border Agency.

At least until the clearances this week, around 1,800 migrants lived in Calais, trying to smuggle themselves into Britain. About 800 Pashtun Afghans lived in the main Jungle in Calais; other groups lived in squats and smaller camps around the town. They are invisible people; ‘illegals’ with no rights so long as they remain at large in Europe.

There are Tajik, Pashtun and Hazara Afghans, most of them teenagers; victims of the NATO war in Afghanistan. They have travelled to build a new life a world away from everything they have ever known. Many are orphans, their parents killed by coalition troops or by the Taliban. It makes me sick to my stomach to recall these thirteen and fourteen-year-old lads with the steady eyes of grown men, telling me that their families “are finish”, and that they have no-one left in the world.

There are Palestinians from Gaza, who fled Israel’s bombardment at the beginning of the year. To escape they climbed across the border into Egypt, their friends caught on razor wire or shot by Israeli troops. There are Sudanese from Darfur who have witnessed the burning of their villages and the massacre of their families. There are Eritreans who escaped the military whilst on national service fighting a war they didn’t believe in against Ethiopia. If they go back they will disappear into torture camps. In their journey across the Sahara, many survived for days without water or shelter while others in their party collapsed and died around them.

These people are refugees, and you would be forgiven for thinking they are treated as such. Instead, they are subjected to violence and arbitrary arrest by European police forces. The Greek police arm fascist groups to hunt them down, and coast guards occasionally puncture their tiny rubber dinghies, leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean. The French CRS, who deal with migrants in Calais, routinely pepper-sprayed the only water point near the Pashtun Jungle, so that no-one could drink until it was cleaned. Routine raids were carried out in which shelters were broken and pepper-sprayed and personal possessions were smashed or confiscated. The Sudanese reported that during a raid about two months ago the CRS put pepper-spray in the food that they were cooking, causing agony when the migrants returned to eat. According to the Eritreans, the CRS once pepper-sprayed a sleeping pregnant woman in a raid on their squat, causing her to miscarry.

According to the Dublin II Convention, refugees must claim asylum in the first safe EU country they enter. The vast majority of migrants who enter Europe are caught in either Greece or Italy, where they are fingerprinted and released. They generally move on to somewhere that shares cultural or linguistic ties with their home country, through colonial shared history. But then when they are caught, months or years later, they are deported back to Greece or Italy.

Both of these countries are hell for migrants. The police commit acts of brutality against them, and eventually they are forced to leave because they can’t find work.What follows is a feedback loop of arrest, deportation and depression until they end up like the thirteen-year-old Pashtun kid we met who doesn’t try for the border anymore, just drinks whiskey and cuts himself.

So does this situation justify the actions of the French government in seeking to clear Calais of migrants? Of course not: it’s a political show to make it look like something is being done. The situation in Calais right now is that hundreds of young people have been assaulted, arrested and detained while their camps are destroyed, but they are already being released back onto the streets minus their possessions, including shoelaces, money, mobile phones and – inexplicably – green cards.

Unless Western governments stop fueling war, poverty and climate change, refugees from the Middle East, Asia and Africa are still going to be arriving in Calais years from now. The squats and camps will be re-established and as long as these people are denied their basic human right to freedom of movement, people smugglers will still ply their trade. Meanwhile, the situation for migrants is worse than ever, no solution has been found, and the British public laps up the lies like dogs at a stagnant pond.