US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has criticised European nations over migration for allowing what he described as an “invasion” on their shores, during a D-Day anniversary speech in France.
Hegseth was speaking in Normandy 82 years after allied forces stormed French beaches to liberate Nazi-occupied north-western Europe in 1944.
“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth said. “Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”
Migration has become a major political issue across Europe, with parties supporting hardline immigration policies surging in the polls.
On Friday, US Vice-President JD Vance blamed the death of the 18-year-old British student Henry Nowak, who was fatally stabbed last year in Southampton by Vickrum Digwa, on the “mass invasion of migrants” and said the “only response” was “righteous anger”.
Downing Street responded by criticising “people trying to interfere in our democracy,” adding that the Nowak family had “said they do not want his death to be used to create further division”.
Speaking in France, Hegseth said that in the years since D-Day some European capitals have grown too “comfortable” with their hard-fought freedoms, forgetting that “freedom is not free”.
“The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe,” Hegseth said. “That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters or what they fought for was merely temporary.”
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D-Day was the largest seaborne military operation ever attempted and involved the simultaneous landing of tens of thousands of troops from the UK, US and Canada on five separate beaches in Normandy in northern France.
US President Donald Trump has also criticised European immigration policy, telling the UN last year that European countries were “going to hell” due to “uncontrolled migration”.
In response, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the president’s remarks were “not right”, while accepting the “challenge” of tackling illegal migration, particularly from people crossing the English Channel in small boats.
Sea arrivals into mainland Europe peaked in 2015, when the UN said more than a million people crossed the Mediterranean. Between April 2025 and March 2026, there were a combined 169,341 sea arrivals to the UK, Greece, Italy, Spain and Cyprus. Crossings to the UK accounted for about 23% of the total.
Between 1 January and 3 June 2026, a total of 9,142 people crossed the English Channel by small boat to the UK from France. This was down by 38% on the same period the previous year.
In December, the Trump administration unveiled its new National Security Strategy, which asserted that if current trends continue Europe would be “unrecognisable in 20 years or less” and its economic issues are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure”.
Domestically, the Trump administration has made anti-immigration policy a key tenet of its agenda, with agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) making thousands of arrests since January 2025.
