Model's video shoot on the beach interrupted by sudden landing of a group of illegal migrants

The migrants make it into the US by jumping off a boat near the shore and running up the beach

Doug Bolton
Wednesday 29 July 2015 00:06 BST
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The boat carrying the migrants can be seen in the back of the model's video shoot
The boat carrying the migrants can be seen in the back of the model's video shoot

A model's video shoot on a Miami beach was interrupted after a group of illegal migrants jumped from a ship close to the shore and ran up the beach to safety.

Ekaterina Juskowski was filming her friend on the beach in the early morning, and saw a boat unusually close to the shore.

She briefly stopped filming as the boat was clearly visible in the background of her shot, but started recording again as a group of what appears to be nine men jump from the boat, wade through the waves, and run up the beach.

Speaking to the Broward Palm Beach New Times, US Border Patrol spokesman Frank Miller said the video was a "testament to how confident" immigrants are in entering the USA.

He said that criminal groups who transport these people often drop off migrants and deliveries of drugs along the Florida coast.

The state's coastline is so long that it is impossible to thoroughly patrol, and he said there had been an increase in maritime smuggling along the Floridian coast over the last year.

Data seen by the paper from the US Border Patrol and Coast Guard show there were thousands of similar incidents in Florida last year, with the majority of immigrants apprehended by authorities coming from Cuba, Haiti, and other Caribbean islands, which are within a few hundred miles of Florida's southern tip.

Like the migrants from North Africa and the Middle East who regularly make the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean to reach Europe, many migrants who land in America pay large sums to criminal groups in exchange for transport across the sea.

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