US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth marked the 82nd anniversary of D-Day in Normandy by taking a break from honouring the fallen to complain about who’s currently using the beach.
Speaking where Allied forces once stormed French shores to liberate Europe from Nazi occupation, Hegseth lamented that today, different European beaches are being “stormed by different dangerous ideologies” - specifically, by migrants arriving in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. “Boats and men arrive,” he noted, apparently unaware that the original D-Day also featured boats and men.
Hegseth’s comments are the latest in a series of critiques from the Trump administration over European migration policy. On Friday, Vice-President JD Vance waded in by blaming the fatal stabbing of British student Henry Nowak, 18, on the “mass invasion of migrants” - despite the Crown Prosecution Service confirming that the perpetrator, Vickrum Digwa, was born British. Downing Street responded by tutting about “people trying to interfere in our democracy,” adding that the Nowak family had explicitly asked for his death not to be used to create further division.
Hegseth argued that some European capitals have grown too “comfortable” with their hard-won freedoms, warning that “freedom is not free” - which is true, though it’s also not a metaphor that generally requires you to compare wartime amphibious assaults with border control.
President Trump has previously told the UN that European countries are “going to hell” due to “uncontrolled migration.” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called that “not right” while conceding the “challenge” of illegal crossings. Sea arrivals to Europe peaked in 2015 at over a million; between April 2025 and March 2026, the combined total for the UK, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Cyprus was 169,341, with UK crossings accounting for about 23%. Between January and June 2026, 9,142 people crossed the English Channel by small boat - down 38% on the previous year.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released in December, warned that if current trends continue, Europe would be “unrecognisable in 20 years or less,” with economic issues “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure.” Domestically, ICE agents have made thousands of arrests since January 2025, because nothing says “protecting freedom” like a lot of paperwork.