More than 300 migrants arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel on Sunday as a seven-year-old girl drowned while trying to make the journey.
The child had been travelling with her pregnant mother, her father and three siblings in a boat carrying 16 people when she died after it capsized, according to the French coastguard.
The Prefet du Nord said another couple, two men and six young children were also on board when the boat got into difficulty in the early hours of the morning off the French coast.
They were all taken to hospital in Dunkirk.
The Home Office recorded 327 people arriving in the UK after making the journey in eight boats that day, suggesting an average of around 41 people per boat.
The latest crossings take the provisional number of arrivals for the year so far to 2,582.
It comes as Rishi Sunak defended his stalled plan to send migrants to Rwanda as a “worthwhile investment”, despite the public spending watchdog revealing the cost of the policy could soar to half a billion pounds.
Last week the National Audit Office (NAO) said the deportation plan could cost taxpayers nearly £2 million for each of the first 300 asylum seekers sent to the east African nation, prompting Labour to brand the news a “national scandal”.
The Home Office had so far refused to say how much more money, on top of the £290 million already confirmed, the UK has agreed to pay Kigali under the initial five-year deal but the NAO report uncovered millions more in spending, including £11,000 for each migrant’s plane ticket.
The Prime Minister is trying to revive the flagship asylum scheme – central to his pledge to stop Channel crossings – and prevent more legal challenges by pushing through legislation which will declare Rwanda a safe country while also ratifying a new treaty.
The Rwanda Bill returns to the House of Lords on Monday, with a series of votes expected.