PARIS– French police evicted migrants from a makeshift camp next to Paris City Hall early Tuesday, in the latest evacuation of homeless people that aid groups say is a “social cleansing” campaign ahead of the Olympics. Of summer.
In the operation that began before dawn, police woke up about 100 West African teenagers and young men and told them to pack their tents and belongings.
Paris police said the operation was carried out for security reasons, particularly because the field was close to schools.
Officials in the Paris region told the men, many of them minors and in the process of obtaining residency documents, that they could be temporarily housed for three weeks in the Loire region city of Angers if they so choose. they wanted. A bus was waiting for them on a nearby street to take them first to a transit center in the Paris region.
Only two or three men got on the bus. Most of the others left carrying their belongings. Some said they feared they would be isolated and stranded in Angers, 250 kilometers (150 miles) southwest of the French capital, once three weeks of temporary accommodation ran out.
Migrant camps are typically dismantled each spring in France for the purpose of an annual winter “truce” that limits evictions and evacuations in cold weather.
But aid groups working with migrants and other vulnerable people say evacuations are intensifying ahead of the July 26-Aug. 11 Olympic Games. They say they are sending people away from the capital instead of offering them refuge in the Paris region, where many asylum seekers have upcoming court dates and meetings with officials about their residency applications.
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