On Tuesday, French police evicted migrants from a makeshift camp in Paris, a stone’s throw from the Seine River. This latest operation is part of what aid groups have denounced as a campaign of “social cleansing” in the lead-up to the Summer Olympics.
Just before dawn on an unseasonably cold April morning, police roused around 30 teenage boys and young men from West Africa, instructing them to pack up their tents and belongings. Most of them were minors and in the process of applying for residency papers.
“I was already scared, but now I’m even more scared because I don’t know where to go,” said Boubacar Traore, 16, who fled conflict in Burkina Faso two months ago.
This operation followed a large-scale eviction of France’s largest squatter camp in a suburb south of Paris just days earlier. Such evictions and evacuations of migrant tent camps have become an annual occurrence in the spring, after the end of a winter “truce” during which authorities suspend these actions.
However, aid groups working with migrants and other vulnerable populations in the Paris region allege that these efforts are intensifying in anticipation of the Olympics. They point out that people are being removed far from the capital instead of being provided shelter in the Paris region, where many asylum seekers have upcoming court dates.
“The authorities want a clean slate for the Olympic Games. They don’t want tourists to see Paris as a city filled with migrants and asylum seekers,” said Elias Hufganel, a volunteer with a group that assists migrants and refugees, at the Paris tent camp on Tuesday.
Paris police maintained that the operation was conducted for security reasons, primarily due to the camp’s proximity to schools. In a nearby street, two large buses bound for Besançon, 400 kilometers (240 miles) southeast of Paris, were waiting. Authorities proposed relocating the young men there and providing them with housing for three weeks.
However, most of the migrants declined this offer, fearing further isolation and uncertainty once the three weeks were up. Traore was among those who refused as he had a court date in Paris in two days. His sleeping arrangements for that night remained uncertain.
