Paris: migrant camp dismantled ‘at night, far from cameras’

According to the collective Accès au Droit (Access to Rights), who published the video on social media, police officers used flashlights to wake migrants who were sleeping under a bridge in the Jaurès district in northern Paris.

 “These young Afghans were sleeping in Jaurès, on the banks of the Seine. They were woken up by police officers with flashlights between 2:30 am. and 3 am,” said Fanny, a member of the collective.

“When the migrants protested and asked questions, the police used tear gas on them. They told the police they had nowhere to go. One young person even set his tent on fire in protest after the police sprayed his belongings with tear gas; he couldn’t take it anymore.”

This event apparently was not the first and last time that migrants in informal camps had reported being suddenly being woken up and abruptly driven out of their tents by French authorities.

A young Afghan migrant apparently filmed a similar episode on March 24.

Accès au Droit also documented in a November 2023 report the recurrence of verbal and physical violence committed against migrants during the dismantling of their camps.

The collective listed 448 testimonies of acts of police violence since 2015, 88% of which resulted from “situations of evictions and dispersions from public spaces.”

A third of the testimonies also cited actual physical violence, ranging from being kicked to beatings, and another third reported confiscation or destruction of migrants’ property.

Read also: Unaccompanied homeless youth in Paris: “We used to look for shelter, now we look for places to hide”

Police violence is ‘nothing new’

Oriane Sebillotte, a doctoral student specialized on migration at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), says that these police operations generally take place at night and are “very much under-documented.”

“It takes place in the dark, far from the cameras, making it difficult to collect witness statements. It is therefore difficult to quantify police violence,” she told InfoMigrants, adding that she doesn’t believe that “the violence is institutionalized; instead, it is the work of small groups of police officers who act at a given moment.”

Read also: Paris: Police ‘evacuate’ 400 young migrants without offering alternative shelter

Sebillotte added, however, that cases involving police brutality have been unfolding for a while: “What we know is that for eight years, there has always been police brutality [toward migrants], and this is nothing new.”

Some migrants meanwhile underplay the reality they have to face on a daily basis. “Certain migrants do not talk about what they suffered for fear of reprisal, others do not have time to film and provide evidence to back up their statement,” Sebillotte surmized.

A 16-year-old Guinean migrant named Chérif, who has been sleeping for months under a bridge in a camp of around 150 people, not far from Paris’ Austerlitz station, told InfoMigrants that “(t)he police come from time to time” and “check if there are any problems.”

“But they are never violent, and they don’t tell us to leave. We have crossed countries where it is much worse. In Morocco and Tunisia, the police beat us because we are black,” Chérif explained.

Read also: ‘As soon as the park closes, we pitch our tent’: Hundreds of unaccompanied minors sleep outside in northern Paris

‘No bad publicity before Olympics’

Sebillot thinks that the police in the streets of Paris are trying to manage the situation quietly and discretely in the run-up to the Olympic:

“The police do not want to attract bad publicity, like in 2020 at Place de la République,” she said, referring to an operation launched on November 23, 2020 during which police cleared out a migrant camp in the heart of Paris.

At the time, people posted countless photos and videos of French police tearing down tents, hitting migrants with batons and removing tents — sometimes with people still inside them.

“Some of the images from the dispersion of the illegal migrant camp at Place de la République are shocking,” wrote the French Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin on Twitter in the early hours of the morning following the evacuation. 

Sebillot told InfoMigrants that since those events, most incidents of police violence against migrants in Paris are “indirect.”

“This is violence which affects the physiological needs of migrants: spraying their belongings with tear gas, preventing them from sleeping by shining flashlights in their faces, pouring oil on the ground to prevent them from pitching their tents again.”

“There is not just one form of violence, but a range of different forms of violence,” she explained.

Read also: Punishment beatings: Migrants beaten, isolated in Greek refugee camps

This trend towards growing police brutality towards migrants has not only been documented in the French capital; NGOs have for years been alarmed by the treatment inflicted on migrants in northern France, particularly in and around the port city of Calais.

More than a thousand migrants are believed to currently live around Calais, stretching from Dunkirk to Boulogne-sur-Mer. The overwhelming majority have reported being harassed by French authorities there. People living in tent camps say they are used to being evicted once every 48 hours, as reported by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2021.

Read also: ‘Either we die from the cold, or we drown in the sea’: Despite Channel drownings, migrants determined to cross