Parisian migrant organizations are accusing city police of operating a "social cleansing" operation on the streets of Paris ahead of the upcoming Olympic Games.

Hundreds of young migrants living on the city's streets have found themselves without any shelter yet again after the evacuation of their informal camp in 2022.

On Wednesday afternoon (March 6), around 400 unaccompanied young migrants sleeping in an informal camp along the banks of the Seine river near the Sully and Marie bridges were moved on by the police.

The Paris prefecture posted an expulsion notice the night before they began their evacuation. The document was posted on the National Flood Alert Information Bulletin (Bulletin d’information national de vigilance crues) website, warning that the level of the Seine had been rising since Saturday evening and as a consequence there could be "a wave of floods in Paris, which could reach their maximum height on Wednesday."

‘Social cleansing’

But this justification did not convince the organizations working with migrants in the area. "It is completely false, we are actually in a period of ebbing floods. Last week there was a risk," explained Nikolaï Posner, spokesperson for the organization Utopia 56.

"The police prefecture in Paris has come to post an expulsion notice along the banks of the River Seine. That will affect about 400 people. The man-hunt ahead of the Olympic Games has begun," the organization wrote in the first of a series of tweets on its X page (formerly known as Twitter).

Later in the thread, they underlined that the "400 unaccompanied minors find themselves once again on the street with nowhere to go. No shelter solutions have been proposed. Wherever they try and set up camp, the police try and move them on."

Humanitarian organizations believe the authorities want to clean up the area ahead of the Olympic Games to be held in Paris this summer.

These young people pitched their tents in the last few months in between the Sully bridge and the Pont Neuf -- the exact location planned for the Games' opening ceremony on July 26.

The organizations have dubbed this behavior "social cleansing." They say these kinds of policies are putting already vulnerable people in even more precarious situations. This latest evacuation along the Seine is yet another proof of this policy, they say.

'They don’t know where to put them'

After their camp was dismantled on Wednesday, no alternative shelter was offered to the migrants.

Paris town hall authorities confirmed this was the fourth evacuation of a camp where unaccompanied young migrants were sleeping without an offer of alternative accommodation.

"The authorities are not offering alternative shelter for fear of creating a demand for more," says Léa Filoche, an assistant at the town hall in charge of charity, emergency accommodation and the protection of refugees. "They think that if they offer accommodation to this group of migrants, then they will create a demand for more, and will attract crowds."

Left without solutions, some of the young people set off into the streets of Paris. A group of about 200 of them gathered on the square in front of the central town hall in the early evening. Utopia 56 posted pictures on their X page.

But they were quickly moved on by the police. Around 100 eventually spent the night under the Marie bridge in front of a building.

"Police officers came to say they could sleep there, but just on the ground," reported Nikolaï Posner from Utopia 56. A team of police officers remained in the area all night to ensure no one pitched a tent.

According to various organizations that work with migrants, alternative shelter has been proposed only rarely in the last few months, even when the camps contain unaccompanied minors.

InfoMigrants contacted the Paris police prefecture and the prefecture for the Ile-de-France area (more towards the outskirts of Paris) but neither responded to requests for information.

'Hard to categorize'

Posner thinks some of these haphazard evacuations may be occurring because the asylum seekers who reside on Paris's streets are hard to categorize.

"They are not people without papers, nor are they asylum seekers, so [the authorities] don’t know where to put them, or who should take care of them."

In fact, these young people are waiting for the authorities to confirm that they are indeed minors. Once that status is confirmed, they would be looked after by the Child Welfare bureau (ASE). But until their status is officially confirmed by a judge in the children’s courts, a process that can take several months, these young people are left to fend for themselves on the streets.

The majority of them have been hanging out for weeks in Paris. Some found a place to stay at an occupied building in the Erlanger school (école Erlanger) in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. The building was squatted by hundreds of migrants until June 2023. Others could be found living in the Belleville park, in the north of the capital, until it too was evacuated in October.

The precarious situation leaves the young people forced to constantly move around the city to hide from police.

"Government policy seems to be: 'We will leave them outside, but we will hassle them continuously'," says Nikolaï Posner.

This article was translated from the French original by Emma Wallis. The article was published in French on March 7.