Police evacuated about 550 migrants who had been living near Canal Saint-Martin for several months without incident on June 4, less than a week after the dismantlement of the "Millenaire" or Millennium camp, a larger installation further northeast along the canal.  

There was a large police presence, as well as staff from the association France Terre d'Asile, Paris city officials, representatives from the prefecture and staff from the Ofii (The French Office for Immigration and Integration). These officials guided migrants to buses that would bring them to temporary housing facilities just outside Paris. There, the migrants would meet with authorities for a "thorough and in-depth review" of their administrative status, according to the prefecture.

Tweet, translated from French: Dismantlement of the Canal Saint Martin, the evacuation begins. Migrants line up in rows of ten.

At the same time, police were also evacuating the roughly 450 people living in a camp at Porte de la Chapelle, in Paris' 18th arrondissement.

InfoMigrants journalist Charlotte Boitiaux, who was on location at Canal Saint Martin, reported that some of the migrants seemed to be relieved to be leaving.

However, others seemed anxious.

"I heard dozens of people asking, 'If I get into the bus, will I be deported?'" Boitiaux reported.

Some were afraid of being sent to detention centres (called, in French, CRA, an acronym for Administrative Retention Centres) and, eventually, being deported to their countries of origin.

Tweet, translated from French. Evacuation of the camp near Canal Saint Martin. Many questions: "Do I get into the bus?" and "if I get in the bus, will I be deported?" #migrants #dublines

Other migrants were worried because they had meetings with the prefecture scheduled for this Monday and they won’t be able to go. Officials with France Terre d'Asile reassured them, saying that the prefecture would work with them to change their meeting time.

Most of the migrants who were living near Canal Saint Martin were young men from Afghanistan. There were also several young women, some of them with very young children.

Almost three-quarters of the camp's  residents are migrants whose right to asylum depends on a decision by another European country. In France, these people are known as "dublinés," so named for the Dublin Regulation, the EU law that determines which member state is responsible for examining an asylum seekers application. Under this law, asylum seekers are usually required to file their claim in their EU port of entry or in the country where they were first fingerprinted.

Many of the migrants in the Canal Saint Martin camp are Afghan asylum seekers whose claims were already rejected in Germany. Most came to try their luck in France.

Determining the authority that is actually responsible for these people is complicated. More and more associations and politicians are asking the French government to find a solution for them.

One of those people is Ian Brossat, deputy mayor of Paris, who is in charge of housing and emergency housing.

"We need to take responsibility for these people as the government promised," Brossat told InfoMigrants. "The risk is that if we don’t deal with these migrants, then they will end up swelling the numbers in camps in Paris."

Didier Leschi, the director general of Ofii, told InfoMigrants that his office would try to find some kind of solution.

"If, after six months, the other EU countries haven’t acted to take back these migrants, then the migrants will be able to file a claim in France," he said. Their claim would then be examined by Ofpra, the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons.

The situation is even more delicate for Afghans whose asylum claims were rejected in Germany, as Berlin doesn't think twice about deporting them.

In October 2017, rights groups La Cimade and Amnesty International denounced these deportations in a report called "Forced back to danger: Asylum-seekers returned from Europe to Afghanistan."