Police swoop on Paris migrants

FRENCH police have evicted migrants from a makeshift camp in Paris a few steps from the River Seine in the latest operation in what aid groups call a campaign of “social cleansing” ahead of the Summer Olympics.

About 30 teenage boys and young men from West Africa were woken before dawn yesterday by officers and urged to pack their tents and belongings. Most were under age and in the process of seeking residency papers.

The operation came days after police carried out a large-scale eviction at France’s biggest squatter camp in a suburb south of Paris.

Such evictions and evacuations of migrant tent camps happen every spring after the end of a winter “truce” when authorities put such actions on hold.

But aid groups working with migrants and other vulnerable people in the Paris region said these efforts were intensifying ahead of the Olympics.

They noted that people were being sent far away from the capital instead of being offered shelter in the Paris region, where many asylum seekers have upcoming court dates.

“The authorities want to have a clean place for the Olympics Games. They don’t want the tourists to see Paris as a city full of migrants and asylum seekers,” Elias Hufnagel, a volunteer with a group serving refugees and immigrants, said.