Forcibly expelling migrants from Jean-Jaurès High School – Le Monde

Le Monde | 05/04/2016 at 12:43 • Updated 04/05/2016 at 3:01 p.m. | By Maryline Baumard

In the kitchen, the water boils. A young woman, Eritrea or Ethiopia, testing the temperature of a bottle before giving it to her baby. She reddened eyes, his movements are slow. The night was short at Jean-Jaurès high school in the 19 ^th arrondissement of Paris. It’s cold, WEDNESDAY May 4 morning before dawn, when the first supporters massed in front of closed doors. Everyone knows the impending evacuation.

Coming from the Porte des Lilas, a bus procession of the grid font with systematism application and each of the red lights. One by one the vehicles are parked near the high school. The day is not yet lifted their file that already goes along sidewalks.

Friday 29 April, the Paris Administrative Court ordered the evacuation “without delay” the place, even stating that “at the end of seventy-two hours, the region may proceed with the assistance of the public force” . The approximately three hundred sixty migrants settled there since April 21 know, they were informed by the collective La Chapelle standing, which helps. The region president, who had brought the case to court, was successful, and the appeal is not suspensive.

At wit’s end

inside the school, most migrants gathered in the dining hall. Sitting around the table, they are worried about their fate. The lucky sip tea or coffee. Others shake their little bag for protection. They lived many galleys, but police scares them. There are those who arrive, those who have experienced evacuations, and undocumented, too.

In the wake of Night standing, these public gathered there to ask to be treated in unison, with the underlying idea that there are no “good immigrants” that deserve a bed and a meal, and “economic migrants” who have no law. All want to “humanity” . in the group initially installed, the number of undocumented migrants and failed asylum who can not return to their country seeking work in this high school in a solution to their galleys.

Some are burnt out, exhausted by “a struggle to get papers, too hard and too random” , as explained by a young Tunisian. “We do not want to go from home to home. Five days here, two days there, three nights out “ said an Eritrean in tears, at the edge of a nervous breakdown, cradling her stroller feverishly. The young woman in France for a year, seems hopeless. It is she who will be taking the first force to be evacuated out of the establishment by the police.

Seeming dialog

around 7 am, indeed, the police enter the place, and people come in support, massed on the Simon Bolivar Avenue, are dispersed by tear gas. Inside, the entry of forces takes place first in the calm. Initially, the occupants are still in the dining room before going out into the yard and all exits are closed on them. “I have my bag with all my papers in the dormitory, how can I do? “ request crying a young Saharan, visibly panicked. Nothing will, it will not be allowed to resume business.

There, a semblance of dialogue is established. The spokesman of migrants in vain to ask the police headquarters representative which they intend to take them. All responses are translated for the group of migrants. “They suggest that women and children go first. Everyone is taken to a center where we study the administrative situation of each, before asylum seekers and refugees are hosted “, announces a translator into a megaphone.

the formula does not suit the residents of the place because of the undocumented are afraid of being sent back to their countries, “Dubliners” (asylum seekers under the European procedure ‘Dublin II’) to be sent back to Italy or Hungary (where their fingerprints were recorded). So migrants ask to be left out of the place without taking them. But there, the trap closes. The police refused and wants to take everyone. “I do not understand launches Marmoud, a Sudanese. They came with a mandate to expel us from the place and want to force us to get on the bus … we all embark. “

Changing your

This is, indeed, the tone changes. Already, the representative of the Prefecture made it clear that the evacuation was conducted by the police. This is the major difference with the previous twenty evacuations carried out in the capital last year. Since June 2015, in fact, the settlements are evacuated by the City of Paris, the regional prefecture, with support (more or less visible) police. The migrants are then all housed and any “sorting” is made between refugees and economic migrants, initially. This is the difference between the operation to Jean-Jaurès and the others. There, it is the police who manages, in Paris, yet “City refuge.”

the twenty police, helmeted and booted gendarmes to take the decision to 9:00 y ” go to force “. ” Should the transfer support, otherwise we will not achieve anything “, is launching one of them. Hardly pronounced this sentence, the young African mother and two supporters were violently dragged out of the premises. The microphone Houssam El Assim swung in a corner, and he finds himself lying on the floor in the hotel lobby, where there was dragged by his feet and hands, as another member of the group.

A young photographer Lewis Joly, this side of the World , is pushed towards the exit after he tried to capture the hardness of the moment. Le Monde will suffer the same fate, with control of press cards, identity and meaning of a decision “hinders evacuation” decorated with a “we’ll look after you” . Opposite, a little helpless, gendarmes sorry turn of events sadly smiling. About ten minutes ago, one of them said to understand the despair of the exiles. He had heard that a young Libyan recounting his galley in France. But listen and hear combine differently.