Aubervilliers migrant camp, July 17, 2020. – FRANCOIS GUILLOT / AFP
Early this Wednesday morning, the police evacuated the large migrant camp located on the edge of the Saint-Denis Canal in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis) where more than 1,500 people had gradually settled in recent weeks, announced the police headquarters.
The operation to evacuate and shelter migrants to various accommodation centers and gymnasiums in Ile-de-France began shortly after 6 a.m. and should end at 8 a.m. prefecture which invoked in particular the health risk linked to the coronavirus to justify the evacuation of the camp.
800 tents installed
“This operation is the logical continuation of all those that we have already carried out for several months”, declared to the press the prefect of police of Paris Didier Lallement, present on the spot. “I wanted to evacuate the camps which were on the outskirts of Paris and to ensure that the entire Paris police sector and the three neighboring departments do not gather in camps” the migrants, he added. .
At the edge of the Saint-Denis canal, many people were waiting to be picked up by buses, noted an AFP journalist. The makeshift camp, where more than 800 tents were set up, is mostly made up of single men from the Horn of Africa or Afghanistan. Many have previously passed through other camps in Paris, successively dismantled, but which are recreated a little further away, in the northern suburbs.
