A new drop-in center has opened in Paris where migrants sleeping rough can charge their phones, take a shower or do their laundry. The center is open every day and also offers French courses, some healthcare services and legal assistance.
Undocumented migrants and asylum seekers often don’t know that they are entitled to fare reductions. Within the Île-de-France transport system, discounts may be available for them.
A few kilometers from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, 240 foreigners are detained in the administrative retention center (CRA) of Mesnil-Amelot, where they will be kept before being deported - or released. When Rachid Temal, a senator and member of the Socialist Party, went to visit the center on Friday, April 26, InfoMigrants went along. Living in constrained conditions and a sometimes tense atmosphere, the undocumented people here count the days before they continue into an uncertain future.
The City of Paris has announced that it is opening the doors of its long-awaited “Refugee House”, an activity center aimed at migrants and refugees, in June. The center will house a library and a café, and offer a host of activities, including computer workshops and conversational French classes.
Whether it’s to keep themselves warm, charge their phones or surf the internet, hundreds of migrants have in the past few years spent much of their days at the library located in the grounds of Paris’ science museum. At the library, they can take French or computer classes for free. InfoMigrants went to visit.
Several times a week, the Midis du Mie collective organizes lunch distributions for unaccompanied foreign minors in the garden on Rue Pali-Kao in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. These meetings draw youth who are dealing with complicated administrative procedures, who sometimes speak little French, and who don’t know anyone in the city. The volunteers of the collective can identify them, guide them, and help the most vulnerable.
Over the last 10 days, in four separate operations, French police have demolished make-shift migrant camps in northern Paris; the operations, say the city authorities, are part of their efforts to bring everyone indoors during the coldest months of the year. But some 800 migrants are thought to still be sleeping rough on the streets and many people are being missed, or ejected by the system.
Migrants seeking asylum in Paris will be able to receive free legal aid from students at the prestigious Professional Bar School through a program set to begin next week. The students will help with tasks such as writing up statements, and preparing for interviews with the refugee office or for court hearings. The initiative is aimed as much at providing vulnerable migrants with essential legal help, as it is at sensitizing the country’s future lawyers to the situation of asylum seekers.
For the past two years, volunteers from the Midis du Mie association have been meeting with minors who have been denied access to the child protection system because they can’t prove that they are underage. The volunteers try every day to best meet the needs of this particularly vulnerable population - from handing out meals to helping with administrative issues and accommodation.
The French region that encompasses Parisn has announced the creation of 1,200 new accommodation places for migrants before the end of September. The goal is to avoid migrants setting up tent camps and sleeping rough.
Protests by some residents in a Paris neighborhood resulted in the postponement of the opening of a migrant reception centre for hundreds of migrants in the French capital.
In the La Chapelle neighborhood in the north of Paris, hundreds of migrants live in deplorable conditions. There are many young men among them, but also minors and families with little children. They live alongside crack addicts who were themselves displaced when police cleared their makeshift encampment earlier this summer. This is the account of a day in a neighborhood marked by despair.