Several hundred migrants set up camp at Place de la République in Paris.

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AFP

Hundreds and hundreds of tents set up on Place de la République.

This Monday evening, several hundred migrants, wandering since the dismantling of a large exile camp last week, set up a camp in the center of Paris to be in turn sheltered in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. .

"We were in the camp, we were fired the day the others were taken to the buses (to be sheltered) and since then we are again in the street where the police do not let us sleep", Mahdi Jafari, a 19-year-old Afghan man, explained as he set up his tent around 7 p.m.

Police remove tents

"They have been left behind and invisible, but they too need accommodation, especially in the midst of a health crisis," said Maël de Marcellus, Parisian manager of the Utopia56 association, which helped the exiles, almost exclusively. Afghans, to set up 500 tents on this central square in the capital.

But from 8 p.m., the police began to remove part of the tents, sometimes with exiles still inside, and under the boos of activists and migrants.

However, according to associations for the defense of migrants, the 400 to 500 migrants who settled in Place de la République "will not leave until an accommodation solution is found"

Dismantling of a camp in Saint-Denis

More than 3,000 people, mainly Afghan men, had received shelter in reception centers or gymnasiums in Ile-de-France last Tuesday, after the dismantling of a very large encampment informal which had been created since the summer under a motorway slip road near the Stade de France, in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis).

But between 500 and 1,000 people had not benefited from this operation and had since been wandering the streets on the outskirts of Paris, according to the associations that come to their aid and which notably denounce police abuse.

Last week, the video broadcast by a journalist of the forced wandering of some of these exiles, forced to walk all night surrounded by police officers who refuse to let them settle down to sleep, in particular sparked a wave of indignation. in associations and politics.

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