Toulouse. 150 unaccompanied foreign minors on the street, “good news” according to the mayor
Photo credit: Autonomy
These 150 unaccompanied foreign minors (MIE) are young people aged 15 to 17 whom the Departmental Council has refused to recognize as minors, within the framework of the legal procedure supposed to grant any minor entering the territory basic rights relating to the protection from childhood. Since 2019, they have lived in the former Epahd des Tourelles, Lardenne district in Toulouse, a building made available by the town hall while the courts examine their minority appeal. But at the end of April, the CCAS (Communal Center for Social Action) seized the administrative court of Toulouse in summary proceedings to recover the premises, claiming incidents and violence.
This place finds for these young people, in addition to the possibility of living under a roof, the means of organizing themselves collectively with the associations which manage their legal, health, school and food follow-up (AutonoMIE, Tous.tes En Classe 31, Médecins du monde , St Vinent de Paul, Right to housing 31…). On May 3, the Toulouse administrative court issued the eviction notice. Since then, the young people have been camping on the Jules Guesdes alleys in order to make visible their fight to be rehoused and to be able to follow a normal schooling.
150 unaccompanied foreign minors on the street: requisition of empty accommodation!
The young people were evicted from their accommodation by the forces of repression on Friday 26 August. “The police gassed us, assaulted us, they broke our phones. We were shocked. We did not expect that from France“, testifies to Permanent Revolution Junior and Kalil, scarred brow bone, broken phone in hand.
To divide the resistance of the teenagers, the authorities showed that only three young people among the 150 present had the papers allowing their care. The others, resulting adults in the absence of civil status documents, are threatened with an obligation to leave French territory.
A makeshift camp of around forty tents has therefore appeared in the middle of the opulent Jules Guesde alleys, between the Courthouse and the Jardin des Plantes. Citizen solidarity and the involvement of associations allow them to collect food, sheets, some clothes… But how to ensure basic hygiene in these conditions? “It’s not easy to live on the streets, says Junior. You have to take the tram or the metro to go to the toilet or shower. On galley, it is difficult. Upon request to be relocated immediately“. It is in this humanitarian scandal that some young people in school will have to start their return to school.
The associations present for several years with these young people organized a press conference on the camp on Monday August 29 in order to demand emergency measures: “the opening of a support and accommodation system adapted to the needs of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors excluded from the child protection system and having appealed to the children’s judge, which allows these young people: to take care of from them – sleeping, bathing, dressing, eating; to heal; to continue their legal proceedings; to resume their education“. Present on the spot, the deputy of the NUPES François Piquemal calls for a “Republic that protects and guarantees everyone the right to decent housing.“However, it is indeed the “Republic” which carries out a racist sorting at the borders.
Minority recognition: down with racist sorting at borders!
At the center of the precarious situation of UAMs is the reactionary simplified procedure for recognition of minority. This evaluation, carried out by social workers from the departmental system for the reception of evaluation and orientation of unaccompanied foreign minors (DDAEOMIE), is supposed to make it possible to distinguish between minors, i.e. those who, according to the law, benefit from the protection of Childhood Social Assistance (ASE) for adults who must then leave French territory. In the absence of civil status documents recognized as valid by the French State, which is the most common case for people who have fled war or repression, this procedure is based on a social assessment examination aimed at the interview determine if the person is under 18.
In a survey published in the journal Men and migrations in 2021, the sociologist Noémie Paté clearly demonstrates that this interview aims to operate a “ranking of immigrants according to their so-called “integration capacity”” based on racist stereotypes (nationality, language, academic capital, behavior …). Effective practices by Junior and Kalil who specify that “these subjective interviews sometimes last 3 hours“.
In addition to the interview, the evaluators can have recourse to bone age tests, a practice widely denounced by many associations such as Gisti and condemned by the Council of Europe. These tests not only produce “devastating effects on the physical, emotional and psychological development of the child“according to France Terre d’Asile, but also have no scientific validity as explained by many medical authorities.
If young migrants are not recognized as minors, they can appeal to the juvenile judge, a situation in which the UAMs of the Allées Jules Guesde camp find themselves. But during the examination of this recourse which can take several months, the State leaves them on the street without any protection. At the end of this period, about 95% of them are recognized as minors by the judge and finally taken in charge by the ASE.
An attack that takes place in Darmanin’s xenophobic offensive
While the city of Toulouse has many vacant homes and the emergency accommodation services are saturated due to lack of sufficient resources, the town hall of Toulouse is continuing its policy ofkicking out all-out squatswhile other historic squats, places of habitation and cultural activities such as the Pum Bat and the Observatory House, are under threat.
In this context, the mayor of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Moudenc (LR), is pleased to put young people on the street: “Each time the law of the Republic regains the upper hand over illegal situations, it is good news for society (…) What I want is for the State to give itself the means, since it is its role, to carry out the obligations to leave the national territory, that is to say when someone in an illegal situation, of legal age, refuses to complete all the formalities. I believe that at that time, there is more than one solution, it is to send these illegals back to their country and that is the role of the State.“As a good watchdog of the government, having supported Macron and spent the last five years begging the Minister of the Interior to obtain more means of repression in Toulouse, Moudenc places himself in the right line of the xenophobic offensive led by Darmanin
Faced with this reactionary offensive in a context of crisis, when a day of national interprofessional strike will take place on September 29, political and trade union organizations must build effective solidarity between workers with and without papers, demand the regularization of the latter and ask for the regularization of undocumented migrants the requisition of empty housing to accommodate the most precarious people!
Participate in the support fund for 150 MIE