Toulouse: the town hall calls for the eviction of an informal camp of young migrants
The City filed, Monday, September 19, a request with the court, in order to expel the hundred young exiles who are camping near the courthouse. Mostly on appeal, these teenagers have been wandering around Toulouse in search of shelter since their expulsion from an nursing home at the end of August.
The wandering continues for young migrants from Toulouse. On Monday, September 19, the town hall filed a request with the city’s judicial court to request the eviction of their informal camp, near the courthouse. “This land being devoid of the necessary safety and sanitation equipment, this occupation constitutes a manifest disturbance to public order”, explains Toulouse Métropole in a press release.
Friday, during a round table organized at the prefecture of Haute-Garonne with the department, the mayor Jean-Luc Moudenc had already rejected the responsibility of these young people to the State and the department, responsible for “rehousing” these exiles for one, and competent to “take care of minors” for the other.
Problem, if most of the migrants present in the camp say they are minors, they have been declared adults by the Departmental Council, in charge of the recognition of minority. They therefore filed an appeal in court to contest this decision. But while waiting for the judge’s answer, and while the authorities reject responsibility for it, they find themselves on the street. A situation denounced by Doctors of the World, which estimates that around “96%” of them are very minors, and need protection.
>> To (re)read: In Toulouse, the uncertain future of young people “neither minors nor adults”
Statements swept aside by Jean-Luc Mondenc in the press, for whom these teenagers are “people […] in an irregular situation, illegal immigrants”. “A lot of them are fraudsters because in reality, they are adults”, he assured Toulouse News in an interview on September 12.
Psychologists to assess the minority
This Tuesday, September 20, it is precisely the problem to which the services of the State, sent on the spot, will try to respond. They will examine the situation of migrants who so wish “on a case-by-case basis”, before a possible expulsion. “The question is who is a minor,” says France3 Occitania. Experts and psychologists will determine this through a psychological analysis.
Convicted minors will be taken care of by the Departmental Council via the DDAEOMIE system, responsible for the reception of unaccompanied foreign minors. For exiles in recourse, “temporary accommodation will be offered on an exceptional basis while the request is studied [ce qui peut prendre plusieurs mois, ndlr]”, says, for his part, France Blue. Finally, if the person is recognized as an adult, they “may make an asylum application, an application for exceptional admission to stay, etc”.
The Haute-Garonne prefecture is currently taking care of “1,125 unaccompanied young people, including 439 minors and 673 young adults”. In the region, exiles are under the protection of the department until the age of 21.
Crowd movement and tear gas
The administrative imbroglio therefore persists for the hundred or so exiles who survive under canvas tents and small huts. They took possession of the premises after being evicted on August 26 from the former Ehpad des Tourelles, in which they had found refuge in February 2020.
During this expulsion, one of the exiles had been injured in the ankle, another in a state of shock had been taken to the psychiatric emergency room. Some had been slightly injured “in the movement of the crowd caused by tear gas”, Antoine Bazin, program and mobile action coordinator for Doctors of the World, told InfoMigrants.
At the end of the expulsion, the department had taken care of isolated young people whose minority had been verified by the public prosecutor, ie 10 people in total.
On September 3, these young people from West Africa, the Maghreb and Afghanistan took over a disused college in Toulouse. They were almost immediately forced to leave, and had therefore reinvested the Jules-Guesde alleys of the courthouse. “I arrived in France a year ago, I’m not yet 18. I never thought I would be treated like a criminal,” Sami, an Algerian crouching on the sidewalk, told AFP. next to a large plastic bag containing his belongings.
>> To (re)read: The “non-reception” of unaccompanied minors on the street aggravates their mental disorders
In a press release, Médecins du Monde recalls that “the consequences” of these expulsions are “multiple and violent” for the migrants. “They come on top of the previous traumas encountered on the road to exile, the loss of bearings for isolated adolescents once they arrive in France, administrative insecurity, the questioning of their own identity and their experience” . These outcasts also “damage the chances of integrating these young people into appropriate school systems”.
The NGO thus calls for “the opening of a support and accommodation system adapted to the needs of unaccompanied foreign minors excluded from the child protection system”, in appeal to the juvenile judge. The corn ? Finally allow these young people to “take care of themselves – sleep, wash, dress, eat, take care of themselves, continue their legal procedures, resume their education”. Basic needs that remain inaccessible to young people in the courthouse camp.