“It’s a powder, it’s explosive, I resign”, one of the doctors at the Lyon detention center says
Thomas Millot had worked as a doctor at the Lyon Saint-Exupéry administrative detention center for 5 years. On December 15, 2022, he resigned and published an open letter in which he denounced a system that generated violence for both prisoners and employees.
“After 5 years of practicing medicine in an administrative detention center, I am leaving my post because it is impossible to practice my profession there”. It was with these words that Thomas Millot resigned from his job as a doctor at the reception center for undocumented migrants in Lyon Saint-Exupéry.
He observed there, distraught, his working conditions deteriorating over the years. In an open letter, the practitioner highlights the endemic violence present in this establishment completely abandoned by the public authorities.
“I went to the detention center knowing full well that I was going to do humanitarian medicine. I went there knowingly and knowing that I was going to have to provide a D system to try to find solutions to problems probably too large”, explains Thomas Millot.
But he was obviously not ready for such a situation. “I knew it was going to be difficult, but I did not expect so much abandonment from the Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL)”, underlines the practitioner, who ensures 4 mornings of medical permanence out of the 5 of the week. Responsible for organizing care on the basis of an agreement signed with the Prefecture of Lyon, the medical service is absent when it comes to bringing in a psychologist, a dentist or even an addictologist for the 140 residents of the center.
“I have been sending alerts, emails for 5 years and I have had no response. It is as if I were a kind of wart which, from time to time, hurts a little. I had no no listening.”
Thomas Millett.Former doctor at the Lyon Saint-Exupéry administrative detention center
The doctor remembers a patient who obviously broke his arm in a fight. He didn’t scream, didn’t seem paralyzed with pain. After days of postponing the appointment hoping that an escort would be free to accompany him, the doctor finally gave up. “After a while, we give up. We end up removing the plaster and we realize that it hurts less. Was it broken, wasn’t it broken, in the end, we won’t know.” he adds. A recurring problem in the service.
For its part, the Prefecture responds by recalling the permanent presence of a police officer in the center’s medical unit. “In addition, with the aim of improving working conditions, several meetings were held with the various players, whether with the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFI), the HCL and the ARC”explains Clément Coti, communication assistant for the Prefecture.
In January 2022, while working at the CRA on the other side of the airport, he was forced, with his team, to move 2 kilometers further, to a new building. The problem, the latter is integrated from scratch to make only administrative detention and expulsion, forgetting the social aspect.
“It’s a penitentiary center, no more, no less, which locks people up with a lot of security devices, with closing portcullises, with barbed wire. Everything is armored, everything is white, everything is silent, c “It was absolutely horrible. For us, it changed everything. You can’t make a prison and decide that you lock people in, close the door and that’s it.”
Thomas Millett.Former doctor at the Lyon Saint-Exupéry administrative detention center
No supervisors, no activities, the doctor regrets the old center, built in a formula 1 hotel and articulated around a courtyard and its various activities. “We organized concerts, table tennis tournaments, writing activities there. We managed to give meaning to what we were doing despite the lack of means given to us”, he adds. In the new center, the police are missing and all the infrastructures are designed by bureaucratic staff who know nothing about the reality of confinement.
“We lock up all local delinquency in the same place without any supervision”
For Thomas Millot, “this permanent promiscuity creates a very important aggressiveness and violence which influences everyone”. Undocumented migrants are left for several hours of the day in an area controlled only by surveillance cameras. No policeman, no agent is present to settle conflicts.
Or, this zone, the residents separate it with the medical services, the lawyers of Forum Réfugiés and the mediators of the OFI. Result, “there are nurses who come, who leave, who come, who leave because it is simply impossible to work in this context”, complains the doctor who for years has noticed a change in the profile of the residents of the center.
“Previously, the CRAs were used by the prefecture to carry out deportation. That is to say that once the administrative files were completed, individuals arrived at the CRA so that they could be expelled. has become a sort of delinquency adjustment variable and when there is an undocumented delinquent, the prefect decides to send him to the CRA”.
Thomas MilletFormer doctor at the Lyon Saint-Exupéry CRA
A number of residents end up being evicted, but a majority come out after a few months, without any judgment. “We lock up all the local delinquency in the same place, without any supervision, without connection, without project, without process. It’s a kind of powder keg, it’s very explosive”completed Thomas Millot before adding “our taxes are no longer really used to make remoteness, they are simply used to lock people up outside of any trial”.
The doctor contacted the Regional Health Authority, but the organization also finds itself facing a wall. “They told me quite quickly that they had absolutely no power at the CRA. It completely escapes them”, he explains. And faced with a police interlocutor who knows nothing of these issues, Thomas Millot preferred to leave.
Beyond the Prefecture, it is the legislation that must change. The last law governing the care of detainees dates from 1999. The data is in francs, detention was then 13 days against 90 today. “The thing is completely obsolete”, discovers the practitioner, now responsible for the health unit of the Villefranche-sur-Saône remand center.
For him, “the system is still extremely well locked by the Ministry of the Interior to ensure that what is happening in the center is completely obscured”.