The French government has put thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and sent them out of Paris before the Olympics. The immigrants said they were promised housing elsewhere, only to end up living on unfamiliar streets far from home or flagged for deportation.
President Emmanuel Macron of France is under pressure to showcase the country’s grandeur and has promised that the Olympic Games will do so. However, reports say the Olympic Village was built in one of Paris’ poorest suburbs, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings.
Around the city in the past year, police and courts have evicted about 5,000 people. Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior government official in Paris, said in a report that most of those were single men. City officials have reportedly been encouraging them to board buses to cities like Lyon or Marseille.
“We were expelled because of the Olympic Games,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, from Chad, who said he was evicted from an abandoned factory close to the Olympic Village. A bus drove them two hours southwest to a town outside Orléans.
“They give you a random ticket,” said Oumar Alamine, from the Central African Republic. “If it’s a ticket to Orléans, you go to Orléans.”
Officials with Macron’s government have not commented on these reports.