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The government promised housing elsewhere. We followed the buses and found a desperate situation.
By Sarah Hurtes and Ségolène Le Stradic
Sarah Hurtes and Ségolène Le Stradic visited street camps, abandoned buildings and emergency shelters in Paris and Orléans, France. They spoke to dozens of homeless people, government officials and emergency housing providers.
The French government has put thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and sent them out of Paris ahead of 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 has promised that the Olympic Games will showcase the country’s grandeur. But the Olympic Village was built in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings.
Around the city over the past year, the police and courts have evicted roughly 5,000 people, most of them single men, according to Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior government official in Paris. City officials encourage them to board buses to cities like Lyon or Marseille.
“We were expelled because of the Olympic Games,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, from Chad, who was evicted from an abandoned cement factory near the Olympic Village. He moved to a vacant building south of Paris, from which the police evicted residents in April. A bus drove them two hours southwest to a town outside Orléans.
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“They give you a random ticket,” said Oumar Alamine, from the Central African Republic, who was on that bus. “If it’s a ticket to Orléans, you go to Orléans.”
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