On Tuesday 29th March at 6am 150 police evicted a Roma camp along the back of the Ourcq canal near Bobigny, north east of Paris. The camp had been there for two years and housed 270 people. Throughout the morning caravans which were mobile were removed and other shelters were destroyed. The mayor of Bobibny, Catherine Peyge, said that they had had no warning from the prefecture about the eviction, and denounced the “security and anti-immigration policies of the government”. 48 of the evictees moved to a plot in Bobigny, the rest were housed in a sports hall which Peyge had opened as an emergency measure.

The collective D’alliers nous sommes d’ici (Besides we are from here) is calling for a national day of mobilisation across France on 28th May against racism and government immigration policies and for the regularisation of sans papier. The littoral (coastal) collective have called for a demo in Calais from the food distribution point to the town hall.

According to railway workers, on 15th March French police requisitioned a carriage of a train to try and send 20 sans-papier back to Italy. At 9.30am a ticket inspector found 7 border police on a platform in Cannes with the sans-papiers. She asked the police if they had travel documents for everyone, they said that they did not intend to put them on board the train. However the police then boarded the two-carriage train, asked all the passengers in the front carriage to move to the back one, and then got on the front carriage with the sans-papiers. At Nice station the police told the driver and the ticket inspector that they would get off the train at Menton, as they cannot go to Italy.

Yesterday in the early evening  a fire broke out at the detention centre of Marsailles. When the firefighters arrived around 5pm, two cells on the first floor of the two storey building  were on fire. 50 detainees were evacuated and treated for smoke inhalation by medical teams on site.