CALAIS: French President Emmanuel Macron’s new government took a tough line on Calais migrants Friday, with his interior minister saying he does not want the northern port to become an “abscess.”
Making his first visit to a city which has for years been a magnet for migrants and refugees hoping to cross to Britain, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb ruled out building a reception center for asylum-seekers in Calais, saying it would only encourage more people to come.
“We’ve seen this before, it starts with a few hundred people and ends with several thousand people who we can’t manage,” Collomb said as he met with security forces, officials and aid workers in Calais.
“That’s why we don’t want a center here.”
Collomb said: “We are going to reinforce security with the arrival of two additional mobile security force units to stop any new camps from forming.”
Authorities shut down the notorious “Jungle” camp in Calais, which at its height was home to some 10,000 people living in dire conditions, last October.
But hundreds of migrants — mostly Afghans, Sudanese and Eritreans — are still at the port, clashing sporadically with police as they try every night to stow away onto trucks heading to Britain.
This week a Polish driver was killed when his truck burst into flames after hitting a roadblock, set up by migrants hoping to slow the traffic to make it easier to jump onto vehicles.
The roadblocks began reappearing in late May with a new uptick of migrants in the region — and a surge for Europe, with Italy registering more than 65,000 arrivals since January.
While the tent city of the Jungle is gone, migrants say conditions in Calais are bleaker than ever.
“There is no tap and we cannot drink, we cannot wash. There is nowhere to sleep. At night I sleep without a tent on the ‘mountain’,” said Jamal, a 24-year-old Afghan, pointing to a huge rubbish dump.
Collomb pledged Friday to present Macron with a plan for asylum reforms in the next two weeks, vowing in particular to tackle African people-smuggling networks at their root.
Eleven charities went to court on Wednesday demanding the construction of a government refugee center in Calais, deploring the miserable conditions in which migrants find themselves.
Collomb had angered aid groups with comments Thursday rejecting the proposal, saying that building such a center would be like creating an artificial festering “abcess” that would keep growing.
France takes tough line on Calais migrants
France takes tough line on Calais migrants
Lawsuit challenges Trump administration’s ending of protections for Somalis
- The lawsuit cites a series of statements Trump has made describing Somalis as “garbage” and “low IQ people” who “contribute nothing.”
BOSTON: Immigrant rights advocates filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop US President Donald Trump’s administration from next week ending legal protections that allow nearly 1,100 Somalis to live and work in the United States. The lawsuit, brought by four Somalis and two advocacy groups, challenges the US Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali immigrants, whom Trump has derided in public remarks. Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in January announced that TPS for Somalis would end on March 17, arguing that Somalia’s conditions had improved, despite fighting continuing between Somali forces and Al-Shabab militants. The plaintiffs, who include the groups African Communities Together and Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, in the lawsuit filed in Boston federal court argue the move was procedurally flawed and driven by a discriminatory, predetermined agenda.
The lawsuit cites a series of statements Trump has made describing Somalis as “garbage” and “low IQ people” who “contribute nothing.”
The plaintiffs said the administration is ending TPS for Somalia and other countries due to unconstitutional bias against non-white immigrants, not based on objective assessments of country conditions.
“The termination of TPS for Somalia is racism masking as immigration policy,” Omar Farah, executive director at the legal group Muslim Advocates, said in a statement.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment. It has previously said TPS was “never intended to be a de facto amnesty program.”
TPS is a form of humanitarian immigration protection that shields eligible migrants from deportation and allows them to work. Under Noem, DHS has moved to end TPS for a dozen countries, sparking legal challenges. The administration on Saturday announced plans to pursue an appeal at the US Supreme Court in order to end TPS for over 350,000 Haitians. It also wants the high court to allow it to end TPS for about 6,000 Syrians.
SOMALI COMMUNITY TARGETED
Somalia was first designated for TPS in 1991, with its latest extension in 2024. About 1,082 Somalis currently hold TPS, and 1,383 more have pending applications, according to DHS. Somalis in Minnesota in recent months had become a target of Trump’s immigration crackdown, with officials pointing to a fraud scandal in which many people charged come from the state’s large Somali community. The Trump administration cited those fraud allegations as a basis for a months-long immigration enforcement surge in Democratic-led Minnesota, during which about 3,000 immigration agents were deployed, spurring protests and leading to the killing of two US citizens by federal agents.
In November, Trump announced he would end TPS for Somalis in Minnesota, and a month later said he wanted them sent “back to where they came from.”
The US Department of State advises against traveling to Somalia, citing crime and civil unrest among numerous factors.
