French interior minister Gerard Collomb has announced that the large makeshift migrant camps around Paris will be cleared in the very near future and slammed left-wing mayor Anne Hidalgo, calling on her to take action.
The French interior minister made his comments earlier this week in order to tackle the growing number of migrants sleeping in makeshift tent camps around the city, BFMTV reports.
Collomb and the interior ministry released a statement indicating that the migrant camps would be evacuated soon — but also called on left-wing Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to do more to stop the camps from forming so that the evacuations do not become a cyclical process.
“This situation will be repeated indefinitely if measures are not taken by the local authorities to prevent the encampments from rebuilding,” Collomb said.
The minister added that while Paris has around 40 per cent of all the asylum applications in France, the city has only two per cent of the asylum accommodations.
Hidalgo recently supported a plan by Communist Party officials in the Paris city government to take an area of the Bois de Boulogne public park and use it to house some of the estimated 2,500 migrants currently living on the streets of the French capital.
According to a report from last month, some experts claimed that as many as 500 migrants were arriving in Paris every week, including supposedly underage migrants who are said to have been terrorising residents in a neighbourhood in the north of the city.
The largest migrant camp, situated along the Canal Saint-Denis, even forced the organisers of the famous Grand Paris ten-kilometre run, which attracted 6,500 participants in 2017, to cancel the event — because it sprawled across the route of the race.
Over the past several years the main makeshift migrant camp in Paris has moved several times, from a location near the Stalingrad metro station — which saw a massive brawl in late 2016 — to Porte de la Chapelle, where Breitbart London interviewed several migrants last year during the second round of the French presidential election.