French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has stated that France has deported 1,100 dangerous migrants in the last six months, including criminals and radical Islamic extremists.
Interior Minister Darmanin announced that the deportations came after a request from President Emmanuel Macron last year to list and identify all of the most dangerous foreigners in France.
“The President of the Republic asked me last summer to draw up a list of 1,100 foreigners who are either criminals, supporters of fundamentalist or Islamist Islam. We expelled them all. In six months, the 1,100 most dangerous foreigners were deported,” Darmanin said, newspaper Le Figaro reports.
Minister Darmanin went on to add that 700 foreigners who were on the Terrorist Radicalisation Prevention Report Index (FSRPT) terror watch list and the S-File watchlist were among those deported by the government in the last six months.
Last year, Darmanin stated that over a thousand illegal immigrants in France were on the FSRPT watchlist saying, “To date, 1,083 illegal aliens are registered, but they are not necessarily in France since, of these, 587 have already been expelled from the country with a ban on return, including 200 last year. For the rest, they are either in prison, in a psychiatric hospital or awaiting deportation.”
Around 20 per cent of all the people on the FSRPT watchlist are foreigners, including around 4,000 who have legal residency in France. 60 per cent of the foreigners are from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in the Maghreb region of North Africa.
Ramping up deportations has been a promise by President Macron since the start of his presidency in 2017 but despite promising a 100 per cent increase, the government has only managed a 25 per cent increase in the number of expulsions.
“There is also a difficulty that all European countries are aware of: to send back someone who came irregularly from Afghanistan, would you accept that I expel Afghans directly into a dictatorial regime called the Taliban? You would tell me that I am inhuman, and you would be right,” Darmanin said this week.
France has also had problems deporting illegals to Algeria in recent months that led to President Macron greatly decreasing the number of visas granted to Algerian nationals in retaliation for the country refusing to take back its nationals.
A reported leaked confidential internal French Interior Ministry email published this month claims that in early December the Algerian government stopped taking all forcibly deported Algerians from France.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com