some 3,000 “delinquent aliens” have been expelled in two years from the national territory, said Saturday, July 30 the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, visiting Lyon. “At the request of the President of the Republic, over the past two years, we have expelled 3,000 delinquent foreigners”he said during a press briefing at the Rhône prefecture, without specifying the nationalities or the alleged facts.
“This is an unprecedented increase (…) and we have to keep doing it”added the tenant of Place Beauvau, visiting the capital of Gaul to inaugurate an administrative detention center (CRA) open since January and announce the opening of a second center for the beginning of 2023, which will bring the number of places available in the agglomeration to 280.
The Minister also mentioned his wish to proceed with the return to “legislative changes” about eviction procedures. “From January, when a police officer arrests a foreigner in an irregular situation, he can put him in the CRA for three months to find a way to deport him to his country”he said.
“It’s not a minister we need”
Saturday afternoon, Mr. Darmanin conversed with residents of La Guillotière, a popular district in the center of Lyon. He also met the three police officers who had been attacked in this district on the evening of July 20, when they were trying to arrest a person suspected of theft, in the middle of a crowd who violently attacked them.
Friday evening, a BAC policeman was hit and dragged by a man on a scooter refusing to comply. The suspect, who was alcoholic, was arrested and taken into custody. The police officer has four days of temporary interruption of work.
During his visit, the minister multiplied the criticisms of the policy of the mayor of Lyon, the ecologist Grégory Doucet, in particular in terms of security. The latter, who came to the Guillotière on Friday, made it known that he would not attend the ministerial trip: “It’s not a minister we need, but more staff”, he tweeted on Friday by asking for three hundred more national police officers.
Mr. Darmanin, who proposes to meet the mayor in September, insisted that he “there were more than a hundred police officers” additional in Lyon “Since I became a minister”a “new permanent CRS” as well as “two hundred PAF police officers” (border police), which will arrive in January 2023.
Reacting in a tweet to these “new promises”Grégory Doucet stressed that he was “imperative that, this time, its commitments [de ministre] be followed up, in particular on the workforce”.