Mayors on the outskirts of France claim Paris is clearing the streets of homeless people before the Olympics this summer.

Mayors in the suburbs and small-town France are getting increasingly angry about the transfer of migrants from the capital to their local communities, writes France24.

Serge Grouard, the right-wing mayor of Orleans, southwest of Paris, complained this week of the arrival of up to 500 homeless migrants in his city – which has about 115,000 inhabitants.

– It has been proven that every three weeks a bus arrives in Orleans from Paris, with between 35-50 people on board, he says and adds that the rumors say that it is to “clean up” the capital before the Olympics in July and August .

According to Grouard, they are offered a three-week hotel stay at the expense of the French state, but are then left to fend for themselves.

More than 70 French charities asked in November 2023 that the capital must not destroy the lives of homeless people as it prepares for the Olympics, RFI reported.

– The social clean-up on the streets of Paris has already begun, said Paul Alauzy, spokesman for the organization “The Back of the Medal”.

France24 writes that Paris has long been a magnet for asylum seekers and migrants, mainly from Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. The demand for housing is far greater than the supply.

Therefore, informal tent camps have appeared under bridges or other places where possible. These are regularly demolished by the police, writes France 24 and claims that the government’s policy is to move them out of Paris and to other places in the country.

The moves to Orleans were not linked to the Paris Olympics, the state’s regional security office said in a statement.

– We have not been consulted, says the deputy prefect in Strasbourg, Floriane Varieras, to the AFP news agency.

– I agree with the mayor of Orleans that it is quite unclear what is happening.

Insidethegames.biz writes that both during the Rio Olympics in 2016 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, these big cities were “cleaned up”.

France24 writes that the mayor of Lavaur, a small town near Toulouse in southwestern France, sent a public letter in January in which he condemned the policy of moving migrants around the country as “irresponsible” and “dangerous”. He believed that the policy was designed “to make Paris as presentable as possible and more controllable before the Olympics”.

President Emmanuel Macron has supported the idea of ​​spreading asylum seekers and refugees around the country. But right-wing politicians have condemned the policy, accusing Macron of pushing poverty and crime to the fringes.