Before dawn, about 30 teenagers and young adults from West Africa, most of them minors and seeking residency papers in France, were awakened by police and told to pack up their tents and belongings.

“I was already scared, but I’m even more scared because I don’t know where to go,” said Boubacar Traore, 16, who said he fled conflict in Burkina Faso and arrived in France two months ago.

Such evictions and camp clearances of migrants happen every spring after the end of a winter “truce” during which French authorities largely halt the operations.

But aid groups working with migrants and the homeless in the Paris region say the sweeps are intensifying ahead of the Paris Olympics, scheduled for July-August 2024.

The groups say the people being evicted are being sent far from the capital, rather than being offered shelter in the Paris region, where many asylum-seekers have court dates.

“The authorities want to clean up for the Olympics,” said Elias Hufnagel, a volunteer with a group that supports refugees and migrants in the Paris camp, adding that the authorities “don’t want tourists to see Paris as a city full of migrants and asylum-seekers.”

Paris police said the operation was carried out for security reasons, notably because the camp was near schools.

The authorities offered to bus the evicted youths 400 kilometers (250 miles) southeast to Besancon, providing them with three weeks of accommodation, but most declined, fearing they would be even more isolated and with no plan after the three weeks were up.

Boubacar Traore was among those who refused to go, saying he has a hearing in Paris in two days, though he doesn’t know where he will sleep Tuesday night.

The operation came days after French police carried out a large-scale evacuation of the country’s biggest illegal migrant camp, in a former office building in the southern Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine, clearing out at least 400 migrants on April 17.

The Vitry squat, which had occupied the long-abandoned building since May 2021, had seen its population double as migrants were evicted from other squats and as the city of Paris closed numerous shelters for the homeless.

A collective called “The Other Olympics,” which brings together 80 NGOs opposed to the negative impacts of the Olympics, has for months decried “a social cleansing” of Paris and its suburbs to keep “misery, begging and solidarity out of sight.”

Already this year, French authorities cleared out a former concrete plant in Saint-Denis, near the future Olympic athletes’ village in Paris, where 500 migrants had been living, and evicted 150 people from a squat in Thiais, south of the capital.

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