Paris police clear 2,700 migrants from the streets

French police on Friday evicted thousands homeless migrants living in northern Paris.

Dozens of police and white police vans moved in at around 5 a.m. local time to clear the area where the regional police said numbers have swollen to almost 2,500.

It is the second eviction since July when more than 2,700 migrants were removed.

“These illegal camps present a security and public health risk for both the occupants and local residents,” the Paris police prefect’s office said.

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The migrants came from countries including Eritrea, Sudan and Afghanistan.

They were escorted onto buses by police to be taken to temporary housing such as in Paris and areas ringing the capital.

French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said the latest action proved the system for handling migrants is “dysfunctional”.

Collomb told RTL radio the ministry and police were studying how to prevent a regrouping of migrants in Paris.

“What we want to do is to ensure that there isn’t a focal point (in Paris), but that we can welcome (the migrants) within the national asylum schemes, possibly on the outskirts of Paris,” he said. “It shows that the Parisian system has some dysfunctions.”

New President Emmanuel Macron has asked Collomb to produce a plan to accelerate processing of asylum requests.

Local authorities also report a rise in recent weeks in the number of migrants roaming the streets of the northern port city of Calais, where a sprawling illegal camp was razed to the ground last November and its inhabitants dispatched to other parts of France.

Calais, from which migrants hope to reach Britain, has come to symbolise Europe’s difficulty in dealing with a record influx of men, women and children who have fled their native countries.