This Wednesday, October 16, at the call of Utopia56 Tours, a gathering was organized in front of the premises of the Departmental Directorate of Employment, Labor and Solidarity (DDETS) to alert of the situation of dozens of young exiled minors who find themselves on the street, the authorities not fulfilling their obligation to provide shelter.
By Joséphine
An attitude of the Prefecture with variable geometry
Utopia56 Tours has been compensating for more than seven years now, without subsidies, the shortcomings of institutions in Touraine by coordinating the action of numerous citizens and volunteers to take care of the daily lives of young exiles – health, accommodation, French lessons, legal procedures, cultural and sporting activities -.
« Currently, the Utopia 56 association in Tours hosts 60 young people and supports 70. However, since the beginning of the summer we have been forced to install young people in tents. In the space of a week, three young people were refused and put back on the street by the Department of Indre et Loire. In the space of a year, 8 young girls were also put on the street by the department. For several months, if not years, we have been warning about the saturation of our solidarity accommodation and the abandonment of these young people by institutions. Due to a lack of solutions, we distribute tents to the young people who come. Symbolically, the young people decided to settle near the Departmental Council. Once again it is up to us, activists, volunteers, citizens who have the horrible task of looking these young people straight in the eyes every end of the day, to ask them to return to their shelter, their tent. and to see them arrive frozen in the morning after another night in the street ».
The DDETS closed this Wednesday afternoon
And faced with this situation, the Prefecture found nothing better than to ask the DDETS agents not to come to work this Wednesday afternoon, arguing in a lunar email of an astonishing “security measure”, precaution completely unjustified given the association’s past: no excess, no violence, no refusal to sit around the table with the authorities to move forward on urgent issues. It therefore seems that the objective of this preventive closure of the DDETS premises is that no delegation from Utopia can be received, even though this association is an essential local interlocutor. All the more essential as its action helps protect exiles while preventing them from falling prey to networks of delinquency, prostitution, slumlords or undeclared work, thus also protecting society from these scourges. Stunned, those responsible for Utopia56 Tours say they do not understand this attitude.
However, we remember that Mr. Prefect was less defensive when it came to discussing and drinking coffee at the gatherings of angry farmers a few months ago, even though they had committed damage to buildings. prefectural and represented real concerns for the integrity of the agents. It seems that the “security measures” vary depending on the demonstrators…or the government’s agenda.
The social sector, the rock in the Prefect’s rangers
In fact, relations have been strained for a year and a half between Prefect Patrice Latron, associative actors, left-wing elected officials and the DDETS.
We remember, in articles from recent months, that the Prefecture was no longer on track with regard to the accommodation of asylum seekers via the CADA (https://www.magcentre.fr/279473- alert-to-the-reception-center-for-asylum-seekers-of-tours/), and this while the government was purging the Paris region of the most precarious populations in order to make room for this “ wonderful enchanted parenthesis of the Olympics “, putting a number of small local authorities in difficulty and provoking a sort of game of musical chairs of poverty, throwing dozens of rejected asylum seekers onto the street. A phenomenon which will also be reinforced given the announcements of savings at the expense of exiles in the future budget of Michel Barnier’s right-wing unity government.
In the same dynamic (https://www.magcentre.fr/274470-explosion-du-nombre-de-gens-a-la-rue-a-tours-mais-que-fait-letat/), the Prefecture had also made a clean sweep of residence permit files, burying dozens of applications, plunging many people into great difficulties, without even having a receipt which confirms their permit application and which can cover them in the event of a police check or then allow them to initiate appeals.
Straight in its boots, the Prefecture continues its communication, displaying increases in places in the field of emergency accommodation, without assuming to remain well below the needs, in particular for the shelter of families with children young children who sleep outside. Thus, the municipality of Tours and the Metropolis regularly compensate for these shortcomings by financing overnight stays in hotels.
Idem, a few days ago, during the annual question session of the departmental advisors of Indre-et-Loire to the Prefect, the latter brushed aside all the questions on migratory subjects, returning the responsibility to the communities and associative actors, like Bruno Le Maire who lectures after having burned the fund. He assumes without qualms OQTF on exiled minors once they become adults, arguing that in any case there were doubts about their age at their arrival, somehow calling into question administrative justice decisions… Asked about the lack places in emergency accommodation? The fault of the associations which did not respond to the calls for projects. The means are not sufficient? We will offer even lower quality accommodation to increase the number of makeshift places. All this coupled with a bombastic speech on the “generous Republic”.
The alliance of the sword and the Excel spreadsheet
Moreover, this hunt for spending has now become an obsession, with all public services being suspected of being out-of-control gamblers, while the RN plays to the fullest on this paranoia, maintaining for example the myth of illegal migrants taking advantage of of the “largesse” of our health system, justifying according to the Lepenists the abolition of state medical aid (AME).
However, according to internal sources at the Tours CHRU, doctors are only doing their job, respecting the Hippocratic Oath; and social services, under pressure, have been dealing with budgetary and regulatory constraints for years:
“Frankly, we get to some completely crazy things: caregivers ask if they can intervene; if the person is covered! However, under no circumstances should the administrative situation be taken into account. The CHRU is absolutely no more flexible than elsewhere. But since the Olympics there have been a lot of movements of undocumented immigrants requiring care in hospitals on the outskirts of the Paris region. »
In short, we see that the Prefecture continues to sink little by little into the throes of bureaucracy, short-circuiting dialogue with the usual interlocutors, cutting off civil servants from the field and considering civil society and elected officials as obstacles to the accomplishment of the only thing worth doing: keeping the budget and obeying a government now under direct influence of the far right, with the promise of a new immigration law in a few months, the 119th of its kind since 1945. And this, in a context of increased internal tension between the management of the Prefecture and its agents since the latter learned in the middle of the summer by a simple email that they would no longer have supplies, training or in charge of their business travel until the end of the year. Without any other form of explanation (https://www.magcentre.fr/314776-en-indre-et-loire-letat-vous-protege-mais-en-low-cost/).
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But no matter, our devoted servants of the State at the head of the Prefecture will be there no matter what to apply the slightest requirement of a government resulting from the gathering of political parties having lost the legislative last July. Without the slightest question, a little finger on the seam of the pants, a clear conscience.
