Migrants who have been forced back across the Franco-Italian border have claimed French police have been treating them poorly and have even accused officers of racism.
While many in France have praised migrant transport captain Carola Rackete, including the city of Paris which gave her a medal and a large cash prize, migrants on the Franco-Italian border claim French authorities are anything but welcoming, newspaper Il Giornale reports.
The newspaper spoke to several migrants along the border including a man named Hamid who said police had forced him back across the border into Italy while insulting him saying: “When the French police understood that I am Algerian, they started insulting me in Arabic.”
“They told me ‘Fuck your mother’. They are racists,” Hamid added.
A report from the Association nationale d’assistance aux frontières pour les étrangers (National Borders Assistance for Foreigners/Anafé) also accused the police of racism stating that train “passengers are subdivided and selected on the basis of ‘external’ signs, such as skin colour, ‘smell’, clothing”.
“They ask for the documents only to people with physical traits that may suggest that they originate from African or Middle East countries,” they added.
Salvini Furious After French Confirm Their Police Dumped Migrants in Italian Town
https://t.co/Ns2Yf7Ywqc— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 16, 2018
Il Giornale spoke with a man named Daren who lives in the border town of Ventimiglia who was detained by French police simply because he looked like he might be a migrant. “I live in Ventimiglia with my family I was just going to do a concert. I’m a singer,” he said.
The reports come after the paper noted in October of last year that French police were driving across the border into Italy and dumping migrants into the town of Claviere.
At the time, populist Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini slammed the actions of French police saying: “What happened to Claviere is an unprecedented offence against our country.”
Over the weekend, Salvini wrote a letter to French interior minister Christophe Castaner, stating that Italy would no longer take in all the new migrant arrivals to Europe saying: “The choices made only in Paris and Berlin are enough, Italy is no longer willing to accept all immigrants arriving in Europe.”
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