'It's hell': Teen migrants in Paris risk homelessness if they can't prove they're under 18
French law states anyone under 18 must have access to shelter and education
Standing on a small Paris street armed with a thermos of tea, biscuits and a bag of mobile phones, Sylvie Brugnon and Quentin Gauthier stop several young men heading toward the French Red Cross offices a few metres away.
A pair of boys arrive, ill-dressed for the cold and shivering. They slept outside the night before.
Brugnon, 68, who is retired from working in the theatre, and Gauthier, 33, a high school teacher, are volunteers with a local migrant support group.
They ask the boys – from Mali and Guinea, respectively – their birthdates and for any identification documents they may have. It's all in preparation for the interview inside, where caseworkers will try to assess the boys' ages and determine whether they are eligible for social assistance. If the Red Cross case workers think they're over 18, they'll remain on the street.
One of the boys indicates his age with three flicks of his hand, followed by one finger: 16. Though he can't speak French, he tries. Gauthier warns him against it, telling him firmly to demand a translator as soon as he gets inside.
"It's the moment when the city will decide if they are minors or not," Gauthier tells CBC. "Some are lost and in a bad state, because they just slept in the street before the interview. They don't understand how important [the interview] is, and then, most of them are rejected."
Under French law, anyone under the age of 18 must have access to shelter and education whether they're born in France or abroad. In Paris, the Red Cross assesses whether those arriving in the city on their own are minors.
Tent cities regularly dismantled
Seventeen-year old Abdoulaye (not his real name) has been deemed an adult by the agency, but he is appealing the decision. (CBC is using pseudonyms for some of the minors in this story to protect their identities while their cases are under review.)
An aspiring professional soccer player, Abdoulaye left his native Mali, a West African country wracked by rebellion and extremist violence, and crossed the deserts of Burkina Faso and Niger before heading north to Morocco, where he boarded a boat to Spain. His 15-month journey ended when he took a bus to Paris.
Since his arrival a year ago, he has spent most of his nights in a tent outside. "It's hell," he said. "We can't sleep anywhere, because of the police."
As NGOs report a rising number of migrants and refugees in the streets, police have been dismantling the makeshift camps popping up primarily in poor and working-class neighbourhoods in the north of the city.
In November, authorities took down the sprawling camp in the bustling, multicultural area of La Chappelle where Abdoulaye had a tent. His phone, clothes, shoes and copy of the Qur'an were all lost.
It was one of dozens of camp "evacuations" carried out since 2015, according to human rights organizations, including Médécins Sans Frontières (MSF). During such operations, Paris authorities have pledged to provide shelter to those displaced, but rights groups complain there are too few spaces for the numbers in need.
Shelter spaces are invariably short-term, and after just two nights, Abdoulaye was on the street again.
He is among hundreds of young people from sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan and Syria who wander the streets of Paris because their applications for obtaining minor status were rejected.
'Completely bogus'
Many of the young migrants arrive without basic documents, such as birth certificates, which makes it difficult to prove their age. So, local authorities rely on interviews, whatever paperwork they can obtain from family overseas and, controversially, hand and wrist X-rays, which have been roundly criticized by scientists as an unreliable way of determining age.
The age-assessment system "is completely bogus," says Jean-François Martini, a legal expert with Gisti, a migrant rights organization.
"No professional in France should be able to say that after 10 minutes — or even 10 hours — of interview that he's sure he has before him a 16-and-a-half-year-old youngster or a 19-year-old. And yet, Paris's entire system rests on it!"
In its 2018 report, Like a Lottery, Human Rights Watch said the age evaluation system is "arbitrary" and "falls short of what is required by French law and violates international standards."
Neither the Département of Paris (a local administration that includes the City of Paris) nor the Red Cross would agree to an interview with CBC.
WATCH | Young migrants on the streets of Paris show off the dirty and cramped tent accommodations where they sleep:
French municipalities have had to cope with rising numbers of new arrivals and blame the federal government for not providing the resources to help them. The number of young migrants arriving in the country has at least doubled in the last few years, with more than 20,000 in care in 2018, according to the Ministry of Justice.
No figures exist for how many are deemed adults and thus ineligible for children's social assistance, but MSF estimates that number to be in the thousands. (Those over 18 can apply for asylum, but that process, too, has a high rejection rate.)
Taking a sample from the Pantin district of Paris last year, MSF found that of the 431 young people who managed to appeal the Red Cross's decision on their age, more than 57 per cent had their rejection of minor status overturned.
'Impossible to understand'
It backed up findings from a multi-agency study that revealed half of the applications rejected by the Red Cross were overturned by judges. Rights groups point to the high ratio as proof of the Red Cross's dubious methods.
"Interviews [with young migrants] are sometimes held without an interpreter and are often conducted hastily," said Corinne Torre, head of MSF's mission in France.
The group also noted that in some cases, the Red Cross refused to assess age at all on the grounds that the young person appeared to be "clearly adult."
"Everything seems to be done to demonstrate the [adulthood] of young people, when they should be treated with the benefit of the doubt," Torre said.
A lawyers group specializing in immigration affairs found hundreds of young people could not even get an interview with a Red Cross case worker or access other means of finding shelter.
Hamid, a young Afghan who has been sleeping rough in Paris, says he's "17 years and five months old."
He says when the Taliban killed his father, he fled Afghanistan, heading to Iran on foot. With the help of human traffickers, Hamid continued on through Turkey and Greece.
He has been living in a vast migrant camp of mostly men for the past four months. Straddling the "périphérique" – the highway that encircles Paris – the camp of more than 150 tents and shacks is almost a kilometre long. Large rats and mice can be seen scurrying across muddy trails and under tents.
Warming his hands over a barrel fire, Hamid says "it's impossible to understand" the Red Cross assessment system or why he was turned away. "I tell them everything! And they say, 'Go see a judge.'"
But Hamid doesn't know how to begin navigating a system in which he must fill out forms and file an appeal on his own — in a language he barely speaks.
Network of volunteers
Sylvie Brugnon and Quentin Gauthier are part of a small but active network of volunteers using social media to find shelter for young migrants, help them navigate the French bureaucracy and organize classes in everything from basic French to math and science.
When all else fails, they sometimes let the youth into their own homes for a few nights — or, in some cases, months.
One cold morning last January, Brugnon was offering tea and advice to some young migrants when she saw a frail boy emerge from the Red Cross offices, muttering to himself. Daby Fofana, whose French was weak at the time, had just been told that his explanation of how he arrived in France was not credible because it lacked detail.
Back in Mali, he says, a neighbouring family had killed the Fofanas' livestock, set fire to their crops and threatened the family. At his father's urging, Daby left with a friend from the village and trekked across Mali, Algeria and Morocco before crossing the Mediterranean.
According to the letter of refusal, the fact that he was able to do all this "showed a degree of maturity and autonomy that are at odds" with his stated age — 16. The interview lasted 15 minutes.
"I'm not going to spend another night on the street," Daby kept telling himself as he approached the front gates, oblivious to Brugnon calling out to him.
She ended up offering him a place to sleep in her fourth-floor flat in central Paris. That night, Daby didn't move, not even to go to the washroom, out of fear that he would wake Brugnon and not be invited back.
Jean-François Martini of Gisti says the problem is not budget or space but how the public views asylum seekers.
"A large number of elected representatives and, I am afraid, a segment of the French population, consider that, young or not, [the migrants] are above all foreigners, and the concern of the government is to reassure the people and tell them, 'We'll control the migration flows.'"
Indeed, a November 2018 poll by French market research firm Ifop reported that seven out of 10 French people said the country can't afford to take in any more migrants.
"Institutions are increasingly hostile [to migrants], and there's a kind of trivialization of having children in the street, denied an education," Martini said.
"Faced with the deficiencies of the state and the departments, there is a kind of alternative system of protection being set up, alongside the official one."
Clothes for the needy
On a damp night in the north end of Paris, about 40 people mainly from West Africa and Afghanistan are gathered at a street corner, waiting to speak to volunteers from the migrant aid association Utopia 56.
A half-dozen teenage boys are gathered around volunteer Léopold Hanczy, who takes note of what they need: socks, trousers, hats.
"Is that all?" he asks.
The boys are reluctant to ask for more. "A coat, as well," one of them ventures. None of them has one as winter sets in.
Hanczy and his colleague Leetha Small head back to the warehouse, hoping there are enough clothes to meet demand. As they emerge, a dozen teenage boys are waiting outside, boisterous as they call dibs on slim-fit jeans and trendy toques.
Among them is Sekou, a tall, lanky 16-year-old from rural Mali who rarely stops smiling. He, too, has moved from camp to camp, and his face is starting to bear the scars of months of sleeping rough.
Like the others, his daily routine revolves around distribution points and facilities' opening hours. After a shower in the free public baths, Sekou and his friends walk a half-hour south to Stalingrad Quarter to line up for breakfast.
On Thursdays and Fridays, some of them attend French class at a nearby library. Otherwise, they kill the time as best they can, walking the streets, trying to stay warm and dry and searching for somewhere to hang out where they won't be kicked out.
A kind of purgatory
In December, after a nine-month wait, news of Daby's appeal finally arrived.
Brugnon was over the moon. "I read it one time, two times, three times, and realized he was accepted as a minor!"
"I'm so happy," said Daby. "But you can see that I'm 16 years old! What they were saying was that I was lying. And yet they rely on bone X-rays – which showed that my friend's teeth were 21 years old, [but] his hand was only 16!"
Now, Daby is looked after by social services and starts high school in Paris this coming week.
Meanwhile, Abdoulaye remains homeless as he awaits news of his appeal. He has begun to spend nights in a hotel booked for him by the local authorities but must vacate his room during the day.
He has no money, and in his efforts to dodge the cold, Abdoulaye was caught in the subway without a ticket and kicked out.
On Thursdays and Fridays, he studies French for a few hours in the library. And he's playing soccer with a local club, a step toward fulfilling his dream of one day playing professionally with a European team.
As for the many others still on the street, the shacks and makeshift camps remain a kind of purgatory between the home they've left and the one they are unable to settle in.
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