A police vehicle in front of the Paris Police Prefecture, October 3, 2019 in Paris. – BERTRAND GUAY / AFP
The Council of Ministers decided on Wednesday to create a post of prefect delegated to immigration to the prefect of police of Paris. Its mission: to coordinate the management of particularly important migratory flows in Ile-de-France. His appointment is due to be announced in the Council of Ministers next week, with the reform due to enter into force on May 1.
This creation, which was part of the proposals contained in the white paper on internal security and was supported by Didier Lallement, had been desired in November by Gérald Darmanin as part of the “reform initiated in the fight against irregular immigration” .
Historic peak
The Ile-de-France region concentrates, according to the Paris Police Prefecture (PP), “50% of national asylum requests, 40% of national activity for the first-time issue of residence permits, 30% of ‘national activity in the fight against irregular immigration’. The prefecture processes 100,000 residence permits per year, and 50,000 users go there per month.
In 2020, a particular year due to the pandemic, out of nearly 81,000 asylum applications filed in France, 38,000 were in Ile-de-France. More specifically, asylum applications under the Dublin Protocol amounted in 2020 to 26,112 in France, including 13,672 in IDF, making this region the first in Europe in this area. A “historic peak” of nearly 6,000 requests was reached in 2019 in Paris, we point out to the PP.
Dedicated cell
Faced with this phenomenon, we explained to the police headquarters, it was necessary to create coordination, with a common framework for all the departments in the region. Regarding the fight against irregular immigration, “the most sensitive subject”, we emphasize the passage through a detention center, before a return to the border, for which until 2017, there was “an absence total equity between departments ”on access to these centers. To put an end to it, the general direction of the police force of the PP created, on an experimental basis, a dedicated unit to provide a constant legal framework in IDF, which is therefore required to continue with the immigration delegation.