The President of the Republicans was able to have a response to his letter to the Minister of the Interior on Wednesday. Eric Ciotti indeed met Gérald Darmanin to discuss “the situation [migratoire] disastrous on the Franco-Italian border”.
During the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, a gymnasium in Menton had to be requisitioned to cope with the influx of minor migrants, the prefecture specifying that the “departmental council reception facilities” are in “saturation”. Since the beginning of the year, 1,202 unaccompanied minors have already arrived in the Alpes-Maritimes.
“Faced with this migratory wave, the State has a duty to act by strengthening the means of control”, affirmed in a tweet announcing this meeting Eric Ciotti, who had already written to Gérald Darmanin on the subject in the morning.
Ciotti wants a “paradigm shift”
In this letter, the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes asks “the mobilization of massive means to stop the migratory submersion in progress at the border”. The Alpes-Maritimes department “no longer has the means today to manage the large and growing flow of foreigners claiming to be unaccompanied minors”, he adds.
While the executive could put an immigration law back in the works, Eric Ciotti had also called on Tuesday for a “change of paradigm” by warning that “we will not be satisfied with lukewarm water”. Already on April 4, Eric Ciotti had met Gérald Darmanin to alert him to drug trafficking in Nice.