Olympic Clean-Up: Paris Evicts Homeless

The French government has put thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and bundled them out of Paris before the Olympics. The immigrants said they were promised housing elsewhere; however, they ended up living on unfamiliar streets far from home or flagged for deportation.

The New York Times reports that the Olympic Village was built in one of Paris' poorest suburbs, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings.

Police and courts have evicted roughly 5,000 people, most of them single men from around the city, the NYT said, quoting Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior federal official in Paris. They have been sent off in buses to cities like Lyon or Marseille. "We were expelled because of the Olympic Games," said Mohamed Ibrahim, from Chad, who was evicted from an abandoned cement factory near the Olympic Village.

He moved to a vacant building south of Paris, from which the police evicted residents in April. A bus drove them to a town outside Orléans.