Police Storm Church To Remove Immigrants

In a rain of tear gas, French riot police stormed into a Paris church Friday morning and removed 300 African immigrants, including nearly 100 children, barricaded inside to resist threatened expulsion from France.

Helmeted security forces waded through a human wall of sympathizers surrounding the St. Bernard Catholic Church in a working-class and heavily ethnic district of Paris. They took hatchets to the church doors and broke through a barricade of chairs and pews held up by the protesters.

The government’s abrupt show of force to end the occupation followed an embarrassing summer-long stand-off with the Africans, who are without legal residence papers.

The crisis has been a test of the center-right government’s resolve on immigration policy, which is no less a hot button to the French electorate than to the American one.

Ten of the immigrants were in their 50th day of a hunger strike that captured the vacationing nation’s attention. Most were removed from the church on stretchers. Fellow protesters inside and crowds of Parisians outside chanted “shame” at the police as they dragged and escorted the Africans to security vehicles.

“They talk about liberty and fraternity,” said a mother of two young children inside the church, “but it doesn’t exist here.”

About 50 of the detained Africans will be put on a military plane Saturday to Mali, the former French possession where a majority of them were born, according to French officials. Others will be ushered out of France in a few days.