Buses have started taking the remaining asylum-seeking teenagers from the Calais refugee camp to undisclosed locations around France, as officials began the final stage of clearing the site.
Two UK Home Office workers were understood to be on each bus, taking the young people to juvenile centres across France where their applications for asylum in the UK and France were due to be processed. No details were revealed about the destinations of the buses.
The Calais prefecture had informed the camp’s last residents on Tuesday that no further applications for asylum in the UK would be dealt with in Calais. Among the camp’s remaining population most appeared to be teenagers, possibly aged between 14 and 17, although there were a handful of much younger children.
UK officials, wearing hi-vis jackets marked “Immigration Enforcement”, joined UNHCR staff as children were led on to buses shortly after 8am. Large numbers of riot police lined the road from the fenced-off area, where an estimated 1,500 people have been sleeping in repurposed shipping containers for the past week, but the first 14 buses left without incident.
By Wednesday evening 1,616 young refugees had been taken away on 38 buses. French officials said around 300 women and children would be taken from a neighbouring building on Thursday to centres around France.
Several dozen new reception centres had been opened in the past few days, set up in holiday camps, youth hostels, disused retirement homes or former military bases. Children were told where they would be going when they got on the buses. They were not given a choice about their destination, but they were allowed to stick with friends and other children from their countries of origin.
“It wasn’t easy to create these reception centres. There was some local opposition. But the idea was to split the minors into smaller groups so that they could receive more personalised attention as they pursue applications to go to the UK, or are helped to be reconnected with family elsewhere in Europe,” Steve Barbet, a spokesman for the local regional government, said. “Some may decide to stay in France. Others may decide to return to their own countries.”
French media have reported that a large number of children sent to children’s homes around France have subsequently run away to continue attempting to come to the UK illegally.
But Fabienne Buccio, the prefect of the Pas-de-Calais region and the most senior local official in charge of the operation, said she hoped that the presence of UK Home Office staff accompanying these children on the buses would convince them that their cases were being treated seriously, and would help persuade them to remain.
About 60 Home Office officials were in Calais on Wednesday morning and they were expected to remain in France, with the smaller groups of children, until the applications of all minors hoping to come to the UK were processed.
“It is important that the British are there on the buses, accompanying the minors, showing their engagement with the whole process,” Buccio said. “This is the result of long ministeral-level negotiations. This is much more personalised than the adult evacuations. The aim is to have no one left here.”
She said she expected several hundred more children to join the 300 refugee children who were taken to the UK last month.
By mid morning more than 14 buses had left, with 600 children on them. Officials hope to finish the clearance on Wednesday. The shipping containers would be removed as soon as they were empty, Buccio said.
The lack of information about where the buses were going had prompted anxiety and uncertainty among the younger residents of the camp. Just a few hours before they left, some children still thought they were being taken to England.
“Are people going to the UK?” Afsar Khan, 12, from Afghanistan, asked, still confused about the dispersal plans. His friend Wali Tajek, 16, from Kabul, who was given a different bus number, was disappointed not to be going to Britain. “My uncle lives in Halifax. He has a pizza shop. He said he will support me, but they don’t let me go,” he said. He said he left Afghanistan because his parents were both dead, and because of the Taliban.
“I had an interview a month ago. The French person said they would tell me in two weeks, but there was no answer,” he said. The period of confusion had unsettled a lot of the teenagers. “There are a lot of fights. People are always angry.”
Garbled reports of the diplomatic standoff between France and Britain over the fate of the young people had been picked up on by many but with muddled accuracy. Many had heard the French president’s request to the UK that they should accommodate all the remaining children, and assumed that this would happen.
A 16-year-old from Sudan, who was due to get on bus No 33, said he had hoped to go to the UK to try to find his brother. “We were so happy last week when we heard that the UK will take all the under-age people. We were so happy but now we are so worried. Everybody is going crazy.” He said he would get on the bus on Wednesday, but if he had another chance to go to the UK in the coming weeks he would take it.
While more than 6,000 adults and children have already left the camp to claim asylum in France, those who remain are mostly people who have a strong reason to want to go to the UK – family members or friends who are there, or they speak very good English. Charity workers have spent months explaining that remaining in France is a more sensible option (particularly for older children from Afghanistan, who risk being sent back to Afghanistan from the UK when they turn 17-and-a-half).
Volunteers who work with some of the small charities that have grown up over the past year to help look after the minors said they were taken aback by the speed of the decision to move the young people on to accommodation elsewhere in France. While there was relief that young people were being moved out of containers where water supplies were said to be inadequate, and where there was no provision of food, except charity handouts, there was also concern that there was no time to hand over details of which children needed extra support.
“There are some with learning difficulties, mental health problems, long-term health issues. We’re trying to hand over this information, but we don’t know who to pass it to, and there is so little time,” said Michael McHugh, who works with the Refugee Youth Service, an organisation part-funded by Save The Children.
Volunteers had put up a large sheet of paper on the fences around the shipping containers where refugees spent their last night in the camp, so departing asylum seekers could write messages. “We are not toys to play with. We are kids. We needs lives,” one message said. Another said: “Never give up. Going to the UK.”
A fight last night between Afghan and Eritrean teenagers had resulted in large numbers of Eritrean minors leaving the shipping containers and sleeping on the floor of the camp’s church, one of the few hand-built structures that has yet to be demolished. Four people were injured but not seriously.