Hélène et Thomas Chassaing fr / en

CRA in Metropolitan France

Introduction:

From March 2012 to October 2019, (alone at first and with Helen toward the end), I made what you might call a kind of "Tour de France" by bike - 20,500 km over twenty months on the road.

The idea from the beginning was to see a bit of the country, its inhabitants, to continue the research started in Spain on agriculture a few years earlier and begin a report on energy production by way of the country's nuclear power plants for example, etc.

I also wanted to do a little documentation on the administrative detention centers listed on the official website of the French government (https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F2780) such as :

"Administrative detention makes it possible to keep in a closed place a foreigner who is the subject of an expulsion decision, pending his forcible return. Detention is decided by the administration, then possibly extended by a judge when the immediate departure of the foreigner from France is impossible. It cannot exceed 90 days (except in the case of terrorist activities). The selected foreigner has certain rights and can receive help from associations."

In Spain, among the undocumented workers in intensive agriculture and to a lesser extent in West Africa and Morocco I had heard about it. It was often in disagreeable terms, not to say traumatic. Even though I knew that without a press card or specific request from a newspaper or an institution it would be impossible for me to get inside the CRAs, we thought that it would not be without interest to photograph from the outside, as well as their immediate surroundings.


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