The castle of Thiverval-Grignon will once again welcome several dozen refugees.
Tonight, a plane from Mayotte will land at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle.
The 195 passengers will then travel by coach to this Yvelines town which houses a specially dedicated reception center.
They will be supervised by Red Cross volunteers during their transfer before being welcomed by Emmaüs social workers.
These migrants, mostly from East Africa, had fled their country to try their luck in this French island in the Indian Ocean, in the Mozambique Channel, where almost half of the population is in an irregular situation. .
These are mainly single women and families.
The mayor wrote to her residents
Everyone will stay there until mid-March before being directed to long-term accommodation solutions in the provinces.
Nadine Gohard, the mayor (without a label) of this town of 1,100 inhabitants wrote to her constituents this morning to warn them.
She says she regrets the constrained nature of this decision, imposed by the prefecture, “without negotiation possible”.
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“I can only be surprised by the suddenness and urgency of this request, the situation in Mayotte is not new... Rest assured that I am committed to obtaining guarantees, both for well-being and security people,” she wrote.
At the end of 2022, Thiverval Castle had welcomed 200 homeless refugees.
They had stayed there for several months.
Their presence had been singled out by activists of the “Reconquest” party.
They even organized a demonstration in front of the site in February 2023.
State property, the Grignon estate includes a 17th century castle and nearly 270 hectares of agricultural land and forest.
After having hosted the AgroParisTech engineering school for a long time, it remained unoccupied after the departure of the latter and the last researchers, in November 2022.