Cédric Herrou, at the origin of the recognition of the “principle of fraternity” in 2018, was arrested on Wednesday while he was traveling with volunteers and companions from his Emmaüs Roya community in the Alpes-Maritimes.
The activist broadcast a video on foreigners in France.
Contacted by AFP, the prefecture referred the matter to the Nice prosecutor's office, which did not immediately respond.
According to several leaders of the Emmaüs Roya community, in the Roya valley, along the Italian border, Cédric Herrou was in a van to go to work in the fields with three companions and two Belgian volunteers when they were stopped by mobile gendarmes for identity checks.
In police custody for “aiding the irregular movement of foreigners in France”.
These “strangers” are companions from Emmaus.
They are currently in administrative detention.
Let us show our support for their immediate release
— Cédric Herrou (@CedricHerrou) March 20, 2024
For reasons that are still unclear, the six men were arrested and taken to the Auvare police station in Nice, an hour's drive away.
The two volunteers and one of the companions, of French nationality, were released early in the evening.
The two other companions, one Gambian and the other Mauritanian, were placed in administrative detention with a view to expulsion.
Two companions in administrative detention
These two companions placed in administrative detention on Wednesday are in an irregular situation but have lived in France for a long time and are declared as companions to the prefecture as part of a regularization process, according to Emmaüs members contacted by AFP on Wednesday.
One of them lives in the community with his wife and their four children, aged 5 to 11, all of whom go to school in the valley.
Identity checks are very frequent in this border strip where migrants transiting from Italy can be subject to an immediate “refusal of entry” procedure.
Denouncing for months the multiplication of these controls, Cédric Herrou launched a call for witnesses last week and planned to file an appeal before the administrative court these days, ensuring that these measures particularly targeted black people and that they were sometimes conducted by soldiers from Operation Sentinel who are not authorized to carry out identity checks.
In an interview with AFP last week, he explained that these controls made life impossible for dozens of black people, mainly asylum seekers, who live in the Roya valley.
If contacts are cordial with the local gendarmes, the mobile gendarmes rotate every three weeks, they do not have time to learn to recognize the inhabitants of the valley and their different forms of documents, explained Cédric Herrou.