Anatomy of a deportation
Timour, from Uzbekistan, was deported the day before the Olympics opening ceremony
On the morning of July 25, less than 48 hours before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Timour, a 37-year-old Uzbek, boarded a plane at Charles de Gaulle airport. He wasn’t doing so voluntarily. Dubbed a “risk to public security,” Timour was being deported to a country he hadn’t stepped foot in for nearly 20 years.
Timour was 18 when he fled his native Uzbekistan after — as he tells it — friends of his were arrested and tortured for participating in a protest movement against that country’s decades-long dictatorship. Now France was sending him back home. As tourists flooded in for the Games, the plane carrying Timour took off in the opposite direction.
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I had met Timour several weeks earlier at the Vincennes CRA (administrative retention center) on the outskirts of Paris. He had a shaved head, high cheekbones, dark eyes. His face was gaunt from the hunger strike he had started on June 20, when his asylum claim was rejected. He looked younger than 37, I thought.
Up until this point, we had been communicating by phone and through a friend of his, but his broken English and bad connections had made it challenging. So on a Saturday morning, I biked from my apartment in Montreuil across Vincennes Park, past open fields, an equestrian center and an arboretum with towering pines. I met Martin Jouvin, a jurist who was accompanying Timour and occasionally translates for him, in front of the CRA, located in a former military barracks that doubles as a police training ground. As is typical, we were given thirty minutes of visiting rights. I took notes by hand since recording was not allowed.
What surprised me was that Timour didn’t seem to want to tell me his story, about why he had fled Uzbekistan — all of that was already in his dossier, he said — but about how he had been treated in France.
But let me quickly explain how he came to be in France: After fleeing Uzbekistan, Timour had landed in Ukraine. This was 2006, well before the war, and Ukraine received many migrants from Central Asia fleeing authoritarianism and looking for economic opportunities. Timour worked odd jobs in Ukraine, and applied for asylum. (He was never granted it, he says, because of bureaucratic hold-ups.) In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Timour, like many others, migrated West — first to Poland, then to Germany where he made (another) asylum claim. When this asylum claim was rejected, in April 2022, he left for France.
In Paris, Timour sought housing assistance alongside other Ukrainian refugees. The Ukrainians were given rooms, but Timour was told that he didn’t have the right to housing. Timour ended up on the streets of Paris, sleeping in a tent at the Place Monge, in Paris’s poetic 5th arrondissement. It was the first time he had ever stayed on the streets, he told me through Martin, who translated.
For more than a year, Timour slept rough in the City of Lights. He was told by social workers that if he waited three years after his rejected asylum claim, he’d be able to reapply so he tried to stay out of trouble, and stay warm.
On June 6, he went to the prefecture to depose his asylum claim. Two weeks later, he was detained by plainclothes cops and sent to the CRA in Vincennes. His lawyer, Samy Djemaoun — who deals with deportation cases — says Timour was never told what he was suspected of, just that he represented a “grave danger to public security.”
In an expulsion arrêté, dating back to April, the prefecture claimed he was barred from the country in order to “prevent any risk that he might commit a terrorist attack or set up a terrorist network.”
Parsing fact from fiction in cases like this is difficult. Standing outside the CRA, Martin explained that it was hard to know the sorts of people Timour may have frequented while on the streets of Paris: who he might have requested assistance from and their connections to other less seemly individuals.
What I can say for sure is that what Timour told me about his experience with the French asylum system in a heightened security setting doesn’t surprise me. After deposing his asylum claim, he was questioned for eight hours and only allowed a 10-minute break and no water. It felt, he said, more like an interrogation than an interview. Then, he was sent to the CRA.
Not only did Timour express confusion at the reasons for his detention, which was never explained to him, but so did his lawyer. According to Djemaoun, the material proof of threats to public order were never delivered. He was deported “on presumed threats to public order,” and without a judge reviewing his case.
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Timour’s detention and subsequent deportation come as Paris hosts the much-awaited 2024 Summer Olympics. This mega-event, which has drawn an estimated 14 million visitors from around the world, has also provided France’s security establishment with the perfect state of exception in which to increase surveillance and policing.
According to Le Monde, more than 150 people have been placed under surveillance and house arrest in connection with the Olympics — most of them are accused, like Timour, of being a threat to public order. For the past several weeks, groups of police have patrolled the streets of Paris, making the city feel more like a cop convention than a European capital.
As I’ve written, the Olympics have been used as an excuse by the Ile-de-France region that surrounds Paris to evict more than 12,500 people from the capital: mostly refugees and migrants, many of them unhoused.
But Timour’s story shows another human side effect of the Games. Speaking to Mediapart, a social worker who accompanied Timour noted that the “reinforced security” parameters of the Olympics had led the French state to “send someone to be tortured without discernment.” Martin, the jurist who accompanied me to visit Timour, noted that France’s December 2023 immigration bill also made it easier to quickly evict people like Timour. For others, the possibility of an Obligation to Leave France (OQTF), a prefectural deportation decision, hangs over their heads like a Damoclean sword.
There’s no way to know what awaits Timour in Uzbekistan, a central Asian country nestled between Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The dictator whose repression he fled stepped down in 2016, but his mother and friends of his still receive calls from intelligence agents asking where he is.
According to his friends, Timour has been reunited with his mother, but for now I haven’t been able to contact him directly.
On Friday night, I watched on TV as a flotilla of boats made their way down the Seine carrying athletes for the Olympics Opening Ceremony. I couldn’t help but notice the boat carrying Uzbek athletes — the 138th of over 200 teams — and wonder whether the French announcers might mention Timour’s fate. But of course they didn’t.