Although this report focuses on the study of the French-Italian border, it is important to note that many of the people who decide to leave Italy to enter France do so after having spent weeks inside a refugee camp. We have collected several testimonies denouncing the living conditions inside these camps, with inadequate food, hygiene, and health services.

On March 5, 2023“Some people who were held at the Italian border police station, waiting for the Red Cross to arrive to take them to Ventimiglia, commented on the reasons why they wished to leave/escape from Italy. They were terrified of being sent back to the refugee camps, which they defined as hell on earth. They commented on the lack of good food (they were given only small portions of pasta), the lack of medical care and the unsanitary conditions in which they were living.”

Once people leave a reception camp in Italy for over three days, going back is very difficult. Most people we encountered seemed to be aware of this, which might indicate that they still preferred losing this service and trying to cross the border, rather than completing the asylum process, which may take several months and end in a negation of this status.

On Sunday April 30th a volunteer reported: “A group of women from Cote d’Ivoire exit the police station. Today, the Red Cross will not be coming as their vehicle is broken. One of the women is pregnant and has a baby who is around six months old strapped to her back. She seems eager to speak to us. She describes how her friends and herself had been staying in a refugee camp in Italy. The conditions were horrific, she reports. No diapers for her baby, nowhere to wash her clothes, 60 people crammed into a small living facility, no hot water or wifi, not enough food nor any medical services. She repeats that she is pregnant. Her health declined while she was in this camp, ‘look at my skin’ she says, ‘I am unwell.’ In such conditions, she had no choice but to leave. In such a place, her baby was not healthy nor safe. Later in the morning, we encountered three unaccompanied minors who had left a camp in Lampedusa. They reported similar unlivable conditions: scarce food, overcrowding, and lack of hygiene services. One boy tells us he had to dig through garbage to find the clothes he was wearing.”

This last testimony, in turn, illustrates the need to implement a transport system on Sundays from the Italian border to Ventimiglia. It is a 1 hour and 48 minute walk from the Border Police to the first town in Italy, Ventimiglia. On weekdays, there is a bus that takes you from the border to this village. However, on Sundays there is no bus line passing through and migrants are not allowed to walk to the Menton Garavan train station (located in France) to return to Italy. This means that on Sundays, women with babies and children, people who are sick or weakened by hunger, are forced to make the walk to this town under all weather conditions. The only option left is the Red Cross, which, on Sunday mornings, is supposed to pick up families with young children at the border so that they do not have to make the crossing.

On February 18th, 2023, a woman in her twenties reported foot pain due to a fractured bone, which prevented her from walking to Ventimiglia. Given that it was Sunday, she awaited the arrival of the Red Cross to avoid walking. Meanwhile, her brother, residing legally in Nice, promptly boarded a train from Nice and journeyed to the border with the intention of providing support and assistance. Regrettably, they were unable to locate each other at the train station, as the Red Cross van arrived and the woman decided to leave the Italian police station in it, so they missed each other. However, the arrival of the Red Cross does not happen automatically every Sunday. In theory, the Italian police are in charge of calling the Red Cross if there are people on the move with children or women with mobility difficulties. However, even under the insistence of the project's volunteers, it is sometimes difficult to enforce this precisely.

On Sunday, March 5th a volunteer reports: At nine o'clock in the morning, the Red Cross van had still not shown up. There was a family with a baby and a pregnant woman who had been waiting since eight in the morning for the Red Cross to arrive. It was preferable for them to have an automatic transport available. Together with another volunteer, we decided to ask the Italian police to call the Red Cross organization in Ventimiglia (the NGO prefers the border security agents to call) and they replied that we had to wait, and that the van would arrive later. About forty minutes later, the van still had not shown up. I had to go and insist, standing in front of the front door of the building so that the Italian police would call the Red Cross. The volunteer who answered the call told the Italian police that they could not assist that morning because they were overwhelmed. If it had not been for an independent volunteer’s car, all these vulnerable people would have had to walk all the way.


July 31st, 2020 marked the day of the shutting down of Camp Roya in Ventimiglia. This Red Cross reception center had been a haven for those in transit, having housed 800 people during the height of the humanitarian crisis. Migrants could shower, eat and pray in the camp’s facilities. While officials cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason for these closures, as of 2023, there has yet to be a new reception center in place. In September 2015, an informal “No Borders” Camp was closed, forcing migrants to find refuge in the streets. The closure of these camps has exacerbated the living conditions that migrants in Ventimiglia face daily. Cristian Papini, director of Caritas Ventimiglia, one of the largest operating aid organizations in Ventimiglia, told the press that“after the closure of the transit camp, the situation deteriorated and today public institutions are entirely absent. The people who arrive are tired, they are losing hope.” The Red Cross has requested permission to reopen its camp, but the local prefecture has continuously denied it. The specificities of PAF’s provisional border holding facility As multiple human rights organizations have noted, the current suspension of the Schengen agreement and the consequent transformation of this internal border into a de facto external one has a series of implications for practices inside the police stations’ holding facilities and practices during the pushback at large.

According to Agnes Lerolle, part of the CAFI project, ever since the suspension of Schengen in 2015, this de facto external border has allowed for systematic identity checks and for expedited readmissions (the pushback procedure that we outlined in section 2), without however upholding the rights that people should have at such borderzones, such as the “jour franc”, a day in which people who are being detained should have access to legal and medical assistance. Moreover, in this context we see a deprivation of freedom: the confinement in border police premises (PAF) during the night is not recognized formally at this borderzone. As ANAFÉ reports, this borderzone is called “mise à l’abris” (shelter), which is not formally a concept in French law. Migrants who try to cross the border and are stopped are taken to the French Station called Police Aux Frontiéres (PAF), and if their refus d’entrée is not processed in time before closing hours, they will spend the night in an informal detention center, often defined as a prison. Colomba told us that more than a “legal gray zone” it’s a “legal black hole”.

The borderzone can be qualified as such through accounts of people we have met, such as a woman from Nigeria who, on March 19th, 2023, told us how she and her family “can always cross the border because we have a French recepissé. I don’t know what happened this time but they didn’t let us through, even if they usually do thanks to the recepissé.” The woman tells us the police made her sleep at the Menton Garavan train station. A few days after, we met her again at SaveTheChildren and she added that the French police had separated her and her child from her husband, bringing her husband to sleep at PAF and letting her and her child sleep at the train station. A very similar situation was reported by a volunteer about a 33-year-old man on October 16th, 2022: He had “domiciliation” (domicile) in France, proof of residence (or residence permit - “recepissé”), but he was still taken by the police [whether his documents were expired or invalid is unknown]. He told us that there were “more than 50 people in the French police station that morning and the police forced them to sit even though the rooms are small and there’s no space.”

In general, this borderzone is first of all problematic regarding administration. On April 30th, we met a group of minors who told us that the Italian and French authorities did not leave them much time to express that they were not of age. Especially if the biometric data in the database shows that they are older than 18, because they were registered as soon as they arrived in a first-entry European country, the chance that police will double check this information or listen to their opinion is low. On the same day, a man from Guinea told us: “I have never spent a night in the PAF police station - I’d never do that. I took the train from Ventimiglia in the morning. The French police are much worse than the Italian police; this is of course my experience, not a general statement. At least the Italians don’t put you in prison. First, they (the French) colonized us and now this. The Italians are fine, the French are racist. I received a “refus d’entrée“; I understand what it means because I’ve seen the document before. But they didn’t explain it to me. Another man with me refused to sign it because he didn’t understand what it meant.” Because a “mise à l’abris” is not a CDA/CRA (Centro di Detenzione Amministrativa in Italian and Centre de Rétention Administrative in French, Administrative Detention Centre), no organization, government body or civilian is allowed to enter and those who are inside can’t possibly appeal to their detention there.


“In 2019, said Lerolle, EU and French MPs asked to visit the border police premises in Menton and Montgenèvre; according to European law, this should be allowed. However, France has a different law that provides a list of all detention centres that are qualified as such and can hence be accessed by public officials and organizations. Menton and Montgenèvre don’t figure in this list, so the MPs couldn’t enter. This was actually a minor success for us, because the border police detention centre had to be then defined, and having a word, a concept [mise à l’abris] is a step towards regularizing it and preventing human rights violations”. “Medici del Mondo (Medicins du Monde) and ANAFÉ have filed a request access to this place [the Police Aux Frontiéres Informal Detention Centre], said Jacopo Colomba, but the Nice Prefecture (TAR) only accorded them one pre-determined hour once a week to carry out an observation. This would not have been very representative of the situation within the PAF, so they [MSF and Anafé] did not accept this. “If a place where people are kept doesn’t formally exist under French law and nobody apart from the police can enter, then we can talk of a suspension of fundamental rights and rule of law. Colomba called the PAF detention center a “non-luogo”, a non-place. Moreover, if this is indeed treated as an external border, the facility should be complete of socio-sanitary experts, a cultural mediator, a lawyer, a translator and social workers. On March 12th, a woman from Sierra Leone we met told us: “On the 14th of February I arrived in Lampedusa, Italy. The police there were very nice. I spent three nights in Milan and two in Ventimiglia sleeping on the street. I want to go to France because that’s where my family is. I speak French, too. I arrived here [at the French police station] at 7 o’clock [pm], then they put us in a prison here [she shows, it’s next to the Italian police station], they locked us up. There is no bed, not much food. They wrote my name in a document, but they didn’t make me sign anything. They kept shouting at me, patting me down. The police in Italy, in Lampedusa, they are very nice. But the police here, especially the French police, they are not.” We received a similar account on March 12, 2023, when “a group of three migrants who had just spent the night in the Italian police station, reported they had to sleep on the floor because there wasn’t enough room for them all to sleep on the mattresses. They were given food and water.” The lack of access to healthcare is one of the main issues that characterizes Ventimiglia as a border-city and the borderzone alike; this has taken a toll on the physical and mental health of people on the move residing in Ventimiglia. In a report, Doctors Without Borders noted that the recalling of traumatic events was widespread, leading to “the repetition of mental health issues including depression, a sense of abandonment, post-traumatic symptoms, apathy, symptoms of adjustment anxiety and, in certain cases, psychosomatic problems.”