France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, and his party Les Républicains (LR) are moving to end the decades-long monopoly on providing legal advice held by left-leaning NGOs inside migrant detention centres. A new Senate bill seeks to strip NGOs such as Cimade and France terre d’asile of their exclusive role providing legal assistance to undocumented migrants awaiting expulsion. In their place, the government wants a more neutral, accountable system without publicly funded activists obstructing its deportation policy.
Critics argue that activist lawyers file migrant appeals in large volumes, often with little legal merit. These automatic suspensions delay deportations
The bill, tabled by Les Républicains, is part of a broader crackdown. It proposes to end the closed system by which only a select few publicly funded NGOs are allowed to operate in France’s Centres de Rétention Administrative (migrant detention centres). These are closed facilities where migrants are held prior to expulsion. In practice, they often house individuals who are being expelled for specific reasons, such as having served a prison sentence for violent crime. They’re not prisons, but secure holding centres intended to prevent absconding while deportation orders are carried out. There are currently 26 across the country.
In an effort to restore neutrality in detention centres, the government has proposed transferring the responsibility for legal assistance from NGOs to the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII), a public agency under the Interior Ministry, or potentially to a neutral judicial figure such as a magistrate. The OFII currently oversees state-run support for legal migrants, asylum seekers and voluntary returns. Retailleau argues that such a shift would ensure greater impartiality. He has criticised the current system as lacking neutrality, arguing that NGOs are ‘judge and party’ in the process.
Retailleau is positioning himself to lead Les Républicains and possibly run for the presidency in 2027. Since his appointment as interior minister, he has tightened naturalisation rules and visa policies and restricted the practice of regularising undocumented migrants. The detention centre reform is the next step. It targets not only illegal immigration, but the bureaucratic ecosystem that enables it.
The rape and murder of a 19-year-old in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in September deeply affected Retailleau. He’s said he was personally shaken by the case, which involved a migrant already under an expulsion order. The migrant had previously been convicted of rape, had served his term, and was released from a detention centre before he was able to be expelled, due to the expiration of the legal detention period. When he came into office Retailleau vowed to prevent such failures, stating that he would act to stop the release of dangerous individuals whom the state is seeking to deport. His push to reform the detention centre system, tighten deportation rules, and limit legal obstruction is in response to that failure.
Retailleau has criticised the role of NGOs in filing legal appeals on behalf of detainees, arguing that their dual role as legal advisers and political advocates undermines neutrality. These filings are designed to trigger automatic delays and protections, regardless of individual merit. Migrants are routinely advised on which procedures to trigger in order to suspend deportation. Critics argue that activist lawyers file these appeals in large volumes, often with little legal merit. These automatic suspensions delay deportations and frequently result in the release of migrants once the legal detention limit is reached, currently set at 90 days. In some centres, this has become standard practice. The result is a de facto right to remain, created not by court rulings on substance, but by the procedural effects of repeated appeals.
This is not just a question of inefficiency. It is ideological. These groups do not hide their views. They oppose deportations in principle. They describe the detention system as racist and repressive. They regularly publish reports accusing the state of violating migrants’ rights. Some have links to broader activist movements that campaign for open borders. Yet they are funded, with public money, by the very government whose policies they undermine.
Retailleau has made the point that the French public has had no say in this arrangement. Detention centre contracts were never debated in Parliament. Under successive governments migration policy has been enforced in theory while quietly sabotaged in practice. The NGOs provided legal cover. Deportation orders were delayed, appealed, or ignored. Migrants learned that removal was far from certain. The result was a system whereby laws were passed by elected officials to expel illegal migrants, and a parallel legal structure achieving the exact opposite was operated by their ideological opponents.
France’s detention network processes nearly 50,000 people a year. Deportation rates remain low. Procedural delays, many of them the result of NGO legal tactics, mean that detainees are often released before any removal can take place. Retailleau has proposed raising the legal detention limit from 90 to 180 or even 210 days. But even that will not fix the problem unless the broader structure is addressed. The reform now in the Senate is not symbolic. It strikes at the core of a publicly funded lobby that has distorted immigration enforcement for decades.
The bill must still pass in both the Senate and the National Assembly before it can become law. That process will test whether the political class is serious about confronting the entrenched ecosystem of state-funded activism.
Predictably, the NGOs are fighting back. Cimadehas called the bill a ‘moral failure’. France terre d’asile warns of a collapse in legal safeguards. Their outrage is telling. They have come to see detention centre access as a right, not a responsibility. For years, they operated with no accountability, drawing down on significant public funding. Now that the system may be opened up, they fear losing their long-held monopoly and influence over legal assistance in detention centres.
NGOs involved in detention centres receive millions of euros annually through multi-year public contracts. Retailleau argues that these contracts have allowed a network of politically motivated associations to entrench themselves within the immigration bureaucracy. His reforms are aimed at reining in this system and restoring state control over a space that has been outsourced to ideological actors.
Reclaiming France’s migration bureaucracy from the NGOs won’t be easy, but Retailleau has begun the process. Legal aid is not political activism. Public money shouldn’t be used to encourage illegal migration. Deportation policy should be enforced by the state, not filtered through the worldview of a few favoured NGOs. Retailleau understands that, and so apparently do the voters. The real question is whether the political class will follow through with these changes, or retreat into the comfortable duplicity of the past.
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