French students swelled the streets of Paris on Friday in response to the government’s shocking deportations of two teenage girls—a 19-year-old Armenian student and a 15-year-old Kosovar girl who was forcibly taken from a bus during a school field trip to be deported with her family. The deportations came after Manuel Valls, the interior minister of François Hollande’s Socialist government, said in a TV interview that France was “not here to welcome” the Roma minority—who often lives on the borders of large French cities. Despite expectations that the Socialist government would take a gentler approach to immigration than the hard line under conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, Valls has been an enthusiastic supporter of deporting the Roma.
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