The Anti-Deportation Collective

Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

2025-03-26

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In the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places.

This is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. If you’re interested in reading the rest of the book, you can back it on Kickstarter now.

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

It’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home.

“You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),¹ and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me.

“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind.

She has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.”

I shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.”

While we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train.

Our objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far.

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles² were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action:

Practical opposition to deportations.
We are not “allies” to the sans-papiers, we struggle with them out of motivations and convictions that are our own.
These motivations vary among individuals, but are in all cases rooted in anti-capitalism.
The collective is autonomous and collaborates with sans-papiers collectives that are autonomous not merely in theory, but in practice.
Decisions are made by way of general assembly.

The plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants.

After that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action.

While the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth.

Or, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline.

We anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things.

Consequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize.

We were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings.

We did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves:

“Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”³

The 21:03 to Marseille

So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective.

Nonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see.

“No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group.

Not one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists.

We’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties.

Still, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action.

I shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.”

I’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks.

“Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves.

The first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines.

The next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort.

The police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot.

But we’ve never done this.

At least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too.

The next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops.

Before I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat.

The young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported⁴ that the train

“departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.”

The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police.

“The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.”

There are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains.

A small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over.

The rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on.

Rather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers.

In front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy.

Somebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation.

Too Much and Never Enough

As we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more.

Despite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition.

What was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized.

What precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it.

Violence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will.

In regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression.

It is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it.

This renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such.

I make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence.

Faced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible?

There is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted.

I can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it.

It’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away?

What we are doing is not too much.

It’s not nearly enough.

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The 21:03 to Marseille

Too Much and Never Enough

Further Reading

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