FRENCH police evicted refugees from a makeshift camp in Paris before dawn today, in what migrant rights groups say is a “social cleansing” campaign to spruce up the capital for this summer’s Olympic Games.

About 30 teenage boys and young men, reportedly from west Africa, were woken before sunrise and ordered to pack their bags and tents before being moved.

“I was already scared but I am even more scared because I don’t know where to go,” 16-year-old Boubacar Traore, who fled conflict in Burkina Faso, said.

The operation came days after police carried out a large-scale eviction at France’s biggest squatter camp in a suburb south of Paris.

Aid groups say these efforts are intensifying ahead of the Olympics and that people are being sent far away from the capital instead of being offered shelter in the Paris region, where many asylum-seekers have upcoming court dates.

“The authorities want to have a clean place for the Olympics Games. They don’t want the tourists to see Paris as a city full of migrants and asylum-seekers,” Elias Hufganel, a volunteer with a group serving refugees and immigrants, said.

Police said the eviction was for security reasons because the camp was too close to a school. Buses waited to take the refugees to Besancon, 240 miles away, and promised accommodation there, but Mr Traore said he was among those who refused to go as he has an asylum hearing in Paris in two days’ time.