Expulsion

I will write in English so that a lot of people can read this...I'm living in Lyon, France, studying anthropology and sociology here and among others I am active in a group called Réseau Université Sans Frontières (Network University Without Borders) and we mobilize against expulsions of students without papers or visa. It seems that right now before the elections France wants to expell a number as high as possible of students, immigrants without papers,.. at most universities here people can sign up without having to present their visa (if they are not French) so even if you don't have a visa, you can very well be a student. France's stand on immigrants without papers/visa is very strict (has become so?!) and there is a lot of controls, detentions and expulsions.
Last week we, the network were informed that there was an Algerian student in detention, she had been in france for 3 years without a visa, had been a student all that time and had recently made a demand for a visa and well, since she had put her adress on there, the police had come to pick her up at her house and put her in detention...

On Friday last week she passed before two tribunals (one that would decide if she was kept in detention and the second one that would determine if the decision to expell her was cancelled or not) and the first one decided to keep her in detention and the second one decided not to cancel the decision previously made.
So we did a first vigil on monday to say that we didn't agree with this policy that we didn't want her to be expelled.. we had supportive letters from her professors, the university president, there was media coverage, television came, newpapers wrote about it, it was not bad... we were received by some members of the prefecture who told us that the law was the law, she hadn't done what was to do (apply for a visa while in Algeria before coming to France) so she needed to be expelled...
So we decided to do a second vigil on Wednesday because we figured she could only be expelled from Tuesday on because then was the earliest flight for Oran, the city she's from. But apparently the prefecture got scared. We had news that she was put on a flight to Alger on Wednesday morning at about 9 o clock.. she didn't even have time to see the part of her family who lives here..
Now she is in Oran at her sister's house and doesn't dare going to her parent's because they are old and sick, she doesn't want to shock them she says.
Here in Lyon we're all very distressed and angry, this kind of treatment is just not fair..We'll continue vigils and pressure so she canr eturn to France and finish her studies, she was doing a Masters in Linguistics, comparison of terms in molecular biology, between French, Arabic and English.
In the meantime we learnt that there are two new cases of students put in detention and under risk of expulsion.
The whole issue keeps me very much thinking about immigration, laws, papers, visas, human rights, politics,.....