Aid group Revers de la Medaille criticised the operation, saying it was part of a campaign to 'make room for the beautiful Paris postcard'.
ADVERTISEMENTFrench police evicted migrants from a makeshift tent encampment next to Paris City Hall early on Tuesday, the latest clear-out of homeless people that aid groups allege is a campaign to "social cleanse" the French capital ahead of the Summer Olympics.
Officers urged the migrants to pack their tents and belongings after appearing right before dawn, and then directed them to buses to be driven to a transit centre outside the city.
Only two or three people climbed aboard the bus. Most others walked away carrying their belongings.
Police said the operation was carried out for security reasons, notably because the tent camp was near schools.
Around 100 mostly teenage boys and young men from West Africa had been living in the makeshift camp in central Paris for several weeks.
Paris-region officials told the migrants - many of them minors and in the process of seeking residency papers - that they could be housed temporarily for three weeks in the Loire-region town of Angers if they wished.
Some who declined to take the bus said they feared being isolated and abandoned in Angers, 250 kilometres southwest of Paris, once the three weeks of temporary accommodation ran out.
The latest police operation is part of a campaign of ''social cleansing'' ahead of the Games, according to Antoine de Clerck, Le Revers de la Medaille coordinator.
''Most of them will probably refuse to go to another city because if they go, they will lose their appeal to the court. So, what they do is just take their stuff and just move away and settle in another place. So that's a problem that we've seen around Paris when the Olympics is coming,'' he said.
''We call it 'nettoyage', social cleansing, as there's no proper solution that is proposed to the people to just, you know, be pushed away.''
Migrant camps are commonly dismantled every spring in France with the end of an annual winter-time "truce" that limits evictions and evacuations when the weather is cold.