French police evict 2,000 migrants sleeping rough in Paris

French police evicted thousands of migrants living on sidewalks in an area of northern Paris as dawn broke on Friday - many of them people who fled war or strife in countries as far away as Sudan, Eritrea and Afghanistan.

Dozens of police and white police vans moved in at around 5am to clear the area where Paris City Hall official Dominique Versini said numbers have swollen to between 2,000 and 2,500 people.

The migrants were escorted onto buses to be taken to temporary lodgings such as gymnasium buildings in Paris and areas ringing the capital. Live TV footage showed what appeared to be a peaceful evacuation.

It was the 34th police evacuation of large numbers of refugees and migrants sleeping rough in the French capital since 2015.

Hundreds of refugees and migrants arrived in the Porte de La Chapelle area of northern Paris, sleeping under road bridges and on the side of the road with almost no access to water, sanitation and food, outside Paris’s new aid centre for asylum-seekers that was opened in November.

Interior minister Gerard Collomb said earlier this week the situation was getting out of hand with more than 400 arrivals a week in the area.

"It's always the same problem," he said on Thursday. "First off you say 'I'm going to open a centre for 500 people' and next thing you know you have 3,000 or 4,000 people and you're left having to sort the problem out."

Aid workers warned that France needed to establish an efficient long-term strategy for processing and housing asylum-seekers in decent conditions rather than constantly taking emergency action at the last minute.

Many of those sleeping rough had queued each day for access to the aid centre only to find it was full. Hundreds had bedded down on the pavement outside the gates, alongside traffic-choked roads.

The numbers of refugees and migrants sleeping rough in Paris has grown after the closure last October of the Calais migrant camp – a vast makeshift shanty town near the Channel coast where thousands had lived in squalid conditions, hoping to get into Britain by stowing away on board motor vehicles entering the Channel tunnel.