The auditorium is packed. The children sit two to a seat, their parents beside them. Though not all understand the language, they pay careful attention to the rousing speeches. Then their surnames are called out -- Aksan, al-Amara, Avongua, Awad, Ayad, Azhar, Azed, on to Zaman, Zachihivilli, Zuheri -- and they stand up to meet those who will sponsor, help and, if it comes to it, defy the full force of the French state to hide them.
The children, recent immigrants or the children of recent immigrants, are among tens of thousands in France who are, according to the Ministry of the Interior, liable for expulsion or who will become liable when they reach the age of 18.
For the moment they are safe, but on June 30, the end of the school year, a de facto truce declared by the maverick right-wing Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy will expire. Then they will be picked up by police and immigration services and deported. Around the hall, a council building in the run-down Paris suburb of Bobigny, the children's "sponsors," all French citizens, wait to be introduced to their charges.
All over France this week similar scenes will be repeated as a national network of volunteers mobilizes. According to Jean-Michel Delabre, an activist with Education sans Frontieres, the battle is about more than just the future of several thousand youngsters.
"This is a fight for the soul of France and for the sort of society we want to live in," he said. "Do we want our country to be tolerant and multicultural? Or xenophobic and closed?"
One of the toughest battles is being fought in the port of Brest where, for months, a six-year-old Dagestani girl called Sakimat Amiralieva has been hidden from the authorities by a network of concerned local mothers.
"In an emergency, hiding the child is the only way of stopping [the expulsion procedure]," said David Rajjou, the immigration lawyer representing the girl, explaining the drastic tactics. "If a mother is separated from her child, neither can be expelled."
But the reality is brutal. Sakimat is passed clandestinely from family to family, often at night. For six weeks, for fear of surveillance by immigration services, she has not seen her mother.
Sakimat arrived in Brest in January after a five-year odyssey across Europe with her unmarried mother, who was forced to leave home after a radical new Muslim cleric had her fired from her job as a school teacher for "immorality." Whenever the prospect of forced return to Dagestan drew close, Patimat Amiralieva moved on, most recently from Germany. But Brest is, after a series of hostels and temporary shelters, the end of the road.
"Even God has forgotten about this place, but we have been tracked down here," she said earlier this month. "I just want my daughter to be safe, to live normally in a free country and choose her own future."
The network protecting Sakimat in Brest was a spontaneous initiative.
"I heard a child speaking German coming out of school and I told my daughter to go and play with her," said Catherine Walmetz, wife of a naval officer and mother of three. "When we learned of the situation we said to ourselves immediately that we had to do something. It seemed totally natural."
"To protect a child threatened with expulsion is an act of resistance against an ultra-capitalist, ultra-liberal political strategy," Eliane Assassi, a Communist politician, told the Bobigny meeting.
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