Despite the rumors that preceded its formation, French Prime Minister Michel Barnier's government did not resurrect the Immigration Ministry created when President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in 2007 and discontinued in 2010. However, at the Interior Ministry, on Tuesday, October 8, Bruno Retailleau met with the prefects representing the state in the 21 administrative departments that account for 80% of the country's deportation measures. That meeting was followed by a larger one in which all prefects listened to the interior minister list his five priorities, the first and most detailed of which was immigration.

"He said he wanted to respond to the will of the people, and that what counts is the result of the first round of the parliamentary elections," reported one of the meeting's participants, speaking on condition of anonymity, like all those who spoke about the content of these talks to Le Monde. On June 30, in the first round of the elections, the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party came out on top, before the "republican front" relegated it to third place, in the July 7 second round.

While his predecessor as interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, a former member of Retailleu's party Les Républicains (LR, right-wing), had proposed to be "mean to the mean guys and nice with the nice guys," Retailleau, hammered home his desire to reduce immigration, including legal immigration. France's issuance of residence permits has been following a sustained upward trend, driven by student, professional and humanitarian immigration.

Aware that, in the absence of a parliamentary majority, he is more free to act through executive action than through legislation, the minister announced new instructions to prefects. The first text appears to set targets for them. "He's asking prefects to report back to him, and to give him data on the rise in deportations and the drop in regularizations," explained one prefect.

On the deportations, the minister asked them to use the provisions introduced in the January 2024 immigration law, lifting a number of protections from deportation for several categories of foreigners (such as those who had arrived in France before the age of 13).

A second set of instructions will seek to address the regularization of undocumented people. It will replace 2012 instructions from former interior minister Manuel Valls which set the criteria for regularizing undocumented foreigners, even though they are applied unevenly across the country. The existing measures allow around 30,000 undocumented people to obtain a residence permit every year, on the grounds of their private and family life in France – this is notably the case for parents of children who have been in school for three years or more – or the salaried work they perform.

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