In April, the prosecutor, working with the police, opened an investigation into whether the Briançon Seven had used the rally to help immigrants enter France illegally. Although during the trial he alleged that they had shepherded in approximately 20 people—a number based on media reports from the march and videos taken by locals—his own investigation did not corroborate that number. The police were only able to confirm that one of the participants had entered the country illegally under the shield of the protesters. The defense argued that the allegation and the inflated estimate were grounded in racially profiling the demonstrators.

The defendants argued that Defend Europe was part of an ongoing hardening of police practices around the border, notably in Briançon, where officers regularly conduct identity checks at the train station, on public transportation, and around town. They maintained that their goal was not to facilitate the illegal entry of undocumented immigrants, but to protest the growing militarization of the border. “We couldn’t just let Génération Identitaire parade like that in our mountains,” Benoît Ducos, one of the defendants, testified.

The Briançon Seven are not the first to face criminal charges for assisting immigrants under the provision based on the 1938 law. In February 2017, a court convicted a farmer, Cédric Herrou, for allegedly helping immigrants reside in France illegally. But in July, France’s highest constitutional court ruled that because Herrou had acted for humanitarian purposes, charging him—even for an illegal act—would violate the French constitutional principle of fraternity. On December 12, additional charges against him were dropped on this basis.

Although Herrou was originally prosecuted under the same law as the Briançon Seven, the dropped charges were limited to facilitating residency and circulation; the humanitarian exemption does not yet apply to helping someone enter the country. In the case of the Briançon Seven, the defense argued that the progressive softening of the law should influence their sentencing, and that even if the prosecutor could prove they used the rally to bring in immigrants, the situation on both sides of the French-Italian border would have given them humanitarian reasons to do so.