In December, Moussa Sacko spent his birthday in Mali scrolling through messages from friends with whom he celebrated a year earlier on Paris' Champs-Elysees. He hasn't seen any of them since being deported from France in July.

Like Sacko, hundreds of foreign nationals previously protected because they grew up in France now face expulsion under legislation introduced last year.

Sacko was born in Mali but moved to France as a young child to treat a chronic eye condition. He spent most of his life in Montreuil, a Paris suburb.