LYON - When the police came to deport Samira Babaïan and her two children, her 10-year old-son Alek hid under the bed.

Since that April morning, Alek has gotten used to hiding - parents and teachers at his Lyon school have taken turns concealing him and his brother David, 7, illegal immigrants from Azerbaijan, to keep them in the country and in school.

“Who would have imagined that in France in 2006, we are finding ourselves hiding children from the police?” said Christine Pitiot, a mother of two, as she waited for the two boys outside school one recent afternoon to take them to their latest “safe house.”

Hiding schoolchildren from the police is the newest chapter in France’s tormented immigration debate, following fatal fires in immigrant squats last summer, burning cars in rioting suburbs last November and clashes between immigrant youths and the police on Paris streets this spring.

After the autumn rioting, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who hopes to run in next year’s presidential elections on a tough law-and-order ticket, vowed to clamp down on illegal immigration, pledging to deport 25,000 people this year, compared with 20,000 in 2006 and 10,000 in 2002.

This week Sarkozy even offered to pay illegal immigrants to leave. He instructed the police across France to offer illegal immigrants €3,500, or $4,400, per couple and €1,000 per child to go, a payment that may be doubled in coming months.

But the cash does not appear to be persuading the immigrants, or the friends and colleagues who are helping them evade deportation, to change their minds.

Today, at least five children, including the Babaïans, are being concealed by teachers, parents, priests and neighbors across the country, according to the Education Without Borders Network, or RESF, an organization working with illegal immigrants. That number could rise sharply after July 4, when the school year ends - and with it an informal freeze on expelling families with children in school.

Sarkozy announced the freeze last October, after the case of two Congolese siblings who went into hiding made headlines across the country. But, as the case of the Babaïans illustrates, it was not uniformly applied.

According to the government, there are 200,000 to 400,000 illegal immigrants in France, and about 70,000 people have formally been asked to leave. As many as 50,000 children could be affected by expulsions, the RESF estimates.

It is the human drama of each child that apparently has motivated the grassroots support, which defies both the law and the opinion polls that show a growing hostility to immigration.

Many of those risking a €30,000, or $37,800, fine or five years in prison are not political activists but mothers, teachers and neighbors who gather in middle-class living rooms.

In the western city of Brest, for example, Patimat, a 6-year-old girl from Dagestan whose last name has not been made public, has been hidden for weeks by local parents, including the wives of French military officers, according to press reports. Those signing a petition demanding residency for her and her mother included members of Sarkozy’s governing center-right party, the reports said.

“We’re not revolutionaries, we are just citizens,” Pitiot said. She started helping the Babaïnans after her daughter came home saying that the police had been looking for two boys after class.

Patrick Midy, an adviser to the government’s committee for immigration control, acknowledged a certain dilemma. “In a democracy, the law has to be applied,” he said. But “obviously there is tension when the law says that a family with children is illegal and needs to be expelled.”

In Lyon’s central Croix-Rousse neighborhood, where Babaïan and her two sons are so far the only family being hidden by the local community, teachers and parents are preparing to aid another 27 families of illegal immigrants, including 63 children. Only one of the families is believed to fulfill Sarkozy’s conditions for exceptional residency papers. (The minister said last week there may be about 700 such families nationwide.)

Ask Alek and David whether they prefer school or vacation as summer looms, and both reply, in unison: “School.” For them, vacation will mean mainly keeping to their hideouts.

As they trailed Pitiot, she detailed how parents were compiling vacation dates and telephone numbers to rotate protection for what she called “high- risk” children.

Already, there is a 24-hour emergency phone number. If a parent is arrested for deportation, other parents will take the children. Alek knows the phone number by heart, and he is under instructions in an emergency to run, hide and call that number.

The Babaïans arrived last November after a seven-year odyssey that began in Azerbaijan in 1999, took them first to Russia and then in 2002 to Germany, where Samira Babaïan applied for asylum. She says she fled Azeri discrimination against ethnic Armenians, a husband who beat her and a life in poverty. Three years passed, and Germany rejected her request - in part because she had entered the country illegally, with a tourist visa on her sister’s passport. Forced back to Russia, Babaïan said she bought a fake passport before embarking on a two-day bus journey from Kaliningrad to Lyon.

But under the European Union’s Schengen border rules, an asylum seeker rejected by one member state cannot be accepted by another.

Now Babaïan hopes the community support may sway the authorities to grant residency to her family anyway.

“I feel like I have seen the best and the worst of this country,” she said. “On the one hand, the rules on immigration are so tough. On the other hand, the population is so welcoming.”

Divided among different families for a month, the Babaïans have spent the past four weeks in the same apartment, aided by a local priest. Ten parents and two teachers rotate taking the boys to and from school.

The hideout is a room with three beds and a large kitchen. Pictures of cartoon characters and French soccer players adorn the walls, as does a letter from Alek’s school soccer team to the police, asking that Alek be allowed to stay. He is the team’s captain.

Last week, in Paris, the city hall in the Fourth district organized an event in support of two Moldovan girls who face expulsion. Several schools in the French capital are on alert, with teachers and parents preparing to hide students if expulsion becomes imminent.

One recent morning, parents, children and teachers gathered outside a primary school in Paris’s northeastern 10^th district, banging pots and waving balloons in support of several children of illegal immigrants who are facing expulsion. Among the demonstrators was Maya Kojan, 21, a Georgian of Kurdish origin, whose two daughters, Milena, 4, and Madlena, 3, attend preschool. She told the principal in January that her family faced expulsion, prompting several other parents to say they were in the same situation. A support network was swiftly organized.

“I would rather hide them than take them to Georgia,” said Kojan, who said she came to France five years ago. She paid $4,000 for an 18-day journey hidden with five others in a truck. “They were born in France, they know no other country, this is their home.”

In several cities, including Paris and Lyon, local mayors of the opposition Socialist Party have organized ceremonies, in which parents become the “Republican patrons” of immigrant children, pledging to protect them. The tradition of Republican patronage, established during the French Revolution as a secular alternative to a Catholic godfather or godmother, has no legal implication but is highly symbolic in a country that reveres its Republican institutions.

Hiding children also has conjured up unwelcome memories of World War II. Many French schools have plaques noting the deportation of Jewish children during France’s collaboration with the Nazis, when some families hid Jewish children from the Vichy police.

“How can you avoid thinking about that analogy?” said Cecile Lacoin, a teacher of German and mother of three, who hid David Babaïan for two weeks in April. “Of course none of these children are sent to death camps but their lives risk being destroyed. Just because we were lucky enough to be born in France, can we close our door to those who were less fortunate?”