Graduate Journal of Social Science, Volume 15, Issue 1 Introduction i In 2015, images of displaced people following desperate journeys via the Aegean and Mediterranean Sea dominated the news and the social media. The mass and social media bombarded audiences with images of overcrowded dinghies floating, capsizing or sinking, and of rescues carried out by humanitarian organisations. The massive border-crossings, the misery, suffering, screams, and even deaths at Lesvos, the North-Eastern edge of the European border, became a spectacle. The Aegean -similar to the Mediterranean Seabecame a deadly border (Albahari, 2016). Lesvos became the epicentre of the so-called “refugee crisis”. Over the course of 2015, approximately one million border crossers ii reached Europe by sea, via Greece and Italy (Clayton & Holland, 2015). Approximately 500,000 border crossers reached Europe via Lesvos (Gillespie et al., 2016), an island with a general population of 86,436 people (Hernadez, 2016). Currently, there are 6,000 border crossers indefinitely trapped on Lesvos in limbo (UNHCR, 2018). This paper is based on ethnographic research I conducted for my PhD thesis between October 2016 and June 2017 on Lesvos. In my thesis, I explore the multiple, and intersectional forms of harm and violence border crossers experience on Lesvos. In this paper, I am deploying interviews, observations and personal accounts, and critical reflections collected during my fieldwork. I argue that the refugee crisis, in terms of discourse and sequence of events, has been deliberately over-used by EU policymakers in order to govern unwanted human mobility and impose and legitimise brutal, obscene and violent politics, including the EU-Turkey Statement, the Hotspot Approach and the geographical restriction rule. I argue here that these obscene policies produce a Kafkaesque and suffocating context with enormously devastating consequences upon border crossers’ everyday lives. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on 1) the refugee crisis discourse; 2) the immobilisation of border crossers on Lesvos, the Prison Island; and 3) the racial profiling and segregation of people into penal and bureaucratic “categories” (“vulnerable/ non-vulnerable” and “delinquents”). An “Unforeseen” Crisis? Border crossings, violence, and the pain, suffering and deaths of people seeking international protection on Lesvos remain intense, enduring and traumatic lived 3 (Unformatted version, page numbers not final)