This article contributes to that emerging body of work. Starting with a general overview of the Greek immigration system, it turns to focus more narrowly on life for women migrants and detention centre staff inside Athens’ Central Holding centre. Through fieldnotes and testimonies drawn from interviews with nineteen female detainees and ten staff, this article fleshes out our understanding of the relationship between gender and border control. What are women’s needs in detention? How do those who work in the detention centre view the women they lock up? What obstacles do detainees face, as women? How do they interpret their experiences? In asking these kinds of questions, our ambition is two-fold. First we aspire to unveil the human impact of policies being implemented in response to transnational pressures from Brussels and to more local problems. Notwithstanding the legal and geographical significance of Greece to European border security and the international criticism that Greece has received regarding its responses to irregular flows, we know very little about daily life in Greek detention centres other than what we can glean from reports by NGOs and the government. Greek scholarship has mainly focused on the economic, political and socio cultural changes connected to migration processes and the development of migration policy (see, inter alia, Triandafyllidou, 2009; Skordas, 2002; Triandafyllidou and Veikou, 2002; Fakiolas, 2003; Vaiou, 2003). Second, we seek to contribute to a feminist body of literature in criminological accounts of border control regarding the salience of gender (see, also, Bosworth and Kellezi, 2013; Pickering and Cochrane, 2013; Kaufman, forthcoming; Bosworth and Slade, 2014; Bosworth, Pickering and Segrave, 2014). Although traditional accounts of migration paid little attention to gender, more critical scholarship on mobility suggests that women and men’s experiences diverge in important ways (see, for example, Gutierrez-Rodriguez, 2010; Yuval-Davis, 1997). In Greece, when female 2