expanded and became a sort of hotspot-zone which includes tents and makeshift barracks in the adjacent olive grove. However, about half a mile after the last makeshift barracks, two police officers constantly monitor the road which takes to the city of Mytilene, carrying out checks on asylum-seekers and their authorisation to leave the hotspot. No more than 120 authorisations per day are given by the Greek police, and asylum-seekers need to prove that they have an appointment with their lawyers or that they are leaving for medical reasons. Thus, the discriminatory lockdown in the Greek hotspots islands is less a matter of asylum-seekers’ immobilisation than of a coexistence of containment and controlled mobility (Mountz et al. 2013). Mobility restrictions have been officially enforced for protecting both asylum-seekers and locals from Covid-19, but actually, as Doctors without Borders stress, they confine asylumseekers in the hotspot-area in order to render their presence less visible to the locals and, in so doing, “women, men and children live in cramped spaces, they need to queue for everything inside - e.g. getting food and finding out the outcome of their asylum application on the board at the entrance of the hotspot.”viii In fact, as the Legal Center Lesvos (2020) clearly pointed out in a recent report, “the prolonged lockdown ensures two things: migrants’ isolation from support services, and their removal from public view”. Together with the discriminatory lockdown enacted through forced spatial seclusion, during the pandemic, migrants on the Greek islands have been subject to multiple obstructions for accessing humanitarian services and for navigating the asylum system. Therefore, confining to protect appears to be “the formula which encapsulates the politics of containment in Covid times” and, in practice, means that “instead of being protected from exposure to the virus, asylum-seekers have been forced to share a cramped space” (AUTHOR A). Regarding the access to humanitarian services, a case in point were the disruptions asylum-seekers experienced in getting the monthly financial support provided by the UNHCR as part of the Cash Assistance Programme. This latter consists of a monthly support given to asylum-seekers and uploaded on Visa prepaid cards. Since 2017, the programme has been funded by the European Commission and managed by the UNHCR (AUTHOR A). In April 2020, prepaid cards of asylum-seekers in Lesvos were blocked for about two weeks, upon request of the Greek authorities with the justification that card beneficiaries could produce queues in front of ATM machines in Mytilini, putting themselves and locals in danger due to the risk of spreading the virus. The financial provider of the Cash Assistance, PrePaid Financial Services, stressed to one of us that “prepaid cards had been temporarily blocked in order to avoid gatherings at the ATM machines, and for disciplining asylum-seekers to behave themselves responsibly: it is a technique of control but for their own good.”ix When the cards were 14