reactivated in May, one ATM machine for the whole asylum-seeker population was installed inside the hotspot, in order to prevent asylum-seekers from going to the village of Mytilini to take out cash. Thus, asylum-seekers ended up queuing for hours in front of the only available ATM machine inside the camp. When the lockdown started in Greece at the end of March, migrants who landed by boats on Greek islands were not allowed to claim asylum, as asylum applications had been suspended until 18 May. The extraordinary temporary suspension of asylum, enforced as part of the Covid-19 measures, was an extension of a decree enforced in early March in response to Turkey’s decision of letting migrants cross the Greek-Turkish border.x Greece’s was widely criticised by NGOs and human rights organisations which accused the government of infringing the right to asylum (Human Rights Watch, 2020b). Measures of migration containment were also deployed at sea, as briefly highlighted before. From March 2020 on, peculiar brightorange objects holding migrant groups were seen floating in the Aegean Sea, described by those inside as tents (Keady-Tabbal and Mann 2020). In order to prevent migrants from reaching Greek islands, the Greek coastguard had transferred them onto emergency rafts, leaving them afloat in Turkish waters. Without the ability to steer, the people inside could merely hope to be detected, rescued, and returned to Turkey by the Turkish coastguards. Over the past year, people stranded in these floating objects have become common sights in the Aegean Sea. The analytical grid of emergency politics, we suggest, does not help in fully scrutinising the containment measures enacted by the Greek government. Certainly, both deterrence and containment measures enforced by the Greek authorities in the context of the Covid-19 crisis need to be situated in a longer trajectory, before the pandemic emerged. While some measures, such as the temporary suspension of prepaid cards, occurred specifically in response to the pandemic, others are further escalations of an existing politics of deterrence and containment.xi Indeed, the Greek government had announced already in November 2019 the plan of replacing hotspots with closed pre-departure centres (Keep Taking Greece, 2019). Also, some of the new measures adopted to deter migrants from landing - such as the push-back to Turkey through floating tents - were new iterations of past measures, devised before the outbreak of Covid-19 in EUrope. However, the pandemic has worked as an accelerator and intensifier of the violent politics of migrant containment, allowing for some significant restructurings of the border regimes and transformations in security-humanitarian rationales, as described before.xii Therefore, a “pop-up governance”, defined by Evie Papada and colleagues (2019: 2) as “flexible and localised governance mechanisms that emerged in response to the migrant reception crisis”, is visibly at play in the frantic transformations of the border regime. And, yet, we suggest, its 15