1) Violence is ingrained and pervasive in immigration detention. 2) Government accounts of what happens inside detention facilities cover up the reality behind bars. 3) People with lived experience and immigrant communities are valid knowledge producers. 4) Different spokes in the machine work together to produce and resist detention. 5) Counter accounts can upend the violence of the system. The work of leading critical thinkers on the ‘prison industrial complex’, i.e., the convergence of actors and interests that profit from the prison industry has been very influential (Davis, 1995; Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 1999). In 2009, Tanya Golash Boza borrowed from the term to define ‘the immigration industrial complex’; namely, “the confluence of public and private sector interests in the criminalization of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of ‘anti-illegal’ rhetoric” (Golash-Boza 2009, 295). More recently Deanna Dadusc and Pierpaolo Mudu (2022) wrote about the ‘humanitarian industrial complex’, which describes the humanitarian organisations implicated in the control of migrants cloaked in a charity rhetoric that always responds to a crisis and is there to help. The way I conceptualise the ‘detention industrial complex’, incorporates elements from all of the above; it is a range of state institutions, NGOs, and international organisations, which have seeped into the disciplinary and repressive system of detention and through their day-to-day work they produce, normalize and legitimize the inherent violence of immigration detention, foreclosing any challenges to the system. In doing so, they actualize the essence of state power against immigration. While, the thesis is in the end a critique of the Greek state, following Micol Seigl (2018) I argue that the state cannot be the focus. ‘It is too big, too amorphous, too ghostly—there really is no there, there, after all.’ (Seigl, 2018, p. 22). This thesis utilises the police, the judiciary system, international organisations, NGOs and activist groups for that guiding role. Only by understanding their conjoined roles in detention can we fully grasp, what detention is really like. And only when we do, can we find the forms, shapes and colours to resist the system. To go back to the introductory quote, I hope this thesis is a seed towards that direction. 29