Officially named ‘closed hospitality centres’, the facilities would be based on unused military sites, typically apart from urban centres and concomitant sources of assistance. They were expected to have a capacity for 30,000 people, a total that not only dwarfed previous numbers in detention but also was considerably more than the nation’s prison population. Yet, severe opposition from local communities stalled this development. A more realistic plan, communicated to the European Commission, was to establish preremoval facilities of a total capacity of 10.000 places by the first semester of 2014. Taking into account available funding and Greece’s capacity to ensure the sustainable management of detention facilities,64 the EU and Greece agreed that a capacity of 7 000 – 7 500 places in pre-removal centres would be sufficient (European Commission, 2014). Between April and September 2012, four pre-removal facilities were opened with a total capacity of 3,555, in addition to special holding facilities and police and border guard stations. While these plans were never fully carried out, the idea behind the publicised expansions was straightforward: immigration, could be eradicated through deterrence. In this view, unsubstantiated by any research evidence and willfully blind to the kinds of factors propelling people to move in the first place, ‘faced with the prospect of indefinite stay inside a Greek detention centre –often under deplorable conditions– irregular migrants will opt to return to their homelands. Once there, they will warn others and discourage new arrivals. The size of the migrant population will gradually shrink and Greece will have largely addressed irregular arrivals.’ (Triandafyllidou et al, 2014, p. 7). This simplistic view of detention as a deterrence practice places the safeguarding of Greece’s borders over any consideration of human rights; the inevitable result: a capricious, unpredictable and reactive system with significant collateral damage for individual lives. The second legitimating basis for detention was deportation. As former Minister of Citizen’s Protection, Nikos Dendias, stated: ‘Our aim is that every illegal migrant, unless the competent authorities decide that he is entitled to international protection, will be detained until he is returned to his home country’ (Ministry of Citizen Protection, 2013a). Despite this firm statement, the Greek state has managed neither to curb arrivals nor remove those migrants deemed undesirable. In fact, between 2008 and 2013, Greece issued Over the period 2008-2013, Greece was the biggest beneficiary of the Return Fund receiving around EUR 125 M plus almost EUR 5 M in emergency funding. 50% of this allocation was earmarked for the implementation of actual returns and approximately 32 % for costs related to detention facility in order to improve their conditions (Angeli et al., 2014). 64 103