Conclusion For a number of years, progressive Greek governments blamed the lack of infrastructure, organisation, capital and the intrinsic pressures of its geographical position for Greece’s difficulty in managing borders and effectively dealing with migrant populations. The narratives of crises, which have been employed since 2009, only granted moral legitimacy to Greece’s continued political, legal and financial margin within Europe (Mantanika, 2014). Against this context, Greek detention policy has been based on flimsy foundations as the Greek state has managed neither to curb arrivals nor remove those migrants deemed undesirable. As Peter Andreas (2003, p. 3) points out, in the US–Mexico borderlands context, immigration enforcement measures may be ‘politically successful policy failures.’ Mainwaring and Silverman (2017) make a similar claim about the UK and Malta, arguing that detention has been used as a defense against manufactured crises, which in turn serve a state’s interests. In other words, detention in Greece may not have succeeded in its official policy aims, it has, though, been successful in other ways. First, it reasserted sovereign power and a shared national identity from which migrants are excluded (Bosworth, 2019); thus, appeasing Greek citizens, who were for years exposed to a state discourse about immigration detention as a defensive reaction to the threats posed by migration. At the same time, it reminds non-citizens of their imminent detainability and deportability (Mainwaring and Silverman, 2017). Second, effective containment on Greek soil assuaged anxieties about mass mobility coming from further north. The placards at the entrance of every detention centre in Greece advertising the finance contribution of the EU unfailingly show what is at stake here; protecting (white) Europe as a community. In the context of yet another migrant crisis, Greece soon became a space of humanitarian intervention where governmental and nongovernmental, security, humanitarian and human rights actors cooperated to respond to humanitarian crises on the ground (PallisterWilkins, 2020). In a situation of endless emergency, people on the move were kept apart and out of sight, while the ‘care’ dispensed was designed to control, filter and confine. With a floundering political leadership, unable to find solutions to anything at all, and with a downward spiralling economy and continuing pressure (and funding) from the EU to employ mechanisms of repressive immigration control, it comes as no surprise that the Syriza-led Greek government (2015-2019) succumbed to models of encampment and abandoned its humanitarian and leftist ideals that were its flagship before they were elected. 121