the inherent brutality of border control in Greece. Staff-detainee relations within detention centres in the country seem unencumbered by the usual restraints rooted in accounts of authority and legitimacy. In Greek detention sites, we see clearly how authoritarianism emerges from racist and racializing tropes, and how difficult it is to challenge or eradicate them. The following section provides a brief critical discussion on the structures of detention monitoring by, mainly, international organisations, in Greece, the primary agents that are responsible for the operation, and the institutional and legal culture within which this operation takes place. It is suggested that the key features of a regime that is based on the exhaustion of others cannot be understood without reference to how successive governments have received and deflected criticism; thus, keeping detention knitted together. The final section of this chapter follows the work of the National Preventive Mechanism in Greece, whose role is to monitor conditions inside confinement institutions and offer recommendations. The analysis draws on shadow visits to detention facilities I did with the NPM team and conversations I have had with their staff. The dilemma between independence and proximity to the government is a puzzling one for the Greek NPM and one in which independence is more often than not compromised. The chapter concludes that the pervasiveness of racism and violence inside immigration detention in Greece is a symbol of an official subculture of tolerance of Greek police’s work culture. Police officers as stakeholders in detention ‘I trust the Greek police. You are the state’ said Prime Minister, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, just before he took power in 1990. So significant was his trust, that the government, either unable or unwilling to deal with the ‘migration problem’, gave the police carte blanche to manage it in their own terms, setting the foundations for Greek police’s influential role in the governance of migration over the years and effectively modelling the later tolerance of human rights violations by law enforcement officials against immigrants. In doing so, the police took an active role in shaping policy implementation and the moral framework of migration management in Greece (Borrelli and Lindberg, 2018). Over the years, immigration detention has involved numerous social actors; formal and informal; governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental; international and local. 126