fear it and grant it legitimacy, in direct extension of the legitimacy they grant to state violence’ (2018, p. 9). The inherent violence of border control in Greece was indeed unstoppable and affecting not just border crossers but also those supporting them. Getting out of detention An NGO worker described his role in service provision inside detention as ‘saving what we can’ (Interview, 2018). Acknowledging their limited independence and the fact that they could not meaningfully prevent ill-treatment and abuse by police officers nor improve living conditions, but rather simply contain and soften the blows that hit those detained, NGOs focused on a more pragmatic operational scope that was successfully encompassed in the following mantra ‘if you can’t protect them, then get them out of there’. This belief materialised in informal practices that took shape over the years. The bureaucratic ethos of police decision makers (Vidali, 2007; Christopoulos, 2014) made releases inconsistent, poorly grounded, arbitrary and at times corrupt. Following years of investigation, a network of police officers at Petrou Ralli, secret service agents, migrants and even politicians was uncovered. According to the indictment, police officers at Petrou Ralli were bribed (EUR 1,500) to secure the release of certain detained migrants (Souliotis, 2019). Furthermore, release through the legal path of judicial reviews and objections against detention was nearly impossible (see AIDA reports from 2013 to 2015), so NGO staff instead worked to influence decision making, drawing not on the structural problems of detention settings but rather focused on the individual characteristics of detainees. Similar to what Cabot (2013) has described about NGO encounters in the community, NGO workers inside detention codified migrants on a vulnerability grading scheme that allowed practitioners to assess which person it was possible or legitimate to ‘save’ (Cabot, 2013); the more vulnerabilities an individual had, the better the outcome was. The primary focus was on those whom NGO workers deemed to meet the criteria for refugee status. This strategy partly reflected the source of their funding from the European Refugee Fund but was also shaped by the reality in which refugees could be more easily presented to the authorities as ‘release worthy’. But even in these cases, the police set their own requirements by insisting they had to have a ‘public order free’ file. According to Greek law, individuals may be detained on public order grounds, i.e., when there is a previous criminal charge. The example of a Kurdish 164