By displacing responsibility for the provision of services to other actors for a number of years, successive governments have spared themselves self-condemning reactions for authorising human cruelty inside the country’s detention facilities. However, the state has always been there but has obscured its responsibility for the amount of pain caused in immigration detention in the country by hiding behind a collective instrumentality; thus, being absent in theory but orchestrating this shameful response to detained individuals in the shadows. I argue that the provision of services inside detention in Greece is one of the prime examples of the state of the politics of invisibility that successive governments wanted to enforce upon migrants in the state’s facilities. NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by an ‘efhtinovos’ (fear of responsibility) state (Herzfeld, 1992). And they are, but as I have argued, they do so in a materially inconsequential way. The sub-contracting relationships forged as a result of this have had a profound effect on NGO practices, which in the process became routinised into detached subfunctions, at the same time as funding criteria placed a heavy burden of expectations. Consequently, NGO professionals shifted their attention from the morality of what they were doing to the operational details prioritising institutional survival and maintenance, similar to other contexts (Tyler et al., 2014). They attained short-term gains by achieving the release of vulnerable individuals, ameliorating the detention conditions or by addressing the shortcomings of the guarding police force. However, their real contribution is that nonstate actors formed a sort of buffer between the police and detainees. They became the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators (Roy, 2014); thus, contributing to the version of less humans the authorities tried to create (Ticktin, 2006). These lesser humans were forced to eat their food with their hands, sleep on the floor around sewage, had no right to defend themselves against police brutality and their welfare was dependent upon other actors who doled out as aid or benevolence that which people in detention ought to have by right. The everyday violence of Greek detention shapes and challenges humanitarian purpose: it becomes constantly necessary, constantly redundant, allowed to stay at the condition of not exposing its inherent violence. Therefore, while humanitarianism worked to relieve the violence of detention, this chapter shows that instead it ‘acted as a salve for sustained racial discrimination and violence [inside detention], working if not to entirely invisibilize racial hierarchies within suffering, then to make the racial underpinnings of such suffering acceptable through supposedly universal practices of care’ (Pallister-Wilkins, 2021, p. 102). In doing so, NGO practitioners in 174