For the first six months of 2009 and more specifically during the summer of 2009, in view of upcoming early elections in September and in fear of the concomitant rise of extreme right-wing parties, the government targeted public places such as metro stations, squares and specific neighbourhoods in the city centre, arresting hundreds of migrants (Triandafyllidou and Ambrosini, 2011). ‘At nights in Agios Panteleimonas, Afghans are injured. The last weeks many have been deported. Legal and illegal. At nights they create checkpoints. Whoever is arrested, is detained, deported…every day they throw them stones, they are mocked’, recounted Zafir Mohamed, an Afghan national residing in the region (Autonome Antifa, 2012, p. 37). In total 45,037 apprehensions were recorded in the mainland in 2009, far exceeding arrests at all Greece’s borders. In July, the police destroyed a makeshift migrant camp in Patras, after having arrested a large number of migrants residing there, including unaccompanied minors (Human Rights Watch, 2009; see also Human Rights Watch, 2008). According to reporting from people in the field, an unknown number of those arrested were transferred to the northern part of the country and expelled to Turkey. In the meantime, raids in areas where migrants lived or gathered began to be trivialised. In November 2008, after a number of big demonstrations, the so-called ‘indignant residents of Agios Panteleimonas’, with links to Golden Dawn, closed down the playground and blocked migrants or ‘migrant-looking’ people from accessing the square. Around the same time, these residents formed informal groups to patrol the squares of the district, where they used violence to block foreigners from accessing public spaces (Autonome Antifa, 2012). At the same time as Greece was expected to seal its borders, albeit with dubious measures, all eyes were on the type of treatment irregular migrants and asylum seekers were afforded upon arrival and in detention. In 2007, the European Court of Justice found that Greece had failed to implement the Council Directive with regard to standards for the reception of asylum seekers (Commission v. Greece). In April 2008, the UNHCR leveled a sharp criticism of Greek asylum and detention policies and recommended that other European states not return asylum seekers to Greece (UNHCR, 2008). Indeed, the Norwegian Immigration Appeals Board suspended all returns to Greece in early 2008 ‘[o]n the basis of the latest information about the possible violations of the rights of asylum seekers in Greece’ (UNHCR, 2008, p. 7). Similarly, the Swedish Migration Board suspended returns of unaccompanied children to Greece due to the practice of detaining them upon arrival and Finland announced it would suspend all transfers until it received written assurances 89