Foreign citizens are further detained in numerous police stations and other police buildings, like border guard stations. Throughout 2021, 12,020 people were detained in official facilities and at the end of the year 2,335 people remained in custody. At the end of 2021, the total number of third-country nationals detained in police stations or other facilities countrywide was 380. Furthermore, throughout the year, the total number of unaccompanied children in administrative detention in pre-removal detention centers and police stations countrywide was 363 (Asylum Information Database, 2022). Yet, there is more. In Evros, ad hoc facilities, mainly repurposed wheat warehouses, have been used over the years as spaces for detention (Iliadi, 2015). Research has also uncovered, semiofficial places, like the Poros Facility, which has been employed as unofficial detention prior to pushbacks, given the complete absence of any registration of detention (Forensic Architecture, 2019; Karamanidou and Kasparek, 2020). Testimonial evidence collected by NGOs and research organisations suggests that detention in informal facilities prior to pushbacks is a common practice in the area.12 People have spoken about fenced yards, portacabins, warehouses, garages, and even animal pens (Karamanidou et al., 2021). The tangled assemblage of sites, where foreigners may be confined, is evident in the different names these facilities have (legally) acquired. Some are designated as ‘pre-removal’ centres, others are ‘special holding facilities’, ‘border guard stations’ adjacent to police stations, yet others are informal, known only to the police. The institutional uncertainty over those sites that are not pre-removal and the legal vacuum in which they operate, allows for arbitrary practices; people stay in police stations for months on end forgotten even by the authorities. One of the NGO lawyers I interviewed, told me that at an ad hoc visit to a police station in Athens, she discovered a Pakistani man, who had been detained there for 8 months.13 The confusion over what is detention seems to be affecting Greek monitors too. At a workshop with NGOs, the Greek National Preventive Mechanism, the police and academics in Greece in 2018, I was talking about the airport detention facility, referring to it as a detention centre. During the coffee break, a member of the Greek NPM In particular, the work of organisations like the Border Violence Monitoring Network, Forensic Architecture and Human Rights 360 have widely documented the link between detention in informal and formal facilities and pushbacks. See e.g., Border Violence Monitoring Network (2020), HumanRights360 (2022) and Mobile Info Team (n.d.). 13 Third-country nationals have always been detained for prolonged periods of time in police stations, despite constant criticism from the international community that the facilities are not suitable. Notwithstanding commitments from the Greek authorities to phase out detention in police stations, the practice has never been discontinued. According to Hellenic Police statistics, there were 380 persons in administrative detention at the end of 2021 in facilities other than pre-removal centres, of whom 35 were asylum seekers (Asylum Information Database, 2022). 12 19