they worked by appealing to cultural stereotypes and norms. ‘90% of Algerians are here for crimes. How do they live? You ask them what they do and they say nothing. How do they survive? They all steal and they come here and they cry. I don’t care. They are all criminals.’, said emphatically one of the doctors after he refused to treat a guy who was allegedly falsely claiming to be Syrian. Medical and carceral power The social field in which detention is practiced is, indeed, better ‘conceptualised as a continuum that is underlined by a dominant logic, common categories, shared political subjectivities and pre-agreed lines of political actions’ (Kalir and Wissink, 2016, p. 35). This was especially true for doctors employed by the NGO to offer primary healthcare services inside detention. There were two types, the retired ones who wanted to pass their time doing something meaningful and the young, often trainee doctors, who needed the money and, in a crisis-ridden country any job would be better than none. On the part of the NGO, doctors were difficult to recruit because this did not qualify as proper medical experience. The difficulty in employing doctors, meant that many were not screened for their beliefs or even their capacity to perform their duties.114 Indeed, most of the doctors I encountered were unhappy to be there, and forged stronger relationships with the police, who were dissociated from the detainees, than with their NGO colleagues. This was reinforced by the same nationalistic frustration about the number of migrants, who are taking over our country taking advantage of our services. ‘Look at it. Just look at it. We have too many Dominicans in here. They have to go at some point, they have to get deported back to their country.’ (Fieldnotes, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2012), the NGO doctor at the Petrou Ralli centre stated, going around showing his colleagues the list of detained women at the centre. In this rhetoric, access to health services is perceived as the right of Greek citizens alone. In line with research that examines the social representations of immigrant patients held by doctors, migrants were considered either as a burden taking advantage of medical services or as uncultured individuals, placing the responsibility for their health entirely on them. Vassilis Chatzimpyros (2014; 2021) in his extensive analysis of medical provision to immigrants lists a number of social representations the doctors he interviewed drew on Adia Benton (2016) has shown how white supremacy and racial hierarchies shape everyday aspects of humanitarian practice from staff recruitment to professional expectations. 114 170