This chapter engages with this paradox. It will explore the implications of European and national immigration policies, which created the contemporary immigration landscape around Europe and helped to significantly expand Greece’s detention industry. In doing so, it will show how insistent official and off-the-record EU appeals for greater border security and, thus, for a Europeanisation of Greek policies and practices (Andreouli et al., 2017; Mavrodi, 2005), have backfired, providing the country, instead, with supportive cues for continuing abusive practices (Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2018). As one border officer astutely put it ‘Those people, who talk about human rights, forget that this country has borders and we have to protect them.’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2011). In this line of argument, if Europe wants secure borders, then they cannot question the legitimacy of Greek border practices. Against this context, the widespread use of immigration detention from 2010 up until 2015 helped to deflect and appease a range of anxieties and frustrations, to which I will turn in the following sections (Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2018). While the previous chapter demonstrated how successive Greek governments laid the ground for a humanitarian catastrophe, this chapter will show how this catastrophe was effectively materialised throughout the country and behind bars, at what cost and with what kind of support. Taking that into account, the chapter signifies a break from the previous chapter, where Greece is presented as a parochial state at the edges of Europe left alone to deal with migratory pressure, to Greece as the centre of attention and concern. In the words of a detention officer, who had served at the land border ‘in the past there was efficiency…they [border police officers] were doing more stuff. Since Europe came into the picture and all the official eyes were on Greece, that stopped’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2011). In this statement, Andreas was referring to ‘invisible’ pushback practices regularly occurring at the land border with Turkey and related detention practices of the past, which were considered to be more effective in managing migration. However, later hyper-visible accounts of harrowing details from inside detention facilities leading to a wide range of damning critiques seem to have altered the landscape. As Andreas went on the explain, ‘when the European boss is looking, we all pretend to be gentlemen.’ However, he continued, ‘when he leaves and the door closes behind him, the real fight starts.’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2012), implying the struggles of working inside a custodial institution. Therefore, the narrative here redirects our focus from the border as an ontological object to bordering as a process of reproducing, rationalising and sustaining exclusionary 94