NGO premises, anti-detention and anti-deportation campaigns and solidarity initiatives. I had informal discussions and I conducted interviews with police officers, coast guards, NGO and IGO personnel, volunteers and activists. As part of my research on the IOM AVR program, I combined participant observation at the IOM’s premises, informal conversations and formal interviews with IOM employees. Finally, I also held discussions with migrants who participated in the IOM AVR programs and police officers who collaborated with the IOM during the implementation of return operations. The IOM AVR epofeloumenoi (“beneficiaries”, as they are officially named by the IOM following the dominant humanitarian vocabulary) were either migrants detained in pre-removal detention centers or non-detained migrants who were constantly escorted by IOM employees and police officers to their departure gate. To protect the anonymity of my research participants, certain elements regarding the specific period of the research and the profiles of my interlocutors have been altered. Gaining access to the airport is extremely hard if one considers that apart from restrictions in access that researchers studying deportation more widely encounter (Maillet, Mountz and Williams, 2016), the airport is a highly securitized space (Adey 2004). This is probably one of the reasons that despite the impressive growth of the study of deportations since the 2000s (Drotbohm and Hasselberg, 2015), the infrastructures that facilitate deportations remain largely unseen. Eventually, I had the opportunity to attend more than ten ‘voluntary’ return operations that were carried out by the IOM staff and police officers and I had unhindered access to all stages of this procedure: from the airport terminals, to the final gates, the detention area4 where detained migrants were kept until they were “voluntarily” returned and the police vans that transferred detained returnees from pre-removal detention centers to the airport. I was introduced to the airport’s parallel worlds During my visits, I was introduced to the airport’s parallel worlds and their intersection with soft deportations. The IOM employees shared the airport’s secrets with me: the corners where homeless people found refuge, the extravagant rental cost of shopping space, the man who had been living in the airport for the last few months as he was unable to obtain travel documents to return to his country. Despite being a model candidate for the IOM AVR program, this man could not become its beneficiary. As the IOM employees explained to me, his case was hopeless as his country of origin— Pakistan—did not collaborate to the issuance of travel documents. The man was a noncitizen par excellence, rejected both by his country of origin and the Greek state. 4 The detention area was at the time a small room by the exit to non-Schengen destinations in the departure terminal of the airport. It must not be confused with the detention facility of the airport which, in 2013, had the reputation of being the worst in Athens (see Fili 2013).