Cheliotis and Xenakis 91 were being held in police stations and special holding facilities with a capacity of approximately 5500. As the same CPT mission discovered, however, the inadequacies of the Greek migration management infrastructure continued unabated. There still were unhygienic conditions and an ongoing dearth of medical services in the detention sites themselves, and newly released, destitute migrants were resorting to camping out in their hundreds in the public spaces of cities across Greece (CPT, 2016). In the meantime, the government’s plan to construct open migrant ‘holding centres’ was blocked by the strict curtailment of public funds as asserted under the loan agreement with the Troika. In March 2015, several high-ranking members of the government made highly publicised comments indicating that Greece might further loosen its migration procedures to allow more migrants to travel on to Western Europe, thus posing a major challenge to the EU’s Schengen and Dublin Agreements. Between April and June that year, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX) went on to report record numbers of largely unregistered migrants and refugees transiting through the Western Balkans (an increase of 663 percent compared with the same period in 2014), who had entered the EU via Greece (Nestoras, 2016). In the summer months of 2015, states along the Western Balkan route began to close their borders and erect fences in response, leaving thousands of unregistered migrants trapped at the Greek frontier with FYROM. In May 2015, the EU responded with an Agenda for Migration, under which practical emergency assistance was proposed to support the administration of irregular migration management in Greece and Italy, with €60 million allocated to boost reception capacity and healthcare across the two countries. In July, the EU agreed to accept a small increase in the number of refugees who would be resettled across the 27 member-states. But by the end of the month, 124,000 irregular migrants had arrived in Greece by sea alone, a 750 percent increase on the same period in 2014. Between 2015 and early 2016, Greece received an unprecedented influx of more than 1 million irregular migrants (Clayton, 2016). The abysmal living conditions of new arrivals led the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to classify the situation as a humanitarian emergency, in the face of which Greece’s reception capacity, infrastructure, services and registration procedures clearly fell far short of needs (Cabot, 2018; Nestoras, 2016; Spindler, 2015). The Greek government’s apparent hopes that its migration pressures might soften the EU’s stance over the punitive conditions of the Troika loan agreement came to nought. Instead, the EU put forward a proposal for a FRONTEX intervention to address the border crisis, and went on to negotiate a controversial deal with Turkey, concluded in March 2016, according to which the Turkish side would be provided with financial aid to accept back from Greece and retain migrants not passing the threshold for refugee status. This deal was then forced upon the Syriza-led government through the threat of Greece’s expulsion from the Schengen regime, which would have been a blow to the country’s tourism-reliant economy (because overseas visitors would have been required to obtain a visa to enter Greece). The EU’s agreement with Turkey was formally accepted by Greece in the form of Law 4375/2016, which transformed ‘hotspot’ reception sites into de facto closed reception facilities, laying the framework for the continuous detention of irregular migrants during the mass, expedited processing of their claims and pending their expulsion. According to Article 14 of the law, new arrivals would be subject to restrictions on freedom of movement within the premises of the centres during the