Thus even at the time (22 December 2017) thousands of asylum seekers (10,916, specifically) remained trapped in island RICs meant to accommodate a maximum of 5,576,185 as further island decongestion stumbled upon the mainland’s dwindling capacity to accommodate both previous residents and those increasingly amassing on the islands.186 Five months on (21st of May 2018), and highlighting the ever-present deadlock, with which the ongoing policy of deterrence is intertwined, conditions at the borders are once more back to critical levels, with the islands “accommodating” 17,029 asylum seekers, of whom 13,828 in RICs under horrid conditions. 187 Yet this time around, and for the first time in years, April 2018 also saw the Greek-Turkish land borders of Evros becoming the major point of entry for asylum seekers, with arrivals nearly reaching –and, per some, exceeding188– the combined respective numbers on the islands (2,900 as opposed to 3,032),189 and in turn further inflating an explosive situation. The results? At the end of April (24 April 2018, specifically), some 1,000 Evros-based asylum seekers –amongst whom many unaccompanied children and families– remained detained in police precincts and pre-Removal Centers, under conditions similar to or worse than those described in preceding chapters, while awaiting for their initial registration to take place at the over-congested Fylakio RIC (pre-RIC detention); an increasing, yet still unknown, number of asylum seekers living fully unprotected in conditions of homelessness throughout Greece (and especially Thessaloniki), and more than 1,500 island-based asylum seekers, whose geographical restriction had already been lifted (due to their being vulnerable, for instance), all hopelessly awaiting to be transferred to proper accommodation in the mainland, where spaces have been virtually exhausted.190 In the meantime, with no indications of decreasing arrivals in the near future, as some 1,000 newcomers have arrived on the islands only within the first 10 days of May,191 it is becoming increasingly safe to argue that the first-line system of reception will, for yet another time, be unable to provide (decent) shelter to inbound refugees and asylum seekers. Could this have been averted? Arguably the matter is multifaceted, and perhaps the “wisdom” concomitant to examining an event in retrospect, to an extent diverts from the day-to-day conundrums arising in the management of such a volatile situation, some of which pertain to internal parameters (e.g. seeming resistance of some municipalities towards additional camps being built within their jurisdiction), others to external (e.g. a previously failed and currently non-existent EU relocation mechanism, amidst increasing barriers placed to family reunification in other MS), and all of which would necessitate a detailed examination that by far exceeds the scope of this report. Yet notwithstanding the multiple loci of accountability (local, national, international) for this situation, it remains a fact that no preparations for these eventualities were made, despite it being a relative certainty –as always– that irregular arrivals would increase during the spring-summer months. Instead, the excessive insistence on maintaining the island-based policy of deterrence and confinement largely guaranteed the system’s un- 54