civilized country and can’t have any more criminality. Tell me what we can do with all of them. There is no answer. We do whatever possible here and generally.’ In line with this rhetoric, detention practices, employed in the most capricious and arbitrary manner (Majcher and Flynn, 2014), remained unchallenged. The criminalisation of migrants was also tied to racist ideas about migrant ethnicity, with migrants from non-European countries deemed more other, alien, inhuman. As Minister of Public Protection, Nikos Dendias declared in 2014, ‘the migrant from the ex-Soviet Union that goes to Sweden has some kind of level. Greece gets migrants from Bangladesh, Afghanistan who have a different culture; they belong to a different world. That’s our misfortune.’ (Ekatihimerini, 2014). In this kind of political discourse, an additional argument slips in, about EU burden sharing. Such populist accounts, both appeases and enflames Greek citizens, building consensus against ‘lower quality’ immigrants. This is echoed in the literature on border control in Greece. By comparing immigrant women’s accounts of their decisions to migrate to Greece and experiences with the views of border and detention officers, in an article I co-authored with Mary Bosworth and Sharon Pickering, we showed that border control articulates and relies on racialised and gendered understandings. Drawing on their participant’s testimonies, we further argued that detainees were perceived through a racialised prism as morally and intellectually distinct from and inferior to (Greek) citizens (Bosworth et al., 2018). For example, a detention officer at Petrou Ralli detention centre claimed in response to a question about women detainees: ‘They are not able to freely move around, they can’t talk to anyone, they just come to Greece and become slaves. So, in a way in here [detention centre] they have a better life, because we feed them and provide them with accommodation’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2011). In this kind of preposterous discourse, ‘the provision of ‘shelter’ to undocumented migrants by the Greek state was considered as a marker of a civilised state (us) pitted against uncivilised masses (them)’ (Bosworth et al., 2018, p. 9), a timeless persuasive technique that helps define any issue in security terms (Karyotis, 2012). The absolute state of necessity most detainees found themselves in, was not lost on officials either. In 2013, a local court in Igoumenitsa dismissed criminal charges against 15 migrants who had escaped from long-term detention in police cells. As the judge ruled, escape was a reasonable act of escaping from humiliation and life-threating conditions to freedom (Infomobile, 2013). Detention officers, too, found this abject situation difficult to stomach. ‘Do you think we like it here?’ (Fieldnotes, airport detention facility, 2012), 109