detainees and everyday contact with the authorities and other organisations offering support outside detention. On its website, the NGO prides itself that it has offered medical and psychosocial support to more than 70,000 detainees in Athens over the course of ten years. However, the figure alone cannot reflect the way this support was offered and the impact this has had on the detention system. The following will draw on my own experience as a social scientist employed by this NGO at one of Athens detention facilities in 2012, at the same time as referring to the whole system of service provision during a specific period, between 2010 and 2013, based on interviews with NGO staff that took place during my PhD research in 2017 and 2018. Foreign bodies ‘Oh fuck’, muttered a police officer when I told him that NGO Arogos would be visiting the airport detention centre every day.105 For the police, outsiders and more specifically, NGOs, are a hassle. They disrupt their established daily routines and increase their workload. ‘If we open the doors now, they are going to keep knocking on the doors all night, and we are the ones who have to deal with it, not you’ (informal conversation, 2012), Kostas, a police officer at the airport detention centre explained to me when I asked to see a detainee at the beginning of his evening shift. During my time at the centre I was often denied access to detainees by detention officers, who invoked every time force majeure situations as an excuse; ‘we don’t have enough staff’, ‘they don’t want to see you’, ‘they are sleeping’, etc. In the words of a former social worker at an island detention facility ‘You are a foreign body [as an NGO professional] and that’s how they treat you’ (interview, Athens, 2018). Such an approach hived off the police, who all too often saw themselves as protecting the country against ‘illegal immigrants’, from the humanitarians, who were considered radical left individuals offering help to the ‘other’. ‘If you care about them so much, then why don’t you take them home?’ (Diary, Elliniko detention facility, 2012), they would demand with nationalistic pride. The association of NGO workers with facilitators of ‘illegal immigration’ reinforced racialised ideas, which are legion in the police force anyway. Maria, The NGO had been visiting this centre once every two weeks on a voluntary basis but in March 2012, a new programme was about to start for six months with funding from the European Refugee Fund, including the daily presence of a social worker (myself), a psychologist and a doctor. 105 157