Iranian activist, as related to me by one of his lawyers, is illustrative of the fixation of the authorities on this issue. Mustafa (pseudonym) was a victim of torture, well-educated with perfect English. His lungs were bleeding and he had a number of other health problems due to the torture he had suffered in Iranian prisons. When he fled, his wife, who had only one eye from having been shot, took refuge in the mountains in Kurdistan. His only concern was that she made it safely to Greece. He was detained for lack of papers. He spent one month in detention before the Asylum Service registered his asylum claim. According to the Asylum Service he could not be released after his registration because he did not have a passport, thus, his identity could not be verified. According to the police, there was a note of public order in his file because he lived in a house which the police had raided and found stolen goods. When the NGO worker offered to share with the police the hundreds of articles that she had found online about his case, they refused because they were adamant that he belonged in detention. Once releasable individuals were identified, NGO staff would appeal to the authorities either in person or via the telephone presenting all the evidence they had collected on the vulnerability and/or legal claim to asylum of the individual and thus, his/her right to release. As an NGO lawyer aptly put it ‘Before you decide on your course of action, you have to weigh the possibilities. If you address the head of the centre, the person might be released in one day. If you go through the formal road, it will take minimum 20 days.’ (Interview, Athens, 2018). This strategy, which avoids putting anything on paper, was especially designed to bypass the official process. In fact, as practitioners have revealed to me, the police would often ask them not to file formal complaints to the Ombudsman about cases, such as mothers with their children or chronically ill individuals in detention, because this would delay the process; such vulnerable cases would indeed be released in a matter of hours through the informal route. While, arguably, NGOs had devised a way with which they stretched the limits of the system for their own purposes, this practice had been shaped over the years through the conjoined efforts of NGO staff and the police’s rules and hegemonic ideas of who is a worthy subject of freedom. Such aid encounters invoked ‘normative, even stereotyped notions of race, class, gender and moralised conceptions of truth, deservingness and credibility’ (Cabot, 2018; see also Rozakou, 2012). For example, migrants coming from countries with low refugee recognition rates were rarely put forward for release. As an 165