NGO lawyer explained ‘Pakistanis in detention are left there, they are considered the underdogs of detention and are subjected to racial profiling by the police. It doesn’t matter if they have refugee claims, they will stay in detention for the maximum period, no matter their circumstances.’ (Interview, Athens, 2018). These people, it seems, were not worth fighting for. Vulnerability and, thus, eligibility to fit in asylum schemes are grounded not so much on standard operating procedures or the law, but more in unofficial encounters and negotiations between the NGOs and the police; what Cabot (2013) describes as ‘the social aesthetics of eligibility’. There are many consequences of this arrangement, whereby the migrants became entangled in nebulous frameworks of governance that, however inadvertently, effectively maintained the state of detention and the wider status quo of power relations between the police and NGOs. For those detained in remote locations who never have the chance of meeting a lawyer or other non-state actors, for example, this informal system is out of reach, leaving them confined for many months without a prospect for (early) release. The dynamics of inclusion/exclusion inherent in this practice have been informed by a ‘biopolitical racism’ (Mavelli, 2017, p. 812) that redraws the boundary between ‘valuable’ (to be released) and ‘not valuable’ (to remain in detention) lives (see also Bosworth, 2014). Indeed, the bureaucratic mechanics of these practices often enabled workers to leave those not deemed worthy behind. Devoid of power in this process, individuals are reliant on the goodwill of the state and the humanitarian intentions of non-state actors to grant or deny release (Rozakou, 2012). More broadly, even as NGO staff sought to work against the police, they also had to cultivate good enough relations to secure their institutional survival and maintenance at the expense of enabling radical change inside detention. The constitutive codependence of state and NGO relations kept the hands of civil society actors clean from getting involved in the actual messy business of detention. As Cabot (2018, p. 13) emphasises ‘the police and NGOs, while seemingly at odds, were thus mutually constitutive in that their bureaucratic structures and practices presumed, overlapped with, and reinforced each other.’ In doing so, the structural problems of the Greek detention regime remained unchallenged and the critical role of NGOs was indefinitely suspended. 166