Chapter 3 ‘Building the Modern Greek Detention System (2010-2017)’, engages with a paradox; Greece’s mandate to secure EU’s borders at a time of severe economic crisis and the concurrent condemnation of the authorities’ practices while doing so. It shows how insistent appeals for more efficient border control have backfired as they have provided supportive cues to the authorities for more repressive measures. This, in turn, has created a humanitarian crisis inside the Greek detention system. The chapter takes us through to an almost abolitionist break in 2015, when the government announced the closure of detention facilities and then to the violent return to confinement practices in the aftermath of the humanitarian crisis of 2015. To explain how the modern Greek detention estate was built and the implication of the EU, through personnel, bordering technologies and significant funding, I use EU policy documents, national policy papers and interviews with a range of key actors, including border and detention officers, NGO personnel, lawyers and members of human rights organisations. Chapter 4 ‘Guarding and Monitoring Immigration Detention Facilities’, explores three key processes through which immigration detention in the country has been normalised and legitimised. The first is making an understaffed, underpaid, and racist police force the key stakeholder inside detention. The second process I refer to is diverting scrutiny away from responsibility and liability. Through this, the authorities have managed to create a parallel reality, where consistent condemning criticism against inhumane detention practices are discredited as untrue and attempts to hurt Greek sovereignty. The final process draws on a critique of the National Preventive Mechanism, whose role is to monitor detention facilities and prevent human rights abuses. I argue that by relying more on their affinities with the police, rather than their institutional mandate and ethics, they have unintentionally become complicit with the exclusionary qualities of the Greek detention system. Chapter 5 ‘Secrets, Silences and Complicities Between State and Non-State Actors Inside Detention’, is the most personal chapter of the thesis, drawing on my experiences as an NGO professional both inside detention and in the community. Combining my first-hand experience in the field with in-depth interviews with a number of NGO practitioners, the chapter examines the role of non-state actors in shaping the practice of immigration detention, the challenges they face, in a largely exploitative sector, and the strategies they adopt to navigate detention. In doing so, it argues that non-state actors have uncritically 33