been cut off because the bills were too high. Although the room had access to natural light, there was no artificial lighting. Further, there was no glass in the windows and no heating system for the winter.’ (CPT, 2001b, p. 26). In a similar fashion in 1999, following a surge of migrant arrivals from the Middle East through the Greece-Turkey land border, two border guard stations, in Alexandroupolis and Orestiada, were set up for arresting and delivering to the relevant police station those irregularly entering Greece. In practice, people arrested crossing the border were detained there for indeterminate periods in facilities resembling ‘human dumps’ (CPT, 2001c, p.15). ‘We had them caged because there were no detention centres there yet. We had built a fence around them in order to keep them there. And for a toilet we had dug out some holes because there was nothing else’, a high-ranking police officer, who had served at the border, described to me detention at border locations in those early years. Most importantly, these facilities can hardly be described as official detention centres. Indeed, people confined there were often not formally registered. As the police officer in charge of the transitional detachments audaciously reassured the CPT delegation, ‘he reported orally all information to the Police Directorate in Alexandroupolis’ (CPT, 2001b, p. 20). A deliberate ‘informality’ which laid the ground for future practices of pushbacks with the blessings of the Ministry of Public Order. As Lena Karamanidou and Bernd Kasparek (2022), highlight in a recent article, the practice of pushbacks is an enduring feature of the Greek border regime that goes back even to the late 1980s. In his edited collection about xenophobia and racism within the Greek state apparatus, the Greek police admitted that, Dimitris Christopoulos (2014) revealed that when called to manage migrant detention spaces, they were forced to ascertain the responsibilities of the state without the necessary prerequisites and preparation. Therefore, without absolutely any education or training, scant legal or policy frameworks, or institutional structures about how to manage migrant populations and with a latent racist and right-wing extremist ideology in the DNA of the organisation, the police invoked, from its institutional memory, practices which had either ceased to exist or were, up until now, dealt with as isolated incidents; that is the severe abuse of confined populations. 73