practices to understand why and how inhumane detention practices have remained resilient to change. Drawing on interviews with a range of key actors, including border and detention officers, NGO personnel, lawyers and members of human rights organisations, as well as a review of relevant policy documents, it will delineate key moments in Greek detention strategy. The account will commence from where the previous chapter naturally stopped, in 2010, and it will take us through to the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 and the violently organised changes the EU response brought. Throughout this chapter, Greece’s detention regime is animated by European bordering technologies, significant funding and mechanisms of governance that the country was compelled to invite and accept. My account neither exculpates Greece nor Europe from a continuum of human rights violations that were often the outcome of deliberate state policy backed by significant EU funding. As this chapter will show, immigration detention is morally and operationally void. It not only lies waste to millions of Euros but also, and more importantly, destroys Europe’s narratives of itself as an ideal of progress, rationality and humanitarian values to which member states should aspire (Stierl, 2019). The political violence and the human rights violations upon which the Greek detention industry has been expanded, have also been its structural outcome. The scaffolding of a humanitarian crisis (2010-2015) ‘Greek society has surpassed its limits with regard to receiving more illegal immigrants. Greece cannot stand it anymore… The Government of George Papandreou has strong political will.’, said Mr. Papoutsis, then Minister of Public Protection (Skai, 2011). Such affirmations shift the focus from the presumed absence of the Greek state to the excess of sovereign power most governments have abused in dealing with migration. The rise of extreme right-wing forces, both at the national level (represented by the extreme right wing party LAOS which obtained 5 percent of the national vote in the November 2009 election) and at the local (the fascist party ‘Golden Dawn’ for the first time elected 2 local councilors at the municipality of Athens in the local elections of November 2010), played a role in this direction (Gropas and Triandafyllidou, 2012). Indeed, against this context, the centralleft newly elected government in 2009 had set off early on to leave its own imprint in the way it dealt with migratory pressure, making 2010 the ‘turning point in Greece’s migration management policy’ (Angeli et al. 2014, p. 7). 95