The Moria hotspot was located almost a kilometre away from the village of Moria, in a former military camp. Until its total destruction on 9 September 2021, it served as a filtering mechanism at the moment of arrival, with the various intervening actors carrying out screening and sorting of border crossers into bureaucratic and legal ‘categories’, such as economic migrant, asylum seeker, deserving/non-deserving and thus deportable/non-deportable. Within Moria, the following procedures took place upon border crossers’ arrival: registration; identification; screening and debriefing by Frontex and the Greek authorities; health inspections; vulnerability and age assessment of unaccompanied minors by NGO medical staff or medical practitioners of the Greek national healthcare system; asylum procedures by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and the Greek Asylum Service; coerced deportations or readmissions of border crossers by the Greek police, the Hellenic Coast Guard and Frontex; and coerced returns (euphemistically called ‘voluntary returns’ or ‘voluntary repatriations’) by the IOM.

This chapter explores the bureaucratic procedures surrounding registration, identification and asylum that are implemented upon arrival and which produce uncertainty, protracted waiting and bureaucratic limbo by mentally exhausting people. The chapter argues that the bureaucratic procedures are designed to always fail, so as to make people's lives unliveable. Furthermore, the procedures are characterized by an overwhelming inconsistency, uncertainty and chaos, which border crossers must adhere to while living in appalling, inhuman, degrading and life-threatening reception and living conditions. Through this lens, the chapter explores bureaucratic deterrence, and therefore bureaucratic violence – that is, the intentional, well-designed policy of deterring by gradually, slowly and silently ‘killing’ those who have sought international protection in Europe. The bureaucratic deterrence is the apotheosis of the ‘politics of discomfort’ (Darling, 2011, p 268). In this way, border crossers are deterred and indirectly coerced by the authorities to withdraw their asylum claims and either traverse alternative dangerous and illicit migratory pathways to other EU countries or ‘voluntarily’ return to their countries of origin.

First stage: screening and identification procedures

The process of registration, identification, screening and debriefing are the first stages of a long and enduring process all border crossers are confronted with immediately after they reach Lesvos and the other Aegean Islands (for example, Chios, Samos).