On 30 August 2017 I woke up to discover that five identical videos had reached my WhatsApp number. They were sent by asylum seekers I had met over the previous two months of field research. The video depicted a man, a Nigerian national I later learnt, standing on the edge of the roof of Hotel Le Grazie, the largest Centro d’Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centre for asylum seekers; CAS) in the Macerata province. The man was staring at the horizon. After a few moments, he turned his back to the man-made three-storey chasm, opened his arms wide, and let himself go, his body producing a loud THUMP as it hit the ground after a half-somersault.

Border deaths have become an unacceptable component of our everyday life. Whether these are the result of violent and militarized policing, of self-harm practices engendered by experiences of confinement and deportability, or of processes of organized abandonment, it is intolerably clear that contemporary border regimes create the conditions for deaths to occur.1 I should not have been so stunned, enraged or indeed surprised, then, that in a place like Hotel Le Grazie an attempted suicide could take place. As a building of (forced) refuge for migrants, the hotel is an integral component of the European Union (EU) border interactive machine, the manifestation of the humanitarian hand that cares, to use Agier's (2011) famous expression, that is inextricably interwoven with the securitized hand that strikes, that is, the sovereign fist that reacts to and lands on EU-bound migrants during the violent patrolling of their routes across the Sahel or the Balkans, during Search and Rescue military operations across the Mediterranean, or through the various agreements that attempt to contain migrants at the outer periphery of Europe.