Since the start of the Syrian war in 2011, over 3 million Syrians have sought protection in Turkey, making it the world’s top refugee hosting country without granting refugee status to any of its asylum applicants. As the conflict persisted, Turkish authorities developed longer-term models of border control and asylum beyond the emergency needs of Syrians. This paper examines the contradictions that emerge from the increasing state involvement in the deployment of these models in Antakya near Turkey’s border with Syria. Turkey’s “Temporary Protection Regime” provides Syrians with differential inclusion in the form of legal access to health, education, and employment, and through a formal discourse of religious kinship and hospitality. Such inclusion, however, works to obscure the Syrians’ removal from the conventional modern state apparatus as non-citizens, and disrupts their day-to-day relations with the locals upon whom they depend for social and economic survival. In Antakya where the largest proportion of Arab citizens of Turkey have resided since the province’s annexation from Syria in 1939, these contradictions are thrown into sharper relief and articulated through state-induced sectarian (Alawi-Sunni) divisions as the Turkish state moves from an open border policy to the construction of a wall along its border with Syria. This paper provides an ethnographic analysis of these divisions and their transgressions based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Antakya between 2010 and 2012 and follow-up visits to the region in the summers of 2015, 2016, and in 2019. Fieldwork included participant observation in social settings such as the marketplaces, religious sites, community events, and households where displaced Syrians of diverse background interact with local citizens. I also draw on official discourses about local refugee resettlement, ethnographic interviews with Syrian and local families, and semi-structured interviews with local authorities, state actors, and civil society actors in Antakya. Through an interpretative analysis of this material, I call for a rethinking of state governance of borders and border-crossers beyond the bureaucratic procedures of status determination in institutional settings. Such governance, I argue, requires attention to the socially configured processes of power and differentiation that situate the governed within everyday relations of hospitality, kinship, and religion at the local level.