Turkey currently hosts more refugees than any other country in the world, including over three million Syrians. By law, Turkey provides free access to healthcare for all registered Syrians with a temporary protection ID. Yet starting in 2015 dozens of informal Syrian-run health clinics emerged in the heart of Istanbul. These clinics operate as low-cost outpatient clinics staffed by Syrian doctors lacking Turkish certification. The Turkish state has neither legalized nor shuttered many of these clinics, allowing them to operate in legal limbo alongside established Turkish providers. I ask: why did Syrian-run clinics emerge in Istanbul despite the Turkish state’s extension of free healthcare to Syrians, and what is their role in the incorporation of Syrians into Turkish society? In describing this process, I consider the health clinic as a site of refugee incorporation. Using semi-structured interviews with Syrian patients, Syrian doctors, as well as Syrian clinic administrators across 10 Syrian-run clinics, I analyze the individual interactions between patients and healthcare providers to explain the mechanisms that perpetuate the operation of illegal Syrian-run healthcare clinics. I find that Syrians’ experiences of Turkish state healthcare services embody a tension between “deserving refugee” and “burden on the state” created by the state’s effort to accept Syrian refugees without delineating a clear long-term refugee integration policy. While the state allows Syrians to utilize formal healthcare services, negative experiences engendered by the language barrier, discrimination, and state healthcare bureaucracy makes Syrian incorporation into services a serious challenge. Syrian-run health care clinics provide a venue where refugees gain access to care without incorporating into Turkey’s bureaucratic state healthcare system. A paradox emerges: refugees who incorporate into formal services as “deserving” refugees often have off-putting experiences that detract from a sense of belonging. Refugees who avoid state care and utilize refugee-run clinics have more positive healthcare experiences but remain marginal to the state apparatus. At the organizational-level, I find that Syrian-run clinics negotiate their illegality by framing themselves as medical humanitarian organizations, thereby gaining patient trust and minimizing state interference. Yet the constant anxiety of closure in which these clinics operate reinforces their status as temporary and constrains their ability to cooperate with state health services. This liminal legality of the clinic underscores Syrians’ “temporary protected status” in Turkey, where deservingness and belonging come into conflict with formal incorporation into state services.