Unaccompanied asylum-seeking youth in Greece: Protection, liberation and securitization This paper examines how shifting local attitudes and migration management policies (from child care and liberation to temporality and criminalization) shape the migration and integration experience of Unaccompanied Minors (UAMs) in Greece, many of whom are of Syrian origin. The study finds that the state’s shift from child protection to migration management policies occurred following the steep rise in the official numbers of UAMs during 2014-2018. The shift manifested in three contradictory ways: 1) official endorsement of the international child rights and child protection legal framework while ignoring unofficial practices that violate children’s rights; 2) assigning law enforcement agents to protect the best interests of the child, and child care agents to enforce migration control policies; and 3) deploying a ‘migration crisis’ language over the child protection discourse to justify protective custody as a ‘means of last resort.’ The study suggests that the current international child protection framework disproportionately promotes the interest of the state over the child. The state’s interpretation of the ‘best interests’ principle disregards both the UAMs’ needs and their rights for protection and ethical care under international law. Minors seeking asylum are regarded as ‘guilty’ of voluntary migration and exposed to arbitrary imprisonment. Thus, UAMs are unchilded (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2019) by being placed into zones of segregation, incarceration, criminalization and isolation. “Unchilding” is marked by young people’s social exclusion from various contexts (both local and global) and spaces (educational, welfare, economic). The paper concludes by suggesting that UAM’s performativity, as voluntary migrants –– leaves many of them exposed to violence and abuse by both state (e.g. police, welfare services, migration officials) and non-state (NGO workers) actors. Hence, the state and non-state actors take part in the “Unchilding” process and push the minors to ‘invisibility,’ which in turn increases their vulnerability to illegal and criminal activities (i.e. gangs, smuggling, trafficking, sexual exploitation and kidnapping). The research for this paper is based on a qualitative data, including NGO reports; policy briefs; statistical data; testimonies of UAMs receiving child protection services in Greece; and semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with 10 professionals who work with the local municipality of Thessaloniki and The Association for the Social Support of Youth (ARSIS), a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that runs youth reception centers and shelters for UAMs across Greece.