As Yemen has been ravaged by seven years of war and humanitarian catastrophe, 4 million Yemenis remain displaced within the country, while some 600,000 others have fled abroad. The most recent wave of Yemeni migration is mostly south to south- with people traveling to neighboring countries and places of Yemeni historical diasporas- but there are also growing numbers of Yemeni asylum seekers and refugees across Europe. In the context of the EU’s restrictive visa regime and the militarization and externalization of its borders, Yemenis’ transnational journeys to pursue refuge are illegalized, and therefore arduous, expensive, and often life- threatening. Building on my larger ethnographic and multi-sited research with Yemenis on the move, this paper sheds light on the lived experiences and embodied knowledge of borders of those who encounter and transgress them. To think about mobility and borders from the vantage point of those who travel to, and across, Europe without the ‘right’ passports, I trace the odysseys of three Yemeni refugees- Fawzia, Abu Khaled and Sami. In telling their stories, I focus in particular on creative strategies to subvert airport surveillance and control, as they attempt to leave Greece by boarding flights with fake documents to reach other European destinations of their choosing. Drawing on postcolonial approaches to migration and interdisciplinary work on subaltern politics, I propose to consider Yemenis’ irregular journeys as practices through which they seize their right to asylum. Furthermore, I show how borders constitute not only barriers to movement but are also sites of race and gender-making for Yemeni migrants, as on their ways they come to recognize their low position in the hierarchy of humanity. By centering Yemenis’ moves for a ‘liveable life’ and appropriation of movement, I aim to expand the gaze of the dominant research on the Yemeni crisis, in which ordinary people tend to be absent or flattened to speechless victims.