What appears as benevolent protection for refugees often manifests as a system of control, surveillance, and spatial restriction. This chapter examines how legal and institutional mechanisms of refugee protection function less as frameworks for inclusion and more as practices that categorise, contain, and marginalise. Drawing on colonial precedents and contemporary state practices, the chapter traces how humanitarian rhetoric converges with sovereign authority to produce exclusionary outcomes. Protection is routinely translated into encampment, deterrence, and criminalisation, while the refugee becomes a managed figure subject to surveillance and administrative violence. In contexts where legal citizenship is withheld, protection assumes a conditional character, delivered through infrastructures that mimic punishment. Rather than serving as a guarantor of rights, the state delineates boundaries between insiders and outsiders, recasting mobile populations as threats to national cohesion. Historical and contemporary examples reveal how camps, border regimes, and detention centres operate as technologies that reinforce spatial and legal separation. The analysis challenges any static understanding of protection by demonstrating its entanglement with coercive governance and the production of rightless subjects. What emerges is a deeply asymmetrical arrangement in which care, exclusion, and control operate through the same institutional channels.