The attempted military coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016 was also a time of rioting in Ankara’s Önder neighborhood, with many Syrian businesses vandalized. Attacks against Syrians have also occurred periodically in other Turkish cities. With over three million Syrians living in Turkey, such attacks are rare, and yet their occurrences are an example of the insecurities facing Syrians as a result of national, regional, and international border politics. This paper discusses the insecurities facing Syrians in urban centers in Turkey as a consequence of the ambiguous subject position that has been forced upon them as a result of border politics at the national level through Turkey’s temporary protection regime, and solidified at the regional level through the EU-Turkey deal. We argue that such border politics aim to strip Syrian refugees of their political subjectivity and ability to claim rights under the international refugee protection regime by reconstituting Syrians — and indeed the figure of the refugee — as objects of humanitarian assistance rather than political agents with rights.