ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 47 The alignment between the variations on deprivation of citizenship with the formal measure itself was revealingly noted by David Cameron (2014) speaking in the House of Commons following his attendance at a special European Council meeting which deliberated on Europe’s response to insurgency movements in eastern Ukraine, Iraq and Syria, Gaza and Libya. In emphasizing the need to simultaneously deal with the terrorist threat at home, he observed that powers already existed to deport and exclude suspect foreign nationals (Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002; Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006), that dual nationals with British citizenship could be deprived of their citizenship through legislation that had been passed since 2002 (Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002), that naturalized Britons could have their British nationality removed and effectively be made stateless if it was thought that they could acquire citizenship elsewhere (Immigration Act 2014) but that there was “a gap in our armoury” for dealing with citizens born and raised in Britain who did not possess another nationality. Passport removals and temporary exclusion orders offered a solution. Beyond the political rhetoric, however, there has been little scrutiny, documentation or analysis of what the nature of these processes entail and thus little consideration of how they might extend or relate to racialized dimensions of citizenship exclusion already firmly institutionalized and conceived of as a racial governmentality (Goldberg 2002). As part of the expansion of state securitization in the context of the War on Terror a whole host of measures have been passed to inhibit and restrict everyday citizenship, most notably through the Prevent agenda (O’Toole et al. 2016) and the burgeoning literature on counter terrorist policing has indicated the racialized dimensions of these processes (Choudhury and Fenwick 2011; Fekete 2004; Kundnani 2014) including the appropriation of racial profiling and community surveillance practices for creating suspect communities (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009). While passport removals reflect another way in which citizenship is exposed as a conditional status for racially marginal subjects, there is little known about the specific detail, process and conditions via which individual passports are being removed under the remit of counter-terrorism policing. This paper offers the first academic account and analysis of just this, drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals, who have had their British passports cancelled by the secretary of state since the introduction of the public interest criteria. We draw on the findings of interview material in order to illuminate the policing, judicial and administrative operations and infrastructures through which the process of removing passports is enacted. Our findings show how the legal process via which individuals are removed of their passports resonate with colonial governmentalities in terms of the authoritarian way in which the measure is enforced. They also make stark the pre-emptory nature of passport removal as a policing practice, helping to further