Risk has recently become a core aspect of the study and practice of security. This raises the question of how the governing of security issues has changed and how risk is situated vis-à-vis other approaches, particularly securitisation theory. One approach is to distinguish securitisation and risk within typologies of ideal-type logics of security, which suggest that while both are useful, securitisation and risk are fundamentally different. One of the crucial distinctions made here is that risk is geared towards the longer-term, routine, and ‘normal’ governance of security issues, while securitisation involves the employment of exceptional measures justified via invocations of existential threat. This article interrogates this distinction, arguing that the division between risk as the normal or routine and securitisation as the exceptional is not as clear as has been suggested in either theory or practice. Risk can and repeatedly has resulted in exceptionalism. This argument is demonstrated empirically through an analysis of the immigration practices and policies of the Trump administration, particularly the travel ban and the declaration of a national emergency to fund construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border.