In recent years, controversies over the politics of knowledge production in Qatar have unsettled how U.S. branch campuses reinforce racialized hierarchies that uphold the supremacy of white Anglo-American expertise in the Gulf. These protests (occurring both physically and virtually) have often focused on overt moments when faculty, administrators, and staff are explicitly racist towards students and communities across Qatar. In this paper, I engage with and build on these analyses of how racism operates in and through the US university in the Gulf. Turning to Texas A&M University at Qatar, an engineering branch campus established in 2003, I argue that legal and administrative mechanisms deployed by the institution maintain and reproduce racialized labor hierarchies of engineering labor and expertise. The educational project of producing engineers in Qatar is uniquely embedded in global capitalism, particularly as a profession closely tied to the development of oil and gas, the military and logistics spaces across the Gulf. In the first part of the paper, I examine how US policy, particularly the National Defense Authorization Act and Protect our Universities Act, impacts research at the branch campus and further excludes people based on nationality in the Gulf, specifically researchers holding citizenship and residency status in Russia, Iran, and China. This policy, while framed through the lens of US national security, reinforces various racialized hierarchies of engineering expertise inside and outside the branch campus in Qatar. In the second part of the paper, I focus on how engineering students encounter US and Texas law in the branch campus and make strategic choices about their education based on their nationality. I argue that US and Texas law is both mobilized and suspended in Qatar to maintain and reinforce racialized hierarchies of expertise and labor. Through these mechanisms, the institution continues the work of promoting the U.S. as the center of expertise and mostly produces a managerial class structure to oversee technical labor in the fossil fuel industry and the military.