The education of students designated as English Learners (ELs) is managed through a patchwork of federal, state, and local policies throughout the United States. A great deal of the practical implementation of that policy comes down to educators in individual school districts. There has been scholarly attention paid to top-down education policy, focusing on policymakers, and also to bottom-up implementation, typically focused on teachers. There has been comparatively little paid to those in between. The School District of Philadelphia is administered through a central office, within which the education of ELs is overseen by the multilingual office. This study takes a discursive stance to policy implementation in bureaucratic organizations to explore how policy is mediated through this office. Drawing on ethnographic, discourse analytic, and organization study methods, this study investigates the ways in which discourses operated within the multilingual office as staff members implemented language policies. In this study, I describe and analyze three different tensions observed within the office and its work. The first is a tension between staff members’ desire to position ELs withing assets framings, and the deficit-frame-upholding discourses they engaged in while trying to advocate on behalf of their students. I argue that this tension exists because staff are operating within resource scarcity and a discursive context of accountability and biopolitical student tracking which only provides certain discursive options to be used. Next, I show that policy in this context is implemented discursively in process which pushes and pulls between compliance- and context-orientations. I argue that this is partly based in avoiding consequences for non-compliance, but also in a belief that compliance is an equity tool. The final tension I explore is office members’ stated efforts to avoid lawsuits, while also expressing the belief that ELs in SDP will not get the resources they deserve unless somebody sues. I argue that staff express these seemingly contradictory wishes because within the organizational structure and culture of the District, they do need see valid options for producing real change internally, and believe the only way change will happen is if it is forced externally.