In 2000, voters in the US state of Arizona passed Proposition 203 "English for the Children," effectively abolishing bilingual education services in favor of a submersion approach termed Sheltered English Immersion. In this discussion, I use an ethnographic lens to highlight the logistical complexities involved in the negotiation of restrictive educational language policies between macro levels of development, meso levels of interpretation and micro levels of educational application. By looking at language policy as a sociocultural process, I reveal how Arizona's anti-bilingual education policy has unfolded across various levels of bureaucracy and been enacted in schools where the majority of students come from an immigrant background. Specifically, the current study explores how Proposition 203 has affected patterns of language use in predominantly language-minority classrooms by illustrating the influence of key policy arbiters within politically repressive environments. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)