Drawing on decades of lessons from a Bilingual Teacher Education Program (BTEP) in California that has persevered both restrictive and additive federal and state educational language policies, this manuscript provides an ethnographic snapshot of how this BTEP has strategically navigated through and around anti-immigrant ideologies and policies to survive incessant attacks on bilingual education and educational equity for multilingual learners. Utilizing a critical language policy framework, the authors analyze how the Castañeda v. Pickard case and other educational language policies shape the work of bilingual teacher educators as language policy agents. They rely on autoethnographic accounts to illustrate how they navigate the complex relationship between policy and practice and offer a critical analysis of the bilingual teacher shortage. The authors propose that developing critically conscious bilingual educators with ideological clarity may mitigate this larger systemic issue.