Multi/bilingual education has been found to have the potential to provide more equitable education for linguistic minority students; nevertheless, these students have not fully benefitted from it due to unequal power dynamics and English-dominant language ideologies. While bilingual programmes in secondary schools remain extremely rare in the US, the Bilingual Diploma in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme offers a high school level bilingual curriculum and fosters heritage language education and multiculturalism. This study examines how advanced bilingual education in one International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme in a US high school served linguistic minority students' specific needs by establishing an institutional structure promoting heritage language learning, which significantly empowered those students by overcoming deficit-oriented ideologies.