This paper assesses why states adopt policies toward refugees that say one thing in law while doing another in practice. States may offer more rights in practice than law; e.g., in 1968, noncitizen Palestinian refugees from Gaza received access to temporary Jordanian passports, despite the absence of a law concerning these passports. On the other hand, states may offer more rights in law than practice; e.g., in 1990, despite clear legal protections from nationality revocations, government officials revoked the nationality of many Palestinian-Jordanians living on the East Bank since 1967. Why would a state implement rights at certain times and not others? Diverging from existing literature on policy implementation, I argue that states may say one thing and do another, not because of limited capacity, but because it suits leaders’ interests. I find that competing pressures on executive political leaders from key regime supporters can drive the gap between law and implementation in refugee policies. Specifically, when the dominant stakeholders in a policy area—such as the largest foreign donor and strongest domestic security leaders—share similar policy preferences, it is easier for the leader to implement the law: a situation I describe as coherence. However, when these actors’ policy preferences differ, the leader can placate both sides by allowing the policy’s law and implementation to diverge, with the law pleasing one side and the implementation suiting the other: a situation I call intentional ambiguity. This paper leverages Jordan’s variation in refugee rights over time and across groups to present cases of coherence and intentional ambiguity in the civil and political rights of different Palestinian refugee groups, i.e., those who arrived on Jordan’s East Bank in: 1948, 1967 from the West Bank, and 1967 from the Gaza Strip. I use process tracing and extensive primary source data to code and analyze these policies. These data include over 800 British and American archival files on Jordan’s internal political affairs from 1946–73 that I compiled as well as over 200 interviews with ministers, security leaders, lawyers, refugees, and others that I conducted in English and Arabic during 14 months of fieldwork in Jordan from 2016–19. Overall, this paper contributes to the migration, citizenship, and policymaking literatures by revealing a political strategy hidden beneath apparent institutional weakness and highlighting the importance of examining rights in both law and practice to capture refugee experiences accurately.