Seems to me there are an many laws being ignored as inconvenient.
If the powers that be want to enforce this law, lets put their feet to fire and have them enforce all laws.
BTW I am neither picking nits with you, nor criticizing your position.
I don't know it it is the case with this or not, but in some cases the administration does have leeway within the law to create exceptions, and that isn't a bad thing when they are carefully tailored to a specific situation, and they are spelled out specifically so that people can find out what the rules really are and can follow the law, and can know what the law is when making business decisions, such as opening a golf course with the greens in one country and the access road in another.
However, in this case, there appears to have just been an unwritten understanding that serves people's purposes well enough and avoided the trouble of forming a real formal agreement. However, that puts people in jeopardy of having the law enforced on them whenever they find an official particularly displeased with them.
There seems to be a tendency among our government to make it so that we are routinely breaking one law or another, so that there is always a legal premise for infringing upon our rights if the government feels the need to do so.
Our government actually argues that laws aren't unconstitutional, and that the courts shouldn't overturn them simply because they haven't been enforced in an abusive manner yet, and unfortunately the courts seem to routinely agree. You generally don't have standing to challenge laws until they have adversely effected you.