Inscribed above the front entrance of the U.S. Supreme Court is a simple, four-word inscription: Equal justice under law. The phrase doesn’t require a great deal of explanation, but it does require fortification. At the moment, the nation has a president who cares deeply about due process for himself but wants to strip it from others.

Last night, the Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to continue deporting people under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The ruling is narrow—the unsigned majority concluded that challenges to removal should be brought in Texas, where detainees are held, and not in Washington, D.C., where a judge had temporarily blocked deportations. Importantly, the majority rejected the administration’s argument about how court approval applies. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that “all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available. The only question is where that judicial review should occur.”

But as my colleague Adam Serwer writes, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent that this distinction was only somewhat meaningful: “Individuals who are unable to secure counsel, or who cannot timely appeal an adverse judgment … face the prospect of removal directly into the perilous conditions” at a notorious Salvadoran prison. In a sense, the majority is hiding behind a small point of process—a jurisdictional one—at the risk of undermining a much more important process question, which is whether people dubiously accused of being gang members have any recourse before being sent into hellish conditions abroad.

The Court’s affirmation of the right to judicial review is somewhat reassuring, but on the same day, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily lifted an order in a separate case for the executive branch to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Abrego Garcia, as my colleague Nick Miroff reported, is a Maryland man who was living in the United States legally, has not been charged with any crime, and yet was arrested and sent to El Salvador. His lawyers called the situation “Kafka-esque,” and though that term is overused, here it is appropriate. The administration acknowledges that Abrego Garcia’s removal was a mistake, but it says it can’t do anything to remedy that mistake, because he’s now in Salvadoran custody. Put differently, the argument is that the government’s error means Abrego Garcia has no right to due process—which is a right that belongs to citizens and noncitizens alike. Although he is not a citizen, U.S. citizens have allegedly been mistakenly deported in previous administrations. By this administration’s logic, a citizen wrongly deported now could find themselves without legal recourse.

The Trump administration’s attempt to deny due process is especially galling because the man who leads it has benefited from—some might say exploited—his own right to due process so extensively and so recently. Starting in 2023, Donald Trump faced a slew of felony charges related to his attempts to subvert the 2020 election and his hoarding of highly sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago. These were widely recognized as the most politically hazardous charges against him, as opposed to the more complicated New York State case that produced convictions on 34 felony counts.

But Trump never faced a trial for the election-subversion or document-mishandling charges, because he and his lawyers cleverly used due-process protections to drag the cases out. In the federal election-subversion case, Trump’s team tried to get the judge in the case disqualified, and though they were unsuccessful, this delayed proceedings. The attorneys then took a long-shot argument about presidential immunity all the way to the Supreme Court, where they won a partial victory and used up even more time. Special Counsel Jack Smith simply re-charged Trump, but ran out of time for a trial before the election. The indictment was dropped after Trump won, in deference to Justice Department guidelines that prevent the prosecution of a sitting president; he would have killed the charges once he took office anyway.

In the documents case, Trump filed multiple requests and repeatedly won favorable and erratic rulings from Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he’d appointed to the bench, culminating in her ruling Smith’s appointment unconstitutional. That case was under appeal when Trump won election, and Trump was thus dropped from it. In Fulton County, Georgia, challenges to District Attorney Fani Willis’s leadership of Trump’s prosecution extended the case past the election; it remains in limbo today.

Although Trump moaned endlessly about being unfairly persecuted, his success in these arguments was evidence to the contrary: Trump exercised his right to challenge the process. (He also had the advantage of deep pockets and time to pursue these appeals.) Some people may view the decisions delaying Trump’s trials as perversions of the law, or as rulings that honor the letter of the law at the expense of its spirit. But the American justice system is built to err on the side of fairness rather than of depriving people of rights.

Trump does not care about that balance where people other than himself are concerned. Whether this is in spite of his own experience or because of it is a question for a psychologist. Whether everyone will continue to enjoy the constitutional protections Trump did, however, is a question for the Supreme Court justices. They should be able to find the answer by looking up on their way into work.