This week, two immigration decisions from the Supreme Court are in the headlines. There’s a third we shouldn’t miss.

The case hinges on a detailed timeline and intricacies of immigration law that I don’t understand deeply, but to summarize: Muk Choi Lau is a Chinese citizen who was living in the United States as a lawful permanent resident, i.e., on a green card. He was charged with trademark counterfeiting, and while awaiting trial traveled to China. When green-card holders return to the US, they’re supposed to be considered already admitted, unless they have committed certain criminal offenses. In that case, they can be considered “seeking an admission.” Because of the charges against him — but not yet a conviction — Lau entered the US as “seeking an admission” instead of actually admitted.

Later, he pled guilty to the charges. That conviction wouldn’t have been grounds for deportation, but the government started removal proceedings against him because he’d never been admitted to the country. He argued that he should have been considered already admitted when he returned from China because, at that time, he had not been convicted of a crime. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion (guess who voted which way) said that because he was ultimately convicted of the crime, the immigration status he was given on returning (when, again, he had not been convicted) turned out to be fine.

This case is being reported as a crackdown on green-card holders and immigrants more broadly, but the stakes are even higher than that (though those stakes are already plenty high).

In school, we learn that freedom is preserved through checks and balances between the different branches, but there is also a set of critical checks that the people have on their government, particularly in criminal matters. The government is empowered to take away the property, liberty, and even life of its people, and in exchange the people are given powers to check it: habeas corpus, the right to trial by jury, the right against cruel and unusual punishment, the rights to counsel and speedy trial, the burden on the government of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and the requirement that the government hand over all exculpatory evidence force the government to clear a high bar before it can punish.

That bar should be high, because it’s how we ensure freedom from arbitrary prosecution. This ruling lowers it. It was a mistake for the government to treat Lau as a convict when he had only been charged, as Justice Jackson clarifies in her dissent. The high bar means that the government doesn’t get to sweep that mistake under the rug because he eventually was convicted.

Immigration proceedings are not the same as criminal law, but as this case shows, they are intertwined (ICE patrolling American streets and killing American citizens is another helpful example). Precedent can migrate from one area to another, particularly in the hands of a Supreme Court more interested in expansive state power than in the rule of law. Yes, I worry about the immigrants who will be harmed because of this ruling. But I also worry about the next American citizen who gets convicted because this precedent lets the government paper over any police or prosecutorial misconduct that happened along the way. Maybe this case won’t support that kind of ruling directly, but it could support the next ruling that takes it a bit further, and the one after that. They’ve run this play before, and they’re patient.

Of course, the system can and does fail today: defendants don’t always get the full benefit of those checks on government power, and that is an urgent and persistent injustice. But there is an enormous difference between a system that fails to check state power and one that is designed to not check state power. This — the unchecked state — is what the president and his appointees evidently think freedom is.

A side note. The victories of civil rights litigation over the past century have been a vindication of the idea that courts are “forums of principle,” where principle rather than political power carries the day. But, while those litigators argued on principle, they also knew that a sympathetic plaintiff helps the medicine go down: an upstanding member of the community, or, for example, a man who was the victim of sex discrimination in order to make the principle evident to male judges. The unsympathetic deserve the benefit of principle and law, too, but it’s easier to get it for everyone by putting the sympathetic forward.

The Lau case is a dark reflection of that strategy. Lau is a non-citizen, an immigrant, a citizen of the nation most frequently cast as America’s opponent, and now a convicted criminal. He’s not a child separated from his family or a refugee fleeing injustice, and so it’s hard to get exercised. Most Americans, if they hear of this case, will hear that a non-citizen pled guilty to a crime and was deported. So what?

Civil rights were built for everyone on the strength of the appeal of sympathetic plaintiffs. They can be torn down for everyone, if judges are inclined, on the weakness of the appeal of the unsympathetic.