It never should’ve taken this long or been this hard. Eighteen months after Donald Trump signed an unconstitutional order attempting to block birthright citizenship, the parents of roughly a quarter-million babies born each year to undocumented or temporary immigrant parents can finally breathe a sigh of relief—but they never should have had to fear for their children’s very identity as Americans. For a year and a half, a sitting president tried to destabilize the 160-year-old Fourteenth Amendment and the 128-year-old Wong Kim Ark decision, treating settled Constitutional guarantees as if they were suggestions he could erase with a pen.

I’m glad and grateful to the justices who rejected Trump’s hate and xenophobia and refused to let him turn citizenship into a weapon. But we cannot ignore what this episode revealed. We have a president who would strip birthright Americans of their constitutionally guaranteed citizenship if the Court would let him.

Make no mistake: the rule of law has been holding Trump’s worst impulses at bay—barely. We saw this during Operation Metro Surge, when the president sent paramilitary forces into our state and directed his Justice Department to bury vital evidence after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed. We saw it as he did his utmost to illegally strip SNAP benefits from hungry children and families across Minnesota. Each time, it has taken enormous courage, resources, and time to claw back rights that were never supposed to be in question, and that work has cost so many so much. The question now isn’t just whether our institutions can survive the next attack, but for how long and at what cost, and whether we will finally act to ensure no future president can ever again play games with who counts as American.

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