In his second term, Donald Trump has launched a full-scale attack on the Fourteenth Amendment. Rightfully, much of the attention has focused on Trump’s executive order purporting to limit the guarantee of birthright citizenship, roll back civil rights gains, and attack racial diversity. One development that has gone largely unnoticed is the administration’s effort to strip marginalized populations of legal protections in defiance of the amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

First, consider the president’s executive orders aimed at transgender people. Among the first anti-trans orders he signed requires reassigning incarcerated transgender women to prisons for men, exposing them to an amply documented risk of harassment, violence, assault, and rape. Rather than protecting transgender prisoners from violence, the Trump executive order puts them in harm’s way.

Second, the Department of Justice has insisted that it will refuse to enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (“FACE”) except in extraordinary circumstances, turning a blind eye to violence aimed at abortion providers. Congress passed FACE in 1994 following systemic violence against and harassment of individuals seeking access to abortion and the providers who serve them. Still, the Trump DOJ has derided this statute as part of “the weaponization of the federal government.” The upshot is that now, when medical providers report bomb threats to the FBI, the federal government will look the other way.

Third, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has halted processing and investigating employment discrimination claims filed by LGBTQ workers. As the Supreme Court recognized in Bostock v. Clayton County, discrimination against workers because of their sexual orientation or their transgender status is prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which the EEOC is charged with administering. Rather than protecting the equality of all workers, the EEOC is refusing to enforce the statute per governing law.

Fourth, the Trump administration’s Department of Education has paused processing race and sex discrimination claims filed with its Office of Civil Rights. Thousands of discrimination claims will remain unexamined, unconscionably delaying and thus denying justice for individuals subject to unlawful discrimination.

This concerted refusal to protect the rights and basic safety of the marginalized sanctions lawless conduct aimed at vulnerable populations. This is precisely what the constitutional guarantee of equal protection was meant to prevent.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment famously guarantees equal rights for all persons. Less well-known is that the Fourteenth Amendment’s architects also enshrined the right of protection—an old principle often forgotten that, in return for our allegiance, the government owes us protection, including protection of our rights to life, liberty, property, and protection from private violence.

The Fourteenth Amendment framers were responding to southern states categorically refusing to protect Black Americans and their white allies following the Civil War and offering no redress for the violence they experienced. Members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, who penned the amendments, detailed the savagery sweeping the former Confederacy. In its report, they explained that a “deep-seated prejudice against color . . . leads to acts of cruelty, oppression, and murder, which the local authorities are at no pains to prevent or punish.”

These abuses made it essential to write into the Constitution a promise of equal protection for everyone in the United States. As Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan argued in his famous floor speech on May 23, 1866, in introducing the amendment in the U.S. Senate, the equal protection guarantee would afford “the humblest, the poorest, the most despised of the race the same rights and same protection before the law as it gives to the most powerful, the most wealthy, and the most haughty.”

During debates over legislation to protect Black Americans from terroristic Klan violence in 1871, Senator John Pool of North Carolina recognized how important the right to protection is, calling it “the most valuable of all rights, without which all others are worthless and all right and all liberty but an empty name.” This right is particularly noteworthy because the right to protection is affirmative in a Constitution composed primarily of negative rights. We need to feel safe to feel free.

The Fourteenth Amendment Framers understood that one way to subjugate a minority was to deny them protection, including ignoring violence against them. This lesson resonates today as the Trump administration has sought to deny legal protections to the marginalized.

Will arguments grounded in the principle of protection sway the courts? The text and history of the Equal Protection Clause are compelling. Supreme Court precedent recognizes that “[c]entral both to the idea of the rule of law and to our own Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection is the principle that government and each of its parts remain open on impartial terms to all who seek its assistance.”

Indeed, early indications so far seem promising. Amidst the chaos of the first month of Trump’s second term, we have seen federal courts push back against many of the Trump administration’s lawless ploys, including its attempts to strip transgender persons of rights. Still, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts seems willing to turn its back on the Fourteenth Amendment’s promises, as it did in Jackson Women’s Medical Center v. Dobbs, when it decimated the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of fundamental rights, and in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, when it ignored the landmark race-conscious laws, passed contemporaneously with the Fourteenth Amendment, to foster equal citizenship.

One of the cases to watch is Doe v. McHenry, in which a federal district judge in Washington D.C. temporarily enjoined Trump’s order mandating the transfer of transgender prisoners, noting that “transgender persons are at a significantly elevated risk of physical and sexual violence relative to other inmates when housed in a facility corresponding to their biological sex.” Although the judge based their ruling on the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments and did not reach the plaintiff’s equal protection claim, the court recognized that the government had a constitutional duty to protect transgender inmates from violence. Trump’s order had breached this duty. The Doe litigation provides an important illustration of how courts can vindicate the right to protection.

The Constitution is a bulwark against Trump’s efforts to deny equal protection. The right to protection demands a government that protects Americans’ rights and personal safety. Understanding this remains critical to  President Trump’s threat to the rule of law.