With oral argument in Trump v. Hawaii, the “travel ban” case, just weeks away, it’s worth asking, “How’s that been working out for us?” The answer from history is, “Not all that well.” During various crises in American history, government has decided to lower the boom on unpopular racial or religious groups; later generations have seen these restrictions for what they were—transparent rationalizations for bigotry, blots on the national escutcheon that, in at least two cases, called for national apologies to the survivors.

Those Ghosts of Deference Past are loudly haunting the “travel ban” case. Survivors of three of these previous episodes have filed amicus briefs urging the justices not to hide behind the wishful assumption that the executive branch this time—finally, really, this time—is telling us the truth, and that the “ban” is based on national-security needs rather than raw racism and nativist politics. In previous cases, courts took the government’s word, the briefs argue; the Supreme Court should learn a bitter lesson from that history.

A brief filed by a coalition of Jewish groups pointedly reminds the Court that, in May 1939—six months after Kristallnacht made clear the situation of Germany’s Jews—the German liner St. Louis carried 937 Jewish refugees from Hamburg to Havana, where they had previously been given permission to land. While the ship was at sea, Cuban authorities changed their minds and rescinded the promised visas for all but 29 of the passengers. When the ship sailed on to Miami, the U.S. government also refused the remaining passengers entry as refugees. This was just a regular immigration matter, U.S. officials said; the passengers should return to Germany and apply for visas using the normal channels.

The St. Louis finally sailed away, landing its passengers at other European ports; though none was returned to Germany, 254 of the passengers eventually died in the Holocaust. In 2012, the brief notes dryly, “the United States government issued a formal apology for the country’s refusal to provide refuge for the Jewish passengers aboard the St. Louis.”

The U.S. later apologized for the Japanese Internment, too—as noted in an amicus brief filed on behalf of Karen Korematsu, Jay Hirabayashi, and Holly Yasui. Their parents were defendants in the cases in which the Supreme Court approved the arrest and shipment to concentration camps of 110,000 Japanese immigrants and their citizen children living on the Pacific Coast. The government at the time proclaimed the interment a matter of “military necessity.” That was not a misjudgment or a mistake; it was a lie. Military authorities proffered phony “evidence” of disloyalty among the West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans; in reality, there was none. Officials of the Justice Department knew this too, but, with weasel words in their pleadings, allowed the Court to presume—or pretend to presume—otherwise. Four decades later, the convictions were vacated, and the government apologized and compensated the survivors. But the cases haven’t been formally overruled; they remain, in the words of Justice Robert Jackson, “like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”