On a summer day in 2010, 15-year-old Sergio Hernández Guereca was playing with three friends in a culvert of the Rio Grande that separates El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico. “The boys dared one another to run up a concrete incline and touch the barbed wire of the American border fence,” The New York Times reported. When U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa Jr. grabbed one of the boys, Hernández Guereca ran back toward Mexico. He made it across the unmarked borderline, but Mesa, some 60 feet away, shot him in the head anyway.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Hernández v. Mesa. The Trump administration will take the same position the Obama administration took: that the murdered boy’s parents cannot challenge the officer’s use of deadly force, even though the shots were fired on the U.S. side of the border, and that the Constitution in no way constrains such police shootings at the border. The Trump administration’s defense is that courts should simply mind their own business when border security is on the line.

These are the same arguments that the Trump administration made to defend its draconian travel and refugee ban aimed at Muslims. But as the Ninth Circuit made clear in denying the government a stay of a lower court’s suspension of the order, that’s not the Constitution our Framers designed. The president’s claim of “unreviewability ... runs counter to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.” (The administration is now asking the courts to ignore that executive order while it drafts a new one.)

With Hernández v. Mesa, the Supreme Court will have an important opportunity to reaffirm its core constitutional role of keeping the political branches in check, vindicating individual rights, and ensuring that no one is above the law. Given the president’s promise to increase federal power at the border, his claim that courts cannot review what he does, and his disrespect for judges that disagree with him, the Supreme Court’s role may now be more important than ever.

The fundamental question in Hernández v. Mesa is whether Hernández’s family can seek redress for this tragic abuse of power. Under the Constitution’s text and history, the answer is yes. The role of the courts in our system of separation of powers is to check official abuse of power and maintain the rule of law. There is no “border shooting” exception to these foundational principles.