The Supreme Court’s decision added to the Trump administration’s collection of dubious legal victories on Friday when it handed down a ruling limiting the nationwide injunctions used by judges to halt President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to unwind over a century of settled law on birthright citizenship.

The 6-3 decision in Casa v. Trump would allow Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship to go into effect, despite the fact the order has repeatedly been found to be unconstitutional on its face. The door has been flung open to chaos, and not just for immigrants or children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants.

The Supreme Court’s decision also set the stage for potentially terrifying new precedents, according to New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin (D). And it moves Trump one step closer to the kind of autocratic rule that has clearly become his goal in his second term.

“If we allow him to dismantle the 14th Amendment with an executive order, he can do it with any other amendment,” Platkin said during a press conference Friday.

In her dissent, Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson didn’t mince words. With the majority’s decision, any president could enact a lawless order and courts would be potentially hamstrung, or even helpless, to stop it.

“I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” Jackson wrote Friday.

Platkin is one of the 22 state attorneys general who fought Trump’s order by suing in federal court, which resulted in four nationwide injunctions. One Washington state judge who issued an injunction, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, told attorneys for the plaintiffs and the Justice Department this spring that in the four decades he had sat on the bench he had never seen such a cut-and-dry question.

“I can’t remember another case where the question presented was clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour said. (Cougenhour was appointed by one of Trump’s idols, former President Ronald Reagan.)

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But some 28 states opted to sit out the birthright fight, choosing not to use every legal tool available to them to challenge the executive order.

The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of birthright citizenship because the Trump administration did not specifically raise that question. When they tried to push that angle in lower courts, they were repeatedly rebuffed. After being dealt loss after loss, the Trump administration ran to the Supreme Court seeking emergency relief, framing the case around the legality of the nationwide injunctions blocking the order.

The maneuver was meant to wrangle the independence and authority of the courts, according to Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown (D), and it was the latest escalation in Trump’s continuing pattern of “undermining law, state sovereignty, and the separation of powers.”

The Supreme Court’s decision states that Trump’s order will go into effect within 30 days, barring any further court orders or class actions in states where it is challenged. One class action suit was already filed on Friday and while that is a swift response, it isn’t typical.

Class actions are one option to bring legal challenges, but they are incredibly difficult for the average person: they entail high standards to join and advance through the courts, require sharp lawyering and can be very expensive and time-consuming to participate in. In short: they are much, much less accessible as a route to relief than a judge’s stay.

By limiting injunctions to apply only to the plaintiffs in specific cases, the power to assert citizenship rights becomes effectively limited to those who can afford to become named plaintiffs in a lawsuit — a difficult, expensive and confusing prospect even for those with the resources and education to do so. For people affected by the order who are not equipped to bring their own suits, there will be little recourse.

The Supreme Court ignored the reality on the ground for most people but especially immigrant advocacy and nonprofit organizations in the mix right now, who are already overwhelmed and worried about clients who are being detained and disappeared, Erin Barbato, the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told HuffPost in an interview on Friday.

“Bringing a class action against the government includes incredibly high standards. And they are incredibly expensive as well as time-consuming to do. I anticipate there will definitely be more people joining in this or people attempting to be certified and be protected by the injunction, but at this point, it’s hard to see who is going to have the resources to do that,” she said.

The Supreme Court’s ruling worries her that Trump is being pushed further and further into becoming king with near unchecked power, as the ability to challenge him is cut away little by little even as he makes more and more drastic changes.

“We had [birthright citizenship] guaranteed for over 100 years,” she said. “If he gains the power to be able to take away birthright citizenship by being intentional and somewhat brilliant in navigating the legal system, I worry how many rights can be taken away by other executive orders simply because of the resources our government has to navigate the legal system.”

During a press conference Friday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) echoed this sentiment, noting how much discord a changing landscape of citizenship rights would cause, and the likelihood it would erode the power of the states themselves.

States who didn’t join the challenge to Trump’s order, he suspected, were “secretly very happy” to be “coasting and drafting” off their work without having to do any for their own constituents.

Maybe that will change, Bonta said, because putting U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants in precarious legal positions may start generating backlash on the ground. It may be easy for some states to ignore now, but the California attorney general warned: If this bedrock constitutional right can come under fire so easily, so can others.

States’ attorneys general who are not fighting for the rights of their people will have tough choices to make and tougher questions to answer.

“They will have important questions from their constituents about why they are letting people’s rights be trampled on, funding for critical services are being withheld unlawfully… and why they are laying down and doing nothing,” Bonta said.

Damon Hewitt, president and director for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement Friday that when the Supreme Court’s ruling is taken into its full context, it was clear that the decisions would only “further enable the Administration’s effort to quash all forms of dissent.”

”The effects of this ruling on marginalized communities who are feeling the brunt of this Administration’s policies will be exacerbated by the White House’s attacks on law firms and non-profit organizations defending causes the current government disfavors,” he wrote.

And he quoted the dissent in the case written by Jackson: “If courts do not have the authority to require the Executive to adhere to law universally, compliance with law sometimes becomes a matter of Executive prerogative.”