The corrections officers told their new prisoner, Ahmer Iqbal Abbasi, to strip and face the wall. They had already twisted his hands in his handcuffs, shoved him and called him a “f—ing Muslim,” Abbasi said in an interview last week.

It was September 2001, two weeks after 19 Muslim hijackers carried out the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history. Federal authorities never found any connection between Abbasi, a 28-year-old yellow-taxi driver from Pakistan, and the terrorists. But like hundreds of other Arab and South Asian men swept up in the aftermath of the attacks, he was not a legal immigrant.

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If the Supreme Court sides with the Obama administration, “not only would these detainees lose any opportunity to prove their claims, but so, too, would many future victims of human rights violations,” Stanford Law School professor Shirin Sinnar, who co-authored an amicus brief in the case, wrote in a Washington Post column.