History, as we all know, never gets tired of its own repeats, and much like Trump and his ilk want to say the 14th Amendment doesn't apply to brown people, government officials tried to say it didn't apply to Chinese Americans either, over a century ago.

At the center of Wednesday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court, discussing the constitutionality of President Trump's racist-on-its-face executive order last year barring birthright citizenship for undocumented migrants' children, is an 1898 Supreme Court case involving a young Chinese American man who was born in San Francisco.

Wong Kim Ark's name was evoked again today, 128 years later, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh and others asked attorneys why that precedent should not stand. Wong was asking the court the same question that the ACLU's attorney Cecillia Wang was asking today, which is how the 14th Amendment's language guaranteeing citizenship for all who are born here does not apply to a particular group of people.

Wong Kim Ark was a cook in San Francisco's Chinatown, and as the New York Times recounts today, he was just 24 years old when he sued the US government for denying him reentry to the country he was born in — this was after he traveled to China multiple times and attempted to return to San Francisco in 1895.

He was, as the story goes, born to a woman with bound feet in the back bedroom of an apartment at 751 Sacramento Street in 1870. According to US Census records, such as they are, Wong Kim Ark was one of just 518 babies of Chinese ancestry born in the US up until that time. His parents decided to return to China in 1877, not long after a white mob ransacked SF's Chinatown on the night of July 24, 1877, an event that was covered in newspapers across the country.

Wong returned in 1880 at the age of 10, with an uncle, and started working as a dishwasher, going with the uncle to a mining camp in the Sierra. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act two years later, explicitly barring more immigrants from China, and as The American Scholar recounts, this meant that by the time Wong reached marrying age, there were few women of Chinese descent around his age in the Bay Area. This meant traveling back to China to find a wife, conceiving a child with a girl who was 17, and then returning to California to find more work, multiple times.

He was bilingual, and fluent in English, as an immigration interviewer would later note. And for much of his life in the US, he had to carry around documents, including letters in which white people attested to the fact that he was born in the US, to prove his citizenship.

It was after his ninth trip back to China, in August 1895, that Wong was given trouble re-entering the US. He was detained, like many migrants are today, forced to live on a steamship in San Francisco Bay for four months before being released on bail. He then worked at a restaurant in Chinatown while his case made its way through the courts. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 1898, after his attorney argued that birthright citizenship was essential for everyone arriving here — including the many hundreds of thousands of white European immigrants arriving every year.

And Wong's troubles didn't end there. He relocated to Texas, where he was again jailed and accused of being a non-citizen in El Paso. And 12 years later, his eldest son tried unsuccessfully to enter the country at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay — the so-called "Ellis Island of the West" — only to get turned away after immigration officials refused to believe that he was, in fact, Wong's biological son.

A man who purported to be Wong's third son, Wong Yook Sue, entered the country at Angel Island and successfully claimed citizenship in 1924 — he would later admit to having been a "paper son," and unreleated to Wong Kim Ark, only using his name to enter the country. And then another, actual descendent, Wong Yook Jim, arrived two years later, at age 11 — and both scholars and the family now believe that he was Wong Kim Ark's grandson, though he claimed to be his youngest son.

Wong Yook Jim would later marry a Japanese American woman and have a family that was raised in San Francisco. His son, Norman Wong, was at the Supreme Court today and tells the New York Times, "They will be shamed for history if they get this wrong."

The descendants of Wong Kim Ark tell the Times that their father never told them about their ancestor's important legacy. They only learned of the connection about 15 years ago, after their father died.

Norman Wong, who attended UC Berkeley and grew up only knowing he was American, tells the Times, "If he had not fought for that right, I probably wouldn’t have existed."

Related: Ninth Circuit Shuts Down Trump's Executive Order on Birthright Citizenship, Setting Up Supreme Court Showdown

Top image: Wong Kim Ark in 1901. National Archive photo courtesy of Amanda Frost