This piece first appeared in our weekly newsletter, The Fallout.

It’s rare the Supreme Court delivers good news related to abortion rights and access, but this week, the Court declined to take up a pair of cases that anti-choice activists had hoped would upend the last remaining precedent protecting clinics, patients, and providers from the most aggressive and hostile clinic protesters.

At issue is the durability of Hill v. Colorado, a 2000 Supreme Court decision that upheld a Colorado law that requires protesters get consent before coming within eight feet of anyone to speak to them or distribute pamphlets within 100 feet of a health-care facility, including an abortion clinic. Anti-choice advocates had teed up two cases—one from Illinois and another from New Jersey—to challenge Hill. If successful, they would have given abortion clinic protesters a green light to dramatically increase clinic protests and harass patients trying to access care.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. On Monday, the Court rejected the cases, which means clinic protest laws like Colorado’s are safe—for now. Both Justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the Court’s decision, saying they would have taken the challenge to Hill.

Because of course they would have.

And while the Court rejected this particular challenge to laws regulating protests outside of abortion clinics, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is fanatically anti-choice, so the overall threat to clinics, their patients, and staff remains dire. In fact, the Justice Department has already issued guidance saying it will reserve enforcing Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act prosecutions and civil actions only in “extraordinary circumstances.” And let’s not forget that the flurry of first-month criminal pardons issued by Trump included a handful of clinic protesters, including one who had forcibly entered abortion clinics and assaulted staff, according to court documents and reporting by Mother Jones.

There’s every reason to expect a renewed wave of abortion-clinic violence under this presidential administration. But by turning away these challenges to protest zone laws, the Supreme Court granted abortion patients and providers a rare reprieve.