Mexican parents’ rights in son’s death split court
U.S. agent, firing from Texas, killed teen in Mexico.
The gun was fired in the United States. The bullet stopped 60 feet away in Mexico — in the head of a 15-yearold boy named Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca.
Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa Jr. pulled the trigger that day six years ago in the wide concrete culvert that separates El Paso, Texas, from Juarez, Mexico. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court appeared split as it considered whether the Constitution gives Hernández’s parents the right to sue Mesa in American courts for killing their son.
The case comes amid a time of increasing tension and controversy over how the United States polices the border, where essential international commerce takes place alongside narcotics trafficking and human smuggling.
Courts have struggled to deal with the national security and foreign policy implications of the case.
If Hernández had been killed inside the United States, then the case could proceed. Or if he had been a U.S. citizen, it would not have mattered that Mesa was on one side of the border and he was on the other.
But the courts so far have said the Constitution does not reach across the border — even 60 feet — to give rights to those without a previous connection to the United States.
To find otherwise, Judge Edith Jones wrote when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit considered the question, would “create a breathtaking expansion of federal court authority ... and would have severely adverse consequences for the conduct of American foreign affairs.”
But lawyers for the parents say there must be recourse for killing an unarmed teenager playing with his friends. Halting the case before it is even tried, their brief tells the Supreme Court, erects “a legal no-man’s land in which federal agents can kill innocent civilians with impunity.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy and other conservative justices suggested during argument Tuesday that the boy’s death on the Mexican side of the border was enough to keep the matter out of U.S. courts.
“This is a sensitive area of foreign affairs where the political branches ought to discuss with Mexico what the solutions ought to be,” Kennedy said.
The four liberal justices indicated they would support the parents’ lawsuit because the shooting happened close to the border in an area in which the two nations share responsibility for upkeep.
U.S. officials chose not to prosecute Mesa in the killing, and the Obama administration refused a request to extradite him to Mexico.
The Trump administration, like its predecessor, is arguing that the location of the teenager’s death, in Mexico, should be the end of the story.
Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler told the court that even if the victim had been American and all the other circumstances were the same, the lawsuit should be thrown out.
But Kneedler and Mesa’s lawyer both acknowledged that someone killed by an agent on the U.S. side of the culvert could sue.
“That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? To distinguish these two victims?” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.
Privacy experts also are watching the case because it could affect how courts treat global internet surveillance, particularly when foreigners are involved.
Hernández’s shooting was not an isolated border incident. Parents of a teenager killed in Nogales, Mexico, from gunshots fired across the border by a U.S. agent have filed a civil rights lawsuit. It is being delayed until the Supreme Court rules..