Ruling: Mexican parents cannot sue

WASHINGTON — An ideologically divided Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the family of a Mexican teenager killed by a Border Patrol agent in a cross-border shooting could not sue in U.S. courts, citing implications for American foreign policy and national security.

The court’s conservatives prevailed in the 5-4 ruling in which the court for the second time considered whether relatives of foreign victims injured on foreign soil can go to court without authorization from Congress.

The case began with the death of Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca, 15, who was fatally shot by a federal agent in 2010 on the Mexican side of the wide concrete culvert that separates El Paso from Juárez, Mexico.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for his conservative colleagues, saying a respect for the separation of powers means courts should be reluctant to allow lawsuits filed by foreign victims in U.S. courts without express congressional authorization.

“Petitioners protest that ‘shooting people who are just walking down a street in Mexico’ does not involve national security, but that misses the point,” Alito wrote. “The question is not whether national security requires such conduct — of course, it does not — but whether the judiciary should alter the framework established by the political branches for addressing cases in which it is alleged that lethal force was unlawfully employed by an agent at the border.”

Alito noted that the federal government did not find that agent Jesus Mesa had violated policy or move to prosecute him for the shooting, and denied Mexico’s request that he be extradited to stand trial.

Alito was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

While Alito said filing a damages lawsuit based on a cross-border shooting “arises in a context that is markedly new,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a dissent that the majority had missed the point.

Mesa’s allegedly unlawful conduct occurred stateside, Ginsburg wrote, and no one disputes that Hernández’s parents could file if their son had been shot on U.S. soil.

“Hernández’s location at the precise moment the bullet landed should not matter one whit,” Ginsburg wrote, adding that “there is still no good reason why Hernández’s parents should face a closed courtroom door.”