The parents of a 15-year-old Mexican teenager shot by the U.S. Border Guard will not be able to sue the agent who killed their son, as the Supreme Court in Washington decided Tuesday. The same border that the agent's shots went through is the one that prevents the victim's parents from seeking justice.
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Shot from the United States, killed in Mexico
The hottest border between Mexico and the United States
A divided Supreme has decided, by five votes to four, that Sergio Hernández Guereca lacked constitutional protection against the excessive use of force, because he was in Mexico. If he had been on the other side, in Texas, next to the agent Jesús Mesa who shot him, his parents could have denounced him.
"A shooting across the border is by definition an international incident," explained Judge Samuel Alito, editor of the ruling. "A demand for a shooting across the border has implications for international relations and national security." Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has voted against along with the other three judges appointed by Democratic administrations, has defended in her discrepancy brief that the shooting occurred on the US side of the border, so that there is no room for Conservative majority concerns about applying US law in foreign territory.
"Unfortunately, Hernández's death is not an isolated incident," Judge Ginsburg has written, recalling "a report of 800 complaints of alleged physical, verbal or sexual abuse of Border Guard agents between 2009 and 2012." The ruling is announced on the same day that President Trump, on an official trip in India, has lashed out at Judges Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor and has argued that they should challenge themselves in cases related to him for his alleged bias against him.
On the fateful day of 2010, Sergio Hernández was playing with three friends in the dry bed of the Rio Grande that separates the cities of El Paso (United States) and Juárez (Mexico). They challenged each other to run across the unmarked border, touch the fence on the American side and run back to the Mexican side. Agent Jesús Mesa arrested one of the young men for illegally crossing the border, but Hernandez escaped and ran to the Mexican side. Then, Mesa took out his gun and fired about 18 meters away, killing Hernandez with a shot in the head.
The US authorities concluded that Agent Mesa fired in self-defense, in response to the stones thrown at him by an alleged group of smugglers to which they said the young man belonged. But a video released shortly after showed that Mesa was not being attacked and shot several times against Hernandez, who was unarmed and threw nothing at the agent. The Mexican prosecution accused Mesa of homicide, but the United States rejected the extradition. Then the parents sued, but the courts dismissed their case alleging, it has been made firm Tuesday, that constitutional protection against the use of excessive force does not extend to foreigners.