Will the Supreme Court Stand Up for an Unarmed Mexican Teenager Shot by a Border Agent?

At stake is whether people will still be able to sue federal officials for violating the Constitution.

by Linda Greenhouse

'Earlier this year, aides to President Trump, who was raging in frustration at his inability to control the country’s border with Mexico, talked him out of the notion of simply shooting migrants. That would be illegal, the aides pointed out.

I was incredulous this month when I read the article in The Times recounting this incident. Then I remembered that the Supreme Court will soon hear a case about an actual cross-border shooting of a Mexican citizen by a Border Patrol agent. The unarmed shooting victim was not a would-be migrant. He was standing on the Mexican side of the 270-foot-wide cement culvert that separates El Paso and Juarez. He had made no attempt to climb the fence on the United States side. Rather, he had been playing in the culvert with his friends, who were running up the American side, touching the fence, and running back down. He was 15 years old. The agent’s bullet hit him in the face and killed him.

The killing of Sergio Hernandez took place in 2010. Obviously, responsibility can’t be laid on the Trump administration. It was the Obama administration’s Department of Justice that decided in 2012 that “on these particular facts,” the action of the agent, Jesus Mesa Jr., didn’t warrant criminal prosecution.

But the Trump administration is in the case now. The question for the Supreme Court is no longer whether Mr. Mesa should be prosecuted but whether Sergio’s parents are entitled to sue him for damages for violating their son’s constitutional rights to due process and to be free from an unreasonable seizure. Or, in the eerily detached language of Solicitor General Noel Francisco’s brief urging the justices to affirm the lower court’s dismissal of the suit, the question is whether to permit a lawsuit for damages from “an injury suffered by an alien abroad in a cross-border shooting by a U.S. Border Patrol agent.” The answer, the current administration claims, should be no.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/opinion/supreme-court-mexico-border-patrol.html?