U.S. Border Patrol Agent's Shooting of Mexican Teen Heads to Supreme Court Michael Doyle - McClatchyDC
go to original February 17, 2017

Photo taken on June 10, 2010, showing relatives of Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, a young man shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent while in Mexican territory, at his funeral. (EFE)

Recurring border tensions between the United States and Mexico will soon captivate the Supreme Court, as justices consider the case of a Texas-based U.S. Border Patrol agent who shot and killed an unarmed teenager standing on Mexican soil.

In a fight that pits the Mexican government against the Trump administration, justices on Tuesday must sort through whether the U.S. Constitution covered 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez when he was horsing around in a culvert separating El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. Hernandez was on the Mexican side of the invisible borderline when he was shot in the head.

“Like countless children before them,” Hernandez family attorneys wrote, “Sergio and his friends were playing a game in which they dared each other to run up the culvert’s northern incline, touch the U.S. fence and then scamper back down to the bottom.”

The family, supported by the Mexican government, immigrant advocacy groups and others, wants to sue the agent, Jesus Mesa Jr., who shot Hernandez on June 7, 2010. Mesa, supported by the Justice Department, contends the shooting was justified and that, more critically, the constitutional prohibition on unjustified use of deadly force did not apply.

“The United States clearly exercises no power or authority over the territory where Hernandez was standing when he was shot,” Mesa’s El Paso-based attorneys wrote in a legal brief.

Mesa’s attorneys will share time during the hourlong oral argument with a career Justice Department lawyer, who will reinforce the case that, as the department put it in a brief, “aliens injured abroad” cannot sue individual federal officers.

The Mexican government hired a U.S. law firm to file a competing legal brief supporting the Hernandez family in which it contended that “shootings at the border are, unfortunately, far from a rare occurrence.”

From October 2010 to August 2016, Customs and Border Patrol officers reported 243 incidents of lethal force involving firearms, most along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, according to government records cited in the Mexican government’s brief.

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