The Supreme Court also issued a decision limiting suits against the police by people claiming retaliatory arrests for exercising their First Amendment rights.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to decide whether the parents of a teenager killed by an American agent shooting across the Mexican border may sue him in federal court. The justices also issued a decision limiting suits by people who claim they were arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights.
The case concerning the shooting, Hernandez v. Mesa, No. 17-1678, started in 2010, when Jesus Mesa Jr., a border guard, shot a fleeing 15-year-old boy in the head, killing him. The boy, Sergio Hernández Guereca, had been playing with friends in the dry bed of the Rio Grande and was in Mexico when he was struck.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, said Sergio’s family could not sue Mr. Mesa.
“This is not a close case,” Judge Edith Jones wrote for the majority. Congress could pass a law allowing suits against federal officials by “aliens injured abroad,” she said. But without such a law, she wrote, federal courts should not “interfere with the political branches’ oversight of national security and foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court has considered the case once before, but it did not issue a definitive ruling. It is likely to do so after it hears arguments in the term that starts in October.
The central question in the case is whether Congress must authorize lawsuits like the one brought by Sergio’s parents.
In 1971, in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, the Supreme Court ruled that congressional authorization was not always needed in suits against federal officials claiming violations of constitutional rights.
