The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that a Border Patrol agent who fired from US soil and fatally shot a child on the Mexican side of the border can't be sued by his family.

In a 5–4 ruling, the court's five conservative justices agreed with the government and upheld a lower court's decision to dismiss the case against the agent because 15-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca wasn't on US soil when he was killed. The court's four liberal justices dissented.

The court's decision not only bars Hernandez's family from suing Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa for damages but also makes it harder for all foreign nationals to sue federal officers for civil rights violations.

The case is centered on the 2010 cross-border fatal shooting of Hernandez, who was in a concrete culvert that separates El Paso, Texas, and the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez.

Hernandez's family said the teenager was playing a game with his friends running across the culvert to touch the fence on the US side of the border and running back into Mexico. Mesa said Hernandez and his friends were trying to enter the US without authorization and had thrown rocks at him.