The Supreme Court ruled against parents of a Mexican teenager who was fatally shot across the border, saying they couldn’t sue the border patrol agent that killed him.

In 2010, 15-year-old Sergio Hernández Güereca ran back to the Mexico side of the border when the agent, Jesus Mesa Jr., shot him in the head. Mesa was on the U.S. side and Hernandez was on the Mexico side.

The justices who voted to toss the lawsuit said that it should be up to Congress to authorize lawsuits against federal agents.

Those opposed dissented, arguing that Mesa should be held responsible for his actions and the only reason he wasn’t was because Hernández was on Mexican soil when he was struck.

Mexican Teen Fatally Shot

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the parents of a Mexican teenager who was killed in a cross-border shooting cannot sue the border patrol agent that struck him.

The case began in 2010 when Sergio Hernández Güereca, 15, was with his friends along the culvert that divides El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. The teenager’s family said that the group was playing a game where they dared each other to run up to the unmarked border, touch the U.S. side, and then return to the Mexico side. Alternatively, Jesus Mesa Jr., the border patrol agent, claimed that the kids were throwing rocks at him in an attempt to illegally cross the border.

During one of the runs across, Mesa detained one of the boys. Hernández was able to run away and make it back to the Mexico side, but Mesa drew his gun and fired shots, hitting the teenager in the face and killing him.

Following the boy’s death, Hernández’s family attempted to sue Mesa based on the 1971 case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. In this case, which dealt with an unconstitutional home search, the Supreme Court ruled that lawsuits could be filed against federal law enforcement officers for constitutional violations, even though no statute has authorized this.

Split Higher Court Ruling

The Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision was split, though it ultimately ruled that the family couldn’t sue Mesa in a 5-4 vote.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority, saying that the Hernández vs. Mesa case was rooted in a different context than the Bivens case, and thus the implied rights from the 1971 ruling should not be extended easily here.

“Unlike any previously recognized Bivens claim, a cross-border shooting claim has foreign relations and national security implications,” Alito wrote.

“In addition, Congress has been notably hesitant to create claims based on allegedly tortious conduct abroad,” Alito wrote. “Because of the distinctive characteristics of cross-border shooting claims, we refuse to extend Bivens into this new field.”

Alito, backed by Justices John G. Roberts Jr., Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh, said that it should be up to Congress to decide the scope of these matters, not the courts.

Additionally, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch called on the court to overrule the Bivens decision entirely in a concurring opinion.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. They argued that the lawsuit should not be thrown out and that the only reason Mesa wasn’t facing consequences was because Hernandez happened to be on the Mexico side when he was shot.

“The only salient difference here: the fortuity that the bullet happened to strike Hernández on the Mexican side of the embankment,” Ginsburg wrote. “But Hernández’s location at the precise moment the bullet landed should not matter one whit.”

“Mesa’s allegedly unwarranted deployment of deadly force occurred on United States soil,” she added. “It scarcely makes sense for a remedy trained on deterring rogue officer conduct to turn upon a happenstance subsequent to the conduct—a bullet landing in one half of a culvert, not the other.”