EJ MONTINI

Does justice end at border for grieving Mexican mother?

EJ Montini
opinion columnist
Araceli Rodríguez carries a makeshift coffin for her son during a march in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico Friday October 10, 2014. It’s been two years since 16-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was shot by a Border Patrol agent who fired through the fence in Nogales.

Back in 2012, 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was shot 10 times in the back and head by a Border Patrol agent firing through the fence into Mexico.

There reportedly had been calls about drug smugglers, and claims that rocks were being thrown. Rodriguez was said to be walking home in Nogales, Mexico, after having played basketball with friends when he was shot.

In Tucson on Tuesday attorneys with the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project will ask U.S. District Court Chief Judge Raner Collins to allow a lawsuit filed by the boy's mother to continue. Araceli Rodriguez filed a lawsuit against the agent who fired the shots. The agent's attorneys want the case dismissed. It begs the question, do U.S. Constitutional protections extend to someone like Rodriguez, a Mexican national standing on Mexican soil who died outside U.S. borders?

Lawyers on the case believe it may take years to resolve and go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Arizona Republic Reporter Bob Ortega has doggedly followed this story since it happened.

He and reporter Rob O'Dell scoured thousands of records for an Arizona Republicinvestigation and discovered that Border Patrol agents who use deadly force face few repercussions.

Law enforcement and civil rights apparently can be sketchy concepts at the border.

If Mexican authorities can't investigate gunshots that originate in the U.S. and U.S. officials have no jurisdiction over a gunshot victim whose body is in Mexico it seems like little can be done to root out the truth about what happened.

That's where the judges come in.

The mother Rodriguez brought the lawsuit under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Her lawyers say it's necessary "to hold accountable the agents who shot and killed her youngest son."

The boy's mother has promised to never give up on the case, no matter how long it takes.

She told Ortega, "I want to look the agent who shot him in the face and ask him why he did it."