UPDATE (March 4, 2025, 1:26 p.m. ET): After Tuesday’s hearing, NBC News reported that the Supreme Court “appeared likely to rule against the Mexican government over a lawsuit seeking to hold U.S. gun makers accountable for an epidemic of violence that officials in Mexico say can be traced to their products.”
While President Donald Trump has made a point of going after drug cartels, the Mexican government says U.S. gunmakers should be held liable for violence caused by their weapons in Mexico. The Supreme Court is about to hear arguments over whether Mexico can press its novel $10 billion claim.
It’s not a Second Amendment case before the court, which has sided with gun rights in recent years, but Mexico might face a skeptical bench all the same Tuesday.
The legal questions presented to the justices are:
- Whether the production and sale of firearms in the U.S. are a “proximate cause” of alleged injuries to the Mexican government stemming from violence committed by Mexican drug cartels.
- And whether that production and sale amounts to “aiding and abetting” illegal firearms trafficking because firearm companies allegedly know that some of their products are unlawfully trafficked.
Represented by Noel Francisco, a former Trump solicitor general, the gunmakers argue that Mexico’s claim is too attenuated because it’s based on “an eight-step causal chain — peppered by independent criminal actors and derivative sovereign harms — to try to link the lawful production and sale of firearms within the United States to the chaos ravaging Mexico courtesy of its drug cartels.” On the aiding and abetting point, they say the lawsuit is simply a challenge to “routine business practices.”
But Mexico argues that the gunmakers “deliberately sell their firearms in large quantities to known red-flag dealers” and “cultivate a market for their firearms in Mexico through design and marketing decisions.” And rather than simply arguing against routine business practices, Mexico alleges the companies “engage in unlawful behavior by intentionally facilitating the unlawful export of their firearms into Mexico through red-flag dealers and abnormal sales.”
The companies appealed to the justices after they lost in the federal appeals court. In that ruling last year, a panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Mexico’s lawsuit wasn’t barred by a federal law that otherwise insulates the firearms industry. The panel noted that Mexico has strict gun laws but that gun violence increased there after the U.S. ended its assault weapons ban in 2004. Mexico’s complaint — against seven manufacturers and one distributor — detailed “a steady and growing stream of illegal gun trafficking from the United States into Mexico, motivated in large part by the demand of the Mexican drug cartels for military-style weapons,” the appellate ruling recounted. In turn, Mexico says it has suffered increased costs for medical, mental health and other services for victims and their families; increased costs for law enforcement and its judicial system; and diminished property values and business revenues. Even the appellate ruling in Mexico’s favor emphasized that it was only deciding that that government’s case was legally sufficient to move forward at a preliminary stage of litigation, and that whether the country could ultimately support its claims “remains to be seen.” But ahead of Tuesday’s oral arguments in Washington, it remains to be seen whether Mexico’s case can move forward at all. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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