Supreme Court allows immigration officials to turn away asylum seekers at the border - POLITICO

Sotomayor painted the court’s decision as a stark abandonment of people fleeing persecution, noting that U.S. asylum laws were “developed in response to the international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.”…

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/25/asylum-seekers-mexico-border-trump-administration-00975589  

US is ‘using Mexico as a garbage sink’ leading to ‘toxic crisis’, UN expert says

Mexico is facing a “toxic crisis” and has become a “garbage sink” for the US, exposing Mexican communities to dangerous pollution, a UN expert has warned...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/07/mexico-us-toxic-waste-un-special-rapporteur

 

Judge orders Trump administration to bring back DACA recipient deported to Mexico - POLITICO

In a Monday order, U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins called the deportation a "flagrant violation" of DACA's promise of protection to those who arrived in the country as minors, as well as a violation of Estrada's constitutional due process rights. Coggins, a Biden appointee, directed the administration to facilitate Estrada's return by March 30...

 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/24/daca-recipient-deportation-ruling-00841604

 

Sheinbaum tells Trump: stop illegal arms trade from the US to Mexico

"There is something that the US can help us a lot with: stop the trafficking of illegal weapons from the US to Mexico," the president of Mexico said. "If they stopped the entry of illegal weapons from the United States into Mexico, then these groups wouldn't have access to this type of high-powered weaponry to carry out their criminal activities."…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/09/mexican-cartels-guns-come-from-us-sheinbaum-trump

 

Mexican drug cartel boss ‘El Mencho’ tracked through romantic partner

While the killing may relieve pressure on the Mexican president from Trump, it will also create a cartel power vacuum. Sheinbaum has previously criticised the discredited "war on drugs" strategy, in which military action often triggers major violence only for new cartel leaders to emerge… 

 "If no one can, if the CJNG finally splinters, you have four or five different lieutenants with the manpower, the weaponry and the criminal empires to build their own fiefdoms – and that could plunge Mexico into almost record levels of violence," Dalby said…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/23/el-mencho-mexican-drug-cartel-boss-killing-violence

History Minute (034): “We take nothing by conquest… Thank God.”

Despite the horrors and dishonorable acts of the U.S. in the war against Mexico, reported in earlier History Minutes …

Quoting Zinn, with emphasis added:

Mexico surrendered. There were calls among Americans to take all of Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 1848, just took half. The Texas boundary was set at the Rio Grande; New Mexico and California were ceded. The United States paid Mexico $15 million, which led the Whig Intelligencer to conclude that "we take nothing by conquest. . . . Thank God."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org.

https://books.apple.com/book/id1046889377

Trump officials wrongly deport trans woman in violation of court order

Officials admit 'inadvertent removal' after court ruled Britania Uriostegui Rios should not be sent to Mexico…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/18/trump-mexico-deportation

History Minute #033: veterans return home from war with Mexico

Quoting Zinn:

As the veterans returned home, speculators immediately showed up to buy the land warrants given by the government. Many of the soldiers, desperate for money, sold their 160 acres for less than $50. The New York Commercial Advertiser said in June 1847: "It is a well-known fact that immense fortunes were made out of the poor soldiers who shed their blood in the revolutionary war by speculators who preyed upon their distresses. A similar system of depredation was practised upon the soldiers of the last war."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

History Minute #032: troops come home from the Mexican War

Quoting Zinn:

The glory of the victory was for the President and the generals, not the deserters, the dead, the wounded. Of the 2nd Regiment of Mississippi Rifles, 167 died of disease. Two regiments from Pennsylvania went out 1,800 strong and came home with six hundred. John Calhoun of South Carolina said in Congress that 20 percent of the troops had died of battle or sickness. The Massachusetts Volunteers had started with 630 men. They came home with three hundred dead, mostly from disease, and at the reception dinner on their return their commander, General Cushing, was hissed by his men. The Cambridge Chronicle wrote: "Charges of the most serious nature against one and all of these military officials drop daily from the lips of the volunteers."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

History Minute #031: A lieutenant writes home

Quoting Zinn:

An infantry lieutenant wrote to his parents what happened after an officer named Walker was killed in battle:

"General Lane . . . told us to "avenge the death of the gallant Walker, to . . . take all we could lay hands on". And well and fearfully was his mandate obeyed. Grog shops were broken open first, and then, maddened with liquor, every species of outrage was committed. Old women and girls were stripped of their clothing—and many suffered still greater outrages. Men were shot by dozens . . . their property, churches, stores and dwelling houses ransacked. . . . Dead horses and men lay about pretty thick, while drunken soldiers, yelling and screeching, were breaking open houses or chasing some poor Mexicans who had abandoned their houses and fled for life. Such a scene I never hope to see again. It gave me a lamentable view of human nature . . . and made me for the first time ashamed of my country."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org.

History Minute #029: report of soldier conduct in 1846

The United States takes Los Angeles by force in 1846.

Quoting Zinn:

General Taylor had moved across the Rio Grande, occupied Matamoros, and now moved southward through Mexico. But his volunteers became more unruly on Mexican territory. Mexican villages were pillaged. One officer wrote in his diary in the summer of 1846: "We reached Burrita about 5 P.M., many of the Louisiana volunteers were there, a lawless drunken rabble. They had driven away the inhabitants, taken possession of their houses, and were emulating each other in making beasts of themselves." Cases of rape began to multiply.

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute #028: Another reacts to 1840's War with Mexico

Quoting Zinn:

Posters appealed for volunteers in Massachusetts: "Men of old Essex! Men of Newburyport! Rally around the bold, gallant and lionhearted Cushing. He will lead you to victory and to glory!" They promised pay of $7 to $10 a month, and spoke of a federal bounty of $24 and 160 acres of land. But one young man wrote anonymously to the Cambridge Chronicle:

"Neither have I the least idea of "joining" you, or in any way assisting the unjust war waging against Mexico. I have no wish to participate in such "glorious" butcheries of women and children as were displayed in the capture of Monterey, etc. Neither have I any desire to place myself under the dictation of a petty military tyrant, to every caprice of whose will I must yield implicit obedience. No sir-ee! As long as I can work, beg, or go to the poor house, I won't go to Mexico, to be lodged on the damp ground, half starved, half roasted, bitten by mosquitoes and centipedes, stung by scorpions and tarantulas—marched, drilled, and flogged, and then stuck up to be shot at, for eight dollars a month and putrid rations. Well, I won't. . . . Human butchery has had its day. . . . And the time is rapidly approaching when the professional soldier will be placed on the same level as a bandit, the Bedouin, and the Thug."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute: What did working men think of the war against Mexico? (027)

Quoting:

There were demonstrations of Irish workers in New York, Boston, and Lowell against the annexation of Texas, Philip Foner reports. In May, when the war against Mexico began, New York workingmen called a meeting to oppose the war, and many Irish workers came. The meeting called the war a plot by slaveowners and asked for the withdrawal of American troops from disputed territory. That year, a convention of the New England Workingmen's Association condemned the war and announced they would "not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholder in robbing one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor."

Some newspapers, at the very start of the war, protested. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune, May 12, 1846:

We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital; we can conquer and "annex" their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson for us? Who believes that a score of victories over Mexico, the "annexation" of half her provinces, will give us more Liberty, a purer Morality, a more prosperous Industry, than we now have? . . . Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War?

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute: Frederick Douglass scornful of politicians failing to oppose the war with Mexico (026)

Quoting Zinn:

Frederick Douglass, former slave, extraordinary speaker and writer, wrote in his Rochester newspaper the North Star, January 21, 1848, of "the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion." Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes):

The determination of our slaveholding President to prosecute the war, and the probability of his success in wringing from the people men and money to carry it on, is made evident, rather than doubtful, by the puny opposition arrayed against him. No politician of any considerable distinction or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party . . . by an open and unqualified disapprobation of the war. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other.

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute: Racism — in the pulpit and Congress — tainted even opposition to the Mexican war (024)

Quoting:

The racism of [Reverend] Parker was widespread. Congressman Delano of Ohio, an antislavery Whig, opposed the war because he was afraid of Americans mingling with an inferior people who "embrace all shades of color. . . . a sad compound of Spanish, English, Indian, and negro bloods . . . and resulting, it is said, in the production of a slothful, ignorant race of beings."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute: With few exceptions, most churches supported war with Mexico. (023)

Quoting:

"The churches, for the most part, were either outspokenly for the war or timidly silent. Generally, no one but the Congregational, Quaker, and Unitarian churches spoke clearly against the war. However, one Baptist minister, the Reverend Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, gave three sermons in the university chapel in which he said that only wars of self-defense were just, and in case of unjust war, the individual was morally obligated to resist it and lend no money to the government to support it."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute: Thoreau opposes the war with Mexico (022)

Quoting Thoreau:

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart."

Quoting Zinn:

His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, "What are you doing in there?" it was reported that Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there?"

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

History Minute: Abolitionists countered that the war with Mexico was really about extending slavery (021)

Quoting:

The American Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, said the war was "waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery throughout the vast territory of Mexico." A twenty-seven-year-old Boston poet and abolitionist, James Russell Lowell, began writing satirical poems in the Boston Courier (they were later collected as the Biglow Papers). In them, a New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, spoke, in his own dialect, on the war:

Ez fer war, I call it murder,—

There you hev it plain an' flat;

I don't want to go no furder

Than my Testyment fer that. . . .

They may talk o' Freedom's airy

Tell they'er pupple in the face,—

It's a grand gret cemetary

Fer the barthrights of our race;

They jest want this Californy

So's to lug new slave-states in

To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,

An' to plunder ye like sin."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute: War with Mexico justified as a mission from God to save souls (020)

Quoting:

The New York Herald was saying, by 1847: "The universal Yankee nation can regenerate and disenthrall the people of Mexico in a few years; and we believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."

A letter appeared in the New York Journal of Commerce introducing God into the situation: "The supreme Ruler of the universe seems to interpose, and aid the energy of man towards benefiting mankind. His interposition . . . seems to me to be identified with the success of our arms. . . . That the redemption of 7,000,000 of souls from all the vices that infest the human race, is the ostensible object . . . appears manifest."

Senator H. V. Johnson said:

I believe we should be recreant to our noble mission, if we refused acquiescence in the high purposes of a wise Providence. War has its evils. In all ages it has been the minister of wholesale death and appalling desolation; but however inscrutable to us, it has also been made, by the Allwise Dispenser of events, the instrumentality of accomplishing the great end of human elevation and human happiness. . . . It is in this view, that I subscribe to the doctrine of "manifest destiny."

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org:

 

History Minute: “Racial Superiority” and greed motivated war with Mexico (019)

Quoting:

After Congress acted in May of 1846, there were rallies and demonstrations for the war in New York, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and many other places. Thousands rushed to volunteer for the army. The poet Walt Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle in the early days of the war: "Yes: Mexico must be thoroughly chastised! . . . Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!"

Accompanying all this aggressiveness was the idea that the United States would be giving the blessings of liberty and democracy to more people. This was intermingled with ideas of racial superiority, longings for the beautiful lands of New Mexico and California, and thoughts of commercial enterprise across the Pacific.

Excerpt From

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn