An ambient walk through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial grounds in Washington D.C.
This piece originally appeared on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
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A voter registration drive in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Oct. 5, 2024. The deadline to register to vote for Texas' March 3 primary election is Feb. 2, 2026. Changes to USPS policies may affect whether a voter registration application is processed on time if it's not postmarked by the deadline.
Gabriel Cárdenas for Votebeat
Postal Service Changes Mean Texas Voters Shouldn’t Wait To Mail Voter Registrations and Ballots
Feb 19, 2026
Texans seeking to register to vote or cast a ballot by mail may not want to wait until the last minute, thanks to new guidance from the U.S. Postal Service.
The USPS last month advised that it may not postmark a piece of mail on the same day that it takes possession of it. Postmarks are applied once mail reaches a processing facility, it said, which may not be the same day it’s dropped in a mailbox, for example.
The new policy means that even if a voter drops their mail ballot in a box by Election Day, it could be rejected if it’s not postmarked on that day. A voter registration application also could miss being postmarked by the Feb. 2 deadline.
That means it’s important to mail voter registration applications and mail ballots early, or bring election mail to a post office and request a manual postmark.
In Texas, there’s no way to register to vote online. The state requires voters to submit a voter registration application to county voter registrars in person or by mail. Mailed applications must be postmarked by Feb. 2 in order for a voter to be eligible to cast a ballot in next month’s primary election.
Mail ballots must be postmarked by Election Day and received by 5 p.m. on the following day in order to be counted.
Here’s what you need to know about the deadlines and procedures for registering and voting by mail:
When is the Texas voter registration deadline for the primary?
In order for a voter to be eligible to vote in the March 3 primary election, their voter registration application must be submitted to the county voter registrar or postmarked by Feb. 2.
Voters can register to vote at any time prior to the deadline. You can print out this form, sign it, and submit it.
What is the Texas mail-in ballot application deadline?
If you qualify to vote by mail, you must first fill out and submit a mail ballot application. For the coming March primary, all mail ballot applications must be received by the end of business on Feb. 20. That time of day varies by county.
What’s the deadline to mail in my ballot?
Election officials can tally mail-in ballots that are postmarked before 7 p.m. on March 3, which is Election Day, and received by 5 p.m. on March 4.
Can I drop it off in person instead?
Yes, but only on Election Day, when voters are permitted to drop off their mail ballot in person at the elections office. Voters are allowed to deliver only their own ballot, and must bring a photo ID. Mail-in ballots cannot be dropped off in person during the two weeks of early voting or any other time prior to Election Day.
What if I live abroad or I am a member of the military overseas?
The deadline to receive ballots from overseas voters is Monday, March 9. The carrier envelope must have a postmark showing it was in the mail by 7 p.m. on March 3 (Election Day).
For military voters who mailed ballots domestically or from overseas and who submitted a Federal Post Card Application, the deadline is also March 9. The carrier envelope does not need to have any postmark.
Deadlines are based on postmarks, which may be later than when you dropped something in the mail. was originally published by Votebeat Texas and is republished with permission.
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Messages of support are posted on the entrance of the Don Julio Mexican restaurant and bar on January 18, 2026 in Forest Lake, Minnesota. The restaurant was reportedly closed because of ICE operations in the area. Residents in some places have organized amid a reported deployment of 3,000 federal agents in the area who have been tasked with rounding up and deporting suspected undocumented immigrants
Getty Images, Scott Olson
The Many Victims of Trump’s Immigration Policy–Including the U.S. Economy
Feb 18, 2026
The first year of President Donald Trump’s second term resulted in some of the most profound immigration policy changes in modern history. With illegal border crossings having dropped to their lowest levels in over 50 years, Trump can claim a measure of victory. But it’s a hollow victory, because it’s becoming increasingly clear that his immigration policy is not only damaging families, communities, workplaces, and schools - it is also hurting the economy and adding to still-soaring prices.
Besides the terrifying police state tactics, the most dramatic shift in Trump's immigration policy, compared to his presidential predecessors (including himself in his first term), is who he is targeting. Previously, a large number of the removals came from immigrants who showed up at the border but were turned away and never allowed to enter the country. But with so much success at reducing activity at the border, Trump has switched to prioritizing “internal deportations” – removing illegal immigrants who are already living in the country, many of them for years, with families, careers, jobs, and businesses.
The Trump administration claims to be pursuing only immigrants who are criminals, the “worst of the worst.” But as of January 7, just 26 percent of those deportees in ICE detention had a criminal conviction for something other than their illegal residency status.
Instead, the White House is targeting people like business owner and father Ismael Ayuzo Sandoval. Ayuzo, the owner of the Caldera Bar and Grill in Staunton, IL, technically fit the White House target of an unauthorized immigrant with a conviction. He was charged in 2008 with driving under the influence, and in exchange for pleading guilty, paying a fine, and completing DUI classes, the conviction was not entered on his record. Hardly an example of the “worst of the worst,” by any reasonable definition.
Seventeen years after his DUI, suddenly the rules of the game changed, and he’s a Trump target. Ayuzo’s wife and neighbors testified that he worked hard, supported community causes, and was active in his daughters’ school. His lawyer says, “It is hard to understand how his deportation benefits the US. This is the type of immigrant that we should be welcoming with open arms.” But none of that mattered. Ayuzo was deported in late December.
Ismael Ayuzo Sandoval’s tragic story is just one of millions like his. Ripping these people from their lives has led to escalating, ugly incidents between ICE and local residents, including at least two homicides, as the impacted communities fight back. While ICE’s gorilla tactics didn’t hit Trump’s “million deportations in the first year” campaign promise – it removed 622,000 noncitizens, less than President Joe Biden’s 778,000 removals in 2024 -- nevertheless these deportations are part of Trump’s “shock and awe” strategy, a kind of street theater designed to scare people away from the border and even into “self-deportation.” The White House claims 1.9 million people have “self-deported” (though it refuses to provide any data to confirm those numbers), so the tactics appear to show some success.
But at what price? Given the dramatic decline in new arrivals at the border, why is it still necessary to use such inhumane, heavy‑handed, and in some cases illegal tactics by ICE and other federal officers? Why doesn’t Donald Trump declare victory and end the growing police state?
What is the goal here? Should federal policy focus more on deporting so-called internal immigrants like Ismael Ayuzo Sandoval than on new arrivals? Which immigration policy would most benefit America? Besides tearing apart families and communities, the Trump policy is having significant impacts on labor markets, a reduced worker supply, higher consumer prices, and other impacts that the economy has only begun to absorb.
Impact on the economy – is it worth it?
According to various measurements, about 5% of the total workforce – roughly 8.3 million people – are undocumented immigrants. As Trump widens the deportation net beyond illegal immigrants with criminal records to all working immigrants having a bullseye on their backs, entire industries, from construction and health care to agriculture, restaurants, caregiving, and elder care, are being damaged.
In those sectors, immigrant labor accounts for anywhere from a quarter to half of the workers. For example, nearly 2.8 million immigrants account for more than 18% of the healthcare workforce. They fill critical roles for physicians and surgeons (26%), registered nurses, dental hygienists, and home health aides (ranging from 27% to almost 40%). Migrant workers also represent about 40% of all crop farmworkers picking the nation’s food, according to the USDA, and their share of the workforce on dairy farms in some states is even higher. NPR reported back in November on increasing shortages of farmworkers, making farmers desperate to find workers and contributing to rising grocery prices,
Immigrants also make up much of the labor pool for construction jobs, from 33% of carpenters to 37% of brick masons, 47% of roofers, and 64% of plasterers. A survey by the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) conducted last summer found that, as a result of immigration enforcement, 10% of construction firms said they had lost workers due to actual or rumored ICE raids, and 20% reported those concerns caused subcontractors to lose workers. 92% of firms were struggling to fill positions. Unsurprisingly, this is driving up housing costs, with the cost of construction labor increasing twice as fast as housing materials.
Trump’s immigration czar, Stephen Miller, applauds this labor shortage, saying Americans will fill those jobs. “Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers,” says Miller, “who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”
Others scoff at Miller as being naïve. For example, Nebraska is one of the nation’s top meat producers, and with one of the worst labor shortages. For every 100 jobs, there are only 39 workers, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Al Juhnke, executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association, says, "People say, 'Well, just double or triple the pay [and] you'll get United States citizens to work.' No, you won't." Why? Because working in a meat packing plant is a hard slog.
Rury Palomino, a Peruvian-born US citizen with his own construction firm, also doesn’t buy the administration’s argument. “Contrary to whatever the government thinks,” he says, the industry is not attracting new, native-born workers. “They don’t want to come to work in construction.”
Kenny Mallick, a plumbing and heating contractor based in Gaithersburg, MD, agrees, saying, “There’s not anyone sitting on the sidelines. Unemployment is low. Where are you going to get them at?"
Mallick, who voted for Donald Trump and agrees with the president’s stance that immigrants who have committed crimes should be deported, says the current broken labor system hurts the economy and is unfair to hardworking migrants. “They’re taking risks every day by coming to work. They could be locked up and deported,” he says. “We can’t do what we do in this country without these people.” In return, he says, “we exploit the shit out of these people.”
Labor shortages were already widespread before the Trump administration launched its anti-immigrant surge. A McKinsey report found that, as of May 2024, the US had 1.5 million fewer unemployed workers than available jobs. But now it’s worse. In places where raids have been occurring, such as California, North Carolina, Georgia, Chicago, Miami, and Phoenix, as many as 75% of immigrant workers, including legal ones, have stopped showing up for work, fearful of getting swept up in the ICE net. Existing staffing shortages at nursing homes and home health businesses are increasing, leading to reduced services and higher costs.
More domino effects
Labor market experts say that the expulsion of these workers is going to have another domino effect – reducing the number of jobs for native-born Americans. Economist Michael Clemens from the Peterson Institute has found that the removal of unauthorized workers in the overall production process has “ripple effects for the jobs of everybody else in the sector — including authorized immigrants, including natives. ” A recent study in the Journal of Labor Economics found that, for every 450,000 immigrants removed from the labor force, employment of complementary production jobs for US-born males also declined by approximately 300,000, many of them high-skilled occupations.
Immigrant workers also contribute some of their wages to Social Security and Medicare, even though they do not receive benefits from those programs. In 2022, immigrants living illegally in the US paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes. The loss of this tax revenue concerns many economists since the Social Security fund is already expected to experience shortfalls by the mid-2030s.
So removing millions of existing workers, and intimidating millions more, is starting to shrink the workforce, drive up business costs and consumer prices, and reduce the economy’s productivity. By Donald Trump continuing to focus his policy on -- not just those new immigrants who show up at the border, and not just those illegal immigrants with a criminal record -- but widening the net to include millions of hard-working people, many with families, jobs and their own businesses, he runs the risk of doing great damage to the national economy, as well as to many local economies that for decades have depended on immigrant labor.
Someone remind me again – what is the goal here?
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote, and political reform director at New America. See more of his writing at his Substack newsletter DemocracySOS.
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Democrats seek a post-Trump strategy, but reliance on neoliberal economic policies may deepen inequality and voter distrust.
Getty Images, Yuichiro Chino
After Trump, Democrats Confront a Deeper Economic Reckoning
Feb 18, 2026
For a decade, Democrats have defined themselves largely by their opposition to Donald Trump, a posture taken in response to institutional crises and a sustained effort to defend democratic norms from erosion. Whatever Trump may claim, he will not be on the 2028 presidential ballot. This moment offers Democrats an opportunity to do something they have postponed for years: move beyond resistance politics and articulate a serious, forward-looking strategy for governing. Notably, at least one emerging Democratic policy group has begun studying what governing might look like in a post-Trump era, signaling an early attempt to think beyond opposition alone.
While Democrats’ growing willingness to look past Trump is a welcome development, there is a real danger in relying too heavily on familiar policy approaches. Established frameworks offer comfort and coherence, but they also carry risks, especially when the conditions that once made them successful no longer hold.
Turning to an Old Playbook
The immediate vehicle for this shift is a newly formed centrist Democratic policy group, made up largely of lawmakers associated with the party’s moderate, pro-business wing and overlapping with the New Democrat Coalition, a long-standing caucus of center-left House Democrats that promotes market-oriented growth, fiscal moderation, and bipartisan deal-making. Framing itself as an answer to voter anxiety over prices and cost-of-living pressures, the group emphasizes affordability, economic growth, and pragmatic reform. It presents itself as a governing corrective, an effort to replace permanent resistance politics with something that looks more like a governing agenda.
In practice, the emergence of this group reflects a little of both: a genuine attempt to move beyond Trump-centered politics and a reflexive return to ideas Democrats once believed worked. In that sense, it represents change shaped by institutional habit. Its aims also align broadly with the party’s emerging “Abundance” school of thought, associated with writers such as Ezra Klein, which argues that Democrats should focus less on redistribution alone and more on removing bottlenecks that constrain growth, from housing supply and infrastructure to energy and building permits. The economic framework behind much of this effort remains neoliberalism, an emphasis on market-friendly growth, fiscal restraint, and incremental reform that aims to smooth capitalism’s rough edges rather than confront its power dynamics.
This governing philosophy was most clearly embraced by leaders like Bill Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, whose electoral successes helped normalize neoliberalism as the default governing ideology for center-left parties. In both cases, neoliberalism helped their parties reclaim power and preside over periods of economic stability and political dominance. But that success proved contingent and temporary. Over time, the same model widened inequality, weakened labor, and left large segments of the electorate feeling exposed and disposable. Those unresolved grievances did not fade; they hardened, helping to pave the way for the populist backlash that followed, from the Tea Party to MAGA. The risk Democrats face is simpler: without a strong alternative framework, familiar policy approaches can seem more flexible than they really are. That makes it easier to mistake past electoral success for a solution to today’s deeper discontent.
Affordability and Its Limits
On the substance, the group is right about one thing: affordability is a real and growing problem for many ordinary Americans. Despite Trump’s rosy declarations about the economy, middle- and lower-income families continue to feel the squeeze from high prices, stagnant wages, and persistent economic uncertainty. For younger Americans in particular, the costs of housing, childcare, and education have pushed once-routine milestones, such as buying a home or starting a family, further out of reach. Wall Street may be up, but for many Americans, the rest of the economy feels stubbornly out of sync with that optimism.
Recognizing the affordability crisis, however, is not the same as being able to solve it. Neoliberalism has always been more comfortable diagnosing price pressures than confronting the deeper structural forces that produce them. Its preferred tools, market incentives, modest tax adjustments, and supply-side nudges, rest on the assumption that if growth resumes and inflation cools, affordability will eventually follow.
Today’s affordability crisis is not an accidental byproduct of otherwise healthy markets. It is rooted in structural imbalances that neoliberal governance not only failed to correct, but actively helped create. Decades of deregulation and consolidation enabled highly concentrated corporate power. The financialization of housing transformed shelter into an investment vehicle, constraining supply while driving up prices. Labor’s bargaining power was weakened by policy choices that prioritized employer flexibility, leaving workers with less leverage over wages, fewer protections on the job, and greater exposure to economic risk. And essential goods—healthcare, education, and childcare—were increasingly treated as market commodities, allowing their costs to detach from wage growth altogether.
Taken together, these dynamics show that neoliberalism does more than fall short of the moment; it helps explain what gave rise to it. By privileging efficiency, capital mobility, and market discipline over wage growth, job security, and public investment, it created an economy that appears strong on paper while leaving large portions of the population permanently exposed. When Democrats lean on this framework to address affordability, they risk offering remedies that treat symptoms while leaving the underlying conditions intact.
Why the Model Persists
At this point, my analysis shifts from outcomes to institutions. If neoliberalism no longer delivers broad economic security, the obvious question is why it continues to exert such a powerful pull on Democratic policymakers. The answer is not simply ideological inertia. Neoliberalism persists because it remains understandable to the institutions that translate economic conditions into policy and to the elites who operate within them.
Those assumptions align neatly with the metrics policymakers are trained to trust: GDP growth, stock market performance, and inflation targets. It fits comfortably within existing budget processes, regulatory frameworks, and media narratives that treat economic health as something measurable from above rather than lived from below. It produces charts, benchmarks, and talking points that signal competence, even when those signals no longer correspond to everyday experience.
This is where the deeper political danger emerges. When official indicators point upward while lived reality does not, the basic understanding between institutions and citizens about what economic success actually means erodes. Voters do not simply disagree with policymakers; they stop believing them. “The economy is strong” sounds less like reassurance and more like dismissal of valid claims. Over time, that gap fuels cynicism, resentment, and a growing susceptibility to populist narratives that promise emotional recognition rather than factual accuracy. By returning to a framework that prioritizes ideological consistency and elite consensus over how people actually experience the economy, Democrats risk reinforcing the very disconnect that helped produce the backlash they are now trying to move beyond.
What a Post-Neoliberal Governing Agenda Would Require
If Democrats are serious about moving beyond resistance politics, they will eventually have to move beyond neoliberalism as well. That does not mean abandoning markets or pursuing rigid, ideological policy agendas. It means recognizing that affordability cannot be restored through marginal adjustments alone when the underlying economic structure remains tilted against ordinary households. A post-neoliberal governing agenda would have to confront power as well as prices, rebuilding labor’s bargaining position, treating housing as shelter rather than a speculative asset, reasserting antitrust authority, and investing in public capacity where markets have repeatedly failed to deliver stability.
Just as importantly, it would require a different conception of economic success. Instead of relying on aggregate indicators that signal health from a distance, Democrats would need to ground policy in outcomes that people actually experience: secure housing, predictable costs, and a sense that personal effort still leads somewhere. That shift is less about ideology than about alignment, bringing institutional measures of success back into line with lived economic reality.
The Choice Ahead
The temptation to return to familiar economic answers is understandable. Neoliberalism offers clarity, legibility, and a comforting sense of control. It fits existing institutions and reassures donors, markets, and policymakers alike. But comfort is not the same as adequacy, and legibility is not the same as legitimacy.
As Democrats look past Trump, they face a choice that is ultimately less about tactics than about diagnosis. They can treat today’s economic anxiety as a temporary mismatch between perception and performance, or they can acknowledge it as a signal that the governing model itself needs revision. The former offers reassurance. The latter demands imagination.
Trump may be leaving the ballot, but the conditions that made his politics possible are not disappearing on their own. If Democrats want to govern in the post-Trump era rather than simply survive it, they will need to do more than revive old answers. They will need to build an economic narrative and an institutional response that people can once again recognize as their own.
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U.S. President Donald Trump on February 13, 2026 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
(Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
Autocracy for Dummies
Feb 18, 2026
Everything Donald Trump has said and done in his second term as president was lifted from the Autocracy for Dummies handbook he should have committed to memory after trying and failing on January 6, 2021, to overthrow the government he had pledged to protect and serve.
This time around, putting his name and face to everything he fancies and diverting our attention from anything he touches as soon as it begins to smell or look bad are telltale signs that he is losing the fight to control the hearts and minds of a nation he would rather rule than help lead.
To be sure, in the five years he has spent in the White House, Donald Trump has come closer to bringing autocratic rule to the United States than any previous president. No doubt, he will keep at it until his term in office ends.
For however long that is and well past the time his second term ends, Donald Trump will remain Americans’ avatar for all things autocratic. But his successes won’t come close to those of other past and present autocrats.
True, the list of bright shiny objects catching his attention both internationally and domestically has been impressive. His branding of things already built, eligible for a teardown, or in desperate need of overhauling under his careful gaze has been exhausting and distracting. But tearing things apart wasn’t a downpayment on building something better and longer lasting. It was the only thing he was interested in and good at doing.
The reason why Donald Trump’s second presidency is already showing serious signs of fraying is that he has ignored the two most important lines aspiring autocrats can’t stop themselves from crossing.
They act as if they are at the center of a universe they can push around and shape to their liking; but the breadth and audacity of their ambitions and penchant for corruption exceed their ability to carry out their grandest designs.
It’s no less true for Vladmir Putin and Donald Trump today as it was in the past for the likes of
Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler. In the case of Hitler, for instance, had he really been serious about building a thousand-year Reich, the late political scientist Sam Sharp observed, he wouldn’t have moved around so much in the first twelve.
Donald Trump’s attention-grabbing threats to “take over” Greenland, make Canada our 51st state, run Venezuela by proxy, bomb Iran into submission, or turn a post-apocalyptic Gaza into a tourist mecca are more scattered and fleeting than anything that Hitler had in mind to do. But the TACO-infused confusion spilling from Donald Trump’s brain makes his proposed do-overs look sillier and more delusional than they are dangerous.
Then there’s this.
Autocrats don’t fare well when the people they try to bully have had lots of practice and success at saying “no” to their would-be overlords.
Donald Trump has shown no familiarity or regard for this crucial piece of our history. Americans are, for better and worse, well-practiced in showing a cranky and sometimes violent face to leaders who push us harder than we like into places we don’t want to go.
The public anger on display in Minneapolis and elsewhere, limited as it may be, is a preamble to a history that’s already been written. We might dislike all the unrest, decry the loss of people’s lives and property, and scratch our heads at the modest changes our rebelliousness leaves behind. But it is the very evanescent quality of the hard and sometimes dangerous work undertaken by agitated Americans that keeps our unrest fresh and relevant.
Not long from now, the assault on our civic lives and constitutional norms occasioned by Trump’s anti-immigration campaign will be remembered for the same reason we should celebrate the insurrection and attempted coup d’état Trump provoked on January 6, 2021. They were dramatic and conspicuous failures.
We won’t have to defame the men and women who tried to take over the Capital or who want to throw out all our illegal immigrants to recognize that their actions were as historically unprecedented as they were incompetently executed.
The legacy of the everyday Americans protesting ICE arrests, incarcerations, deportations, and killings will be their restraint and programmatic modesty. The only thing they will have forced the rest of us to do is think about ideals we had come to take for granted but now, thanks to the trouble they’re making on the streets of American cities, we are practicing again.
The public fights over Trump’s anti-immigration policies are shocking. But they also make us reflect upon a long history of taking in people we weren’t expecting or thrilled to have here and letting them stay long enough to do better than expected for themselves and for the rest of us.
It would be good to keep all this in mind in the run up to our 250th birthday party. The irony that we would have President Trump to thank for reminding us about these important lessons is a pill I am ready and happy to swallow.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.
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