Headlines August 8, 2025 from Democracy Now!

Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn says the FBI has granted his request to track down and arrest more than 50 Democratic state lawmakers who left the state of Texas to block a vote on the GOP’s new congressional map, which could allow Republicans to win up to five additional congressional seats in the midterm elections.

On Wednesday, Texas legislators were evacuated from a hotel in Chicago after a bomb threat. Police did not find a device.

President Trump is calling for a new census that would take the unprecedented step of excluding undocumented immigrants for the first time. As mandated by the Constitution, the census is conducted every 10 years and counts all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status, since the 14th Amendment requires the “whole number of persons in each state” to be included. It’s unclear whether Trump will attempt to move up the census from 2030 to an earlier date.

The Justice Department has hired a January 6 rioter who was seen on bodycam footage encouraging rioters to kill police officers at the Capitol. Jared Wise is now a senior adviser and counselor to Ed Martin, the director of the DOJ’s so-called Weaponization Committee, which was established by President Trump to go after his political enemies. The footage, obtained by NPR, was shown during Wise’s trial earlier this year — before Trump pardoned him along with about 1,500 Capitol riot defendants.

Jared Wise: “You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo. You can’t see it, because you’re chasing your pension, right? Your pension, your retirement, right? That’s what runs your life, your retirement.”

Unidentified: “And the sad thing is they’re not even going to get their pension because it’s going to be worthless.”

Jared Wise: “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Yeah! [Bleep] them! Yeah! Kill ’em! Yeah!”

The Trump administration has forced out more FBI officials who investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The purge includes Steven Jensen, the head of the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office. Jensen led a domestic terrorism unit that investigated the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Also fired is Brian Driscoll, who briefly served as acting FBI director at the beginning of the second Trump administration. Driscoll resisted demands that he turn over the names of FBI agents previously assigned to January 6 probes. And FBI special agent Walter Giardina was fired. He was a member of the team that investigated Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro’s work to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

The Trump administration is set to use military bases for its mass deportation operation, tapping Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, to house 1,000 immigrants. ICE says the facility will begin accepting detainees starting on August 17 and will expand to 5,000 beds. The El Paso Times reports that at full capacity, Fort Bliss would become the largest immigration detention facility in the U.S.

The actor Dean Cain, who rose to stardom for portraying Superman in a 1990s TV series, said Wednesday he will join ICE, as the agency struggles to recruit and retain enough people to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans. This week, the Department of Homeland Security removed age limits for new hires; it’s also offering $50,000 bonuses and student loan forgiveness to new recruits.

In Los Angeles, activists are calling for a 24-hour boycott next Tuesday of Target, Walmart, McDonald’s and other companies they say are complicit in Trump’s mass deportation efforts. The boycott follows an ICE raid at a Home Depot parking lot this week. Angelica Salas is the executive director of the Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights.

Angelica Salas: “While we’re asking you not to participate and purchase in certain corporations that have been complicit in this enforcement, we’re also asking you to support street vendors and support immigrant businesses that are suffering right now in many of the neighborhoods in which many of these raids have happened. So we’re asking you to take action on the 12th [of August], to mobilize in the streets, to use your economic power, especially our immigrant construction workers, not to purchase at Home Depot on that day, and to send a message that we will not accept this terror on our community.”

A federal judge has ordered Florida to halt construction at a notorious ICE jail in the remote Everglades for at least 14 days, citing environmental concerns. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s office said in response that immigrant detainees would remain at the immigration detention camp, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” and that the ruling would have no impact on deportation efforts.

After threatening a federal takeover of Washington, D.C., President Trump has ordered federal law enforcement agents to be deployed to the city. This comes as President Trump claimed that crime in the capital was “totally out of control” after a former DOGE staffer was assaulted during an attempted carjacking. In recent years, crime rates in D.C. have fallen sharply.

CNN is reporting that Vice President JD Vance met with top Justice Department officials Wednesday to discuss the Jeffrey Epstein case. The meeting was reportedly set to take place at Vance’s Washington, D.C., home but was moved to the White House amid intense media coverage. CNN’s reporting directly contradicts Vice President Vance’s denial that officials had huddled behind closed doors to discuss Epstein. The gathering reportedly included Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, who discussed the need to craft a unified response to the Epstein scandal and emerging details of Trump’s longstanding friendship with the dead serial sex trafficker.

President Trump has signed an executive order broadening the ways people can invest in the most common type of U.S. retirement accounts. Under Trump’s order, 401(k) retirement plans can now include private equity, real estate, cryptocurrency and other alternative investments. Prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, including the $TRUMP meme coin, surged as Trump signed the order. Blackstone CEO and Trump backer Stephen Schwarzman once told investors it was a “dream” of the private equity industry to draw upon 401(k) retirement accounts.

The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it will bar transgender service members with up to 18 years of experience from applying for early retirement — and will instead force them out of the military with only lump-sum separation payments. Shannon Minter of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights told Reuters, “This is just betrayal of a direct commitment made to these service members.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs said Wednesday it’s canceling collective bargaining agreements for most of its 377,000 unionized workers, citing national security reasons.