When you think the Trump Administration has hit Peak Stoopid, it always manages to outdo itself. Today’s example is the ICE raid on a Hyundai-LG Energy Solutions facility in Georgia, in which Korean workers, many of them management types or specialists, were hauled away in wrist and some even in ankle chains, as if they were violent thugs who needed to be restrained. As we’ll explain, if the Administration is to get anywhere with its reindustraialization fantasy, it needs to bring in skilled foreign workers at the technical, supervisory, and managerial levels. Good luck with that now.
Mind you, as we will also explain, this factory had had a bad safety record, including deaths, and there are allegations that some of the construction workers were Koreans brought in on visas that did not permit manual labor. So Hyundai was not doing the best job of running this startup and if Administration charges are borne out, may have been been abusing these low-level workers. However, a significant number of the expats were technicians and seasoned supervisors.
🚨BREAKING: South Korea is FURIOUS that Trump deported 450 Korean workers during an ICE raid of the Hyundai battery plant in GA.
The country invested over $1 TRILLION in U.S. factories – and now they’re questioning it all.
Trump is a f*cking idiot.
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) September 9, 2025
The open question is what this self-sabotage implies about Trump priorities. It’s not hard to surmise that normalizing violent repression is more important than any other aim. And if one is cynical, the reason for targeting a Korean plant is that there would be less of a reaction to hauling off individuals with more social status than, say, workers at meatpacking plants, if they were foreign. In other words, this is moving up the food chain in terms of who the authoritarians are targeting.
Let’s first look at the raid and then its implications. From CNN:
More than 500 federal, state and local agents participated in the operation that ended with the arrest of 475 people in Ellabell, approximately 25 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. The small community was shaken by what was the largest raid so far in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown on US workplaces.
Let’s stop and point out that this is a huge show of force. CNN focused on Latinos included in the arrests, likely due to the ability to find some family members who could provide more detail. However:
The majority of those held are South Korean nationals, [Steven] Schrank [special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Georgia and Alabama] said, adding he did not have a breakdown of the nationalities of those arrested. Over 300 of the people arrested were South Korean, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Cho Hyun said on Saturday.
The CNN story features Schrank asserting the detainees had overstayed visas or did not have them. One of the CNN interviewees disputed that, as have others. From Associated Press:
A lawyer for several workers detained at a Hyundai factory in Georgia says many of the South Koreans rounded up in the immigration raid are engineers and equipment installers brought in for the highly specialized work of getting an electric battery plant online.
Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who represents four of the detained South Korean nationals, told The Associated Press on Monday that many were doing work that is authorized under the B-1 business visitor visa program. They had planned to be in the U.S. for just a couple of weeks and “never longer than 75 days,” he said.
“The vast majority of the individuals that were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that were South Korean were either there as engineers or were involved in after-sales service and installation,” Kuck said.
And to provide more background, the plant was under construction. These experts were to help it get up and running…so it could employ Americans:
🧵
Something folks are missing here: this raid wasn’t about “illegals taking American jobs.” It was about ICE storming the Hyundai–LG battery plant in Georgia, part of a $7.6B Metaplant project that isn’t even operational yet.They dragged out more than 300 South Korean… pic.twitter.com/7IQuGisEYg
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) September 7, 2025
Now it turns out that the raid looks like the result of a MAGA stunt gone bad. Rolling Stone was fast out with the story:
Tori Branum is a Marine Corps veteran, firearms instructor, and Republican candidate for Georgia’s 12th congressional district.
She’s also a proud “America first” supporter of President Donald Trump. On Thursday, as agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security were still carrying out a raid at a Hyundai plant in rural Bryan County, just outside the district Branum is running to serve, she expressed pride in something else: her purported role in causing the raid, which resulted in the arrest of 450 people, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
There had been safety problems, including three deaths, and OSHA had multiple investigations open at the plant. Two of the deaths were forklift accidents. There are also claims from the Administration that some (many?) of the Korean workers bought in on short-term business visas were doing performing manaul labor, which is not allowed on those visa categories.
ICE announced an investigation into “human trafficking” at the site, which sounds like a stretch until you understand that, per labor reporter Mike Elk, that:
During previous Democratic administrations, workplace safety officials in federal courts routinely argued that “human trafficking” existed when an immigrant worker’s legal status was tied to an employer that was asking them to violate labor laws. Due to workers’ dependence on their employer for their immigration status and in violation of labor laws, workplace safety advocates have argued that such practices constitute “human trafficking.”
[Labor reporter and South Korea expert] Tim Shorrock says that he doesn’t necessarily trust the Trump Administration’s spin on the raid, but does say there is reason for concern if workers on ESTA visas were illegally forced into dangerous construction work.
“That’s a situation of exploitation,” says Shorrock, who says that unions in both Korea and the United States should be paying close attention to the working conditions at Hyundai’s plant in Savannah, Georgia.
One has to wonder about the concern for the workers at this plant, when as we recounted many years ago, abuse of H1-B visa working as IT contractors is endemic. That is not to say labor abuses at foreign-owned plants are not serious, but that enforcement this selective looks sus.
And of course there is another side to this story:
1/ Something that's not being reported much re: ICE crackdown at Hyundai-LG Georgia battery factory: Korean companies investing billions cannot get proper visas, are then criminalised for bringing skilled workers to fill gaps American labour cannot.
Sentiment is one of betrayal. https://t.co/r3q1mZrMvA
— Raphael Rashid (@koryodynasty) September 6, 2025
But even if the ICE version of events is closer to the whole truth than the Hyundai version, the Administration’s apparent keen need to put this plant crackdown as an ICE raid looks to be yet another backfire, in that Team Trump seems to understand only domination, and not calibrated but effective use of power.
If the concern was abuse of relatively short-term work visas, how about calling management and saying, “You have a month to clean this up, otherwise ICE will pay a visit”? Recall I worked extensively with the Japanese in their heyday back in the 1980s. It was well known among the foreign firms operating in Tokyo that the Ministry of Finance could (and would) completely paralyze their operations by sending in a team for a MoF audit (the first step was to blow a whistle loudly; the white-gloved team would run in and slap seals on all the files and halt all work on personal computers). And therefore a threat of a MoF audit did lead to compliance. In other words, there were likely “show of authority” moves available that would have gotten the attention of Hyuandai management that wouldn’t have given Team Trump yet another press clip that could have brought the operation to heel.
And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training.
The Financial Times has as its lead story a href=”https://archive.is/3dVbf” rel=”nofollow”>Workers in shackles, companies in shock: Georgia raid spooks foreign investors in US. From its account:
Multinational companies with foreign employees in the US have sought legal advice and paused some travel after federal authorities arrested hundreds of South Korean workers at an electric-car battery plant in Georgia last week.
The detention of 475 people, mostly South Korean nationals, at the Hyundai-LG Energy Solution factory under construction in Ellabell, Georgia, last week represented a new front in the White House’s broad crackdown on illegal immigration.
Video released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed people shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist outside the plant, which forms part of the Trump administration’s push to expand manufacturing in the country. ICE said that in its execution of a federal warrant it found individuals were “fraudulently using visitors’ visas”.
Let’s stop here. Do you seriously think these workers from South Korea got their own visas? The few times I needed a visa to travel for work, my employer got it. Oh, and I was told by McKinsey to lie in one case too, on a four-month assignment to the UK, and claim I was there on holiday. So why weren’t employers read the riot act instead?
Back to the story:
Other immigration lawyers said that they believed many of the arrests were of individuals who entered the US on so-called B-1 visas used by foreigners for business meetings, or had arrived under a related visa waiver programme. Many of those arrested were working for subcontractors….
But the rules around these terms of entry have been somewhat ambiguous. “It may be an aggressive use of the B-1 category for business meetings, or it could be an over-reach by ICE, and they may have taken a more restrictive view of what’s allowed as a business visitor than what’s in the regulations,” said Dan Maranci, a partner at WR Immigration, a law firm.
Charles Kuck, founding partner of Kuck Baxter, an Atlanta-based immigration law firm, said he was representing some of the people arrested in Ellabell. Many of the Korean workers were in the US under a visa provision that allows vendors to a US business to help install equipment, he said….
Tami Overby, an international trade consultant with DGA Group and former president of the US-Korea Business Council, said that big foreign companies had halted some travel to the US as they review the legal ramifications of the Georgia crackdown.
“When this happened, it was so unexpected and so shocking to see hundreds of Korean workers looking like criminals,” she said. “Those videos and those photos have played not just in Korea but in Japan, in Taiwan, in other trading partners of the US who also have large investment going on in the US.”….
DGA Group’s Overby said that the industries most at risk of being swept up in a dragnet over business visitor visas were those that bring in local talent. The need is particularly acute in sectors where US workers lack the technical expertise compared with those in Asia, such as battery manufacturing, shipbuilding and semiconductors…
Taiwanese executives said the raid sent a chill through the foreign business community. “Maybe Trump did it for some political reason, to send a message to the South Korean government,” said one. “The US government has become very different and unpredictable now.”
And this raid happened as US-South Korean negotiations over $350 billion of South Korean investment were already starting to go pear-shaped. From Bloomberg:
Speaking at a forum on Tuesday, Kim Yong-beom, director of national policy at South Korea’s presidential office, said Seoul has been emphasizing to US officials that it cannot accept the same terms as Japan’s $550 billion investment pledge finalized last week, citing the disparity in the size of the two economies and the potential repercussions on the foreign exchange market….
The $350 billion fund is a central pillar of the trade deal that preserved a 15% tariff on imports from South Korea, but the two countries remain divided over how the fund will operate. Kim said last month that the investment pledge would be structured mainly as loan guarantees rather than direct capital injections.
Mind you, there is yet no sign that this agreement won’t get done, but the US and Japan found it difficult to get to a detailed memorandum.
And there are forms of possible backlash:
In response to the ICE raid at the Hyundai plant in Georgia that resulted in detaining around 300 South Koreans, one lawmaker in Seoul suggests looking into U.S. nationals teaching English on a tourist visa in S. Koreahttps://t.co/A6IUQieyub
— Hyunsu Yim (@hyunsuinseoul) September 8, 2025
So yet again, to invoke a saying based on Sun Tsu’s teachings, “Tactics with no strategy is the noise before the defeat.”
They are doing similar to Australians on working visas, the E-3 ones from the free trade agreement. You now have to come back to Australia every 2 years instead of any old consulate.
Everyone got lazy about the terms of their visas which were made pretty vague in the details but new black letter interpretations have been made.
I have quite a lot of experience of travelling overseas for work and it has been my experience that I have always had to sort out my own visa. That comes down to several reasons. Travel and HR departments regularly have no clue what is required. So you have to try and work it out yourself or if they do tell you what is required they get it wrong. I’m certain I’ve worked illegally in certain countries due to misunderstanding requirements or being given the wrong advice. I’ve certainly been told when i don’t have an answer to questions in a visa application to make it up as it doesn’t matter.
What has also made this worse us that many travel policies try and put more and more of thr cost onto staff. So you are expected to pay for more and more of the requirements up front and then claim it back. That is pretty standard.
And lastly a lot of work I have done tends to be very short notice dealing with emergency situations. Contact a travel separtment eith requirements and you may not get a response for 24 hours or mote. Especially as many travel departments have moved to India and are on a completely different time zone. And often you don’t have time to wait for any response.
As for getting temporary skilled workers into the US, it is a nightmare. One of our clients needed someone at very short notice to deal with an emerging and potential very dangerous situation on an offshore oil and gas project that was being commissioned. It took over 3 months to get it. And it turned out the situation was even more serious than initially thought. It could have had a major impact.
Did you ever work for a large multinational? I have never heard of anyone at a bigger scale of operation than digital nomad or small firm employee sorting out their own visa.
I worked at a EU-based multinational here in the states. While the situation for executives may have been different, lower-level workers were on their own for renewal of work visas. Back then (it may be the same today, IDK) renewals had to be completed out of the country. Most of my ex-pat coworkers would do it back home while on vacation but a few had to make emergency trips to Canada to get the visa.
My data sets are US and Japanese. I can’t imagine it would happen in either.
From the UK, Kodak and a no-longer-extant large biotech got me the visas I needed (B1-B2, H-1B). A small startup also got a B1-B2 expedited for me – motorcycle couriers and all that jazz.
Every company I’ve worked for has been a multinational in the oil and gas/energy industry.
And people I know at other companies have had similar experiences. For established long term jobs it can be different. But anything short term, short notice or one off, it is generally a case of you are on your own. If lucky you would get some advice, though often that advice was wrong. Generally it was a case of talking to colleagues to see what was required for each country.
Ny general experience has been flights are paid for, anything else travel related is out of pocket and claimed back.
Short term is a contract, not a job. I am referring to employees.
Yes i was an employee. Always have been. I’m a highly specialist engineer who has worked for companies with clients worldwide. A lot of our projects involved site work, often at short notice. So you’d arrange travel via the company where possible and that was supposed to include support with getting visas. Normally all that would happen is flights would be booked and paid for, a hotel booked (but you’d pay for that yourself then claim it back, and then given bad or no advice about visas, so would have to work that out for yourself.
European multinational over 20 years here. The longer the trip, the stricter they are that they have to handle absolutely everything.
Going somewhere for a few days, they’re open to suggestions about visas but they still decide.
The plant was expected to create over 8,000 new jobs once open and operational. I’d suspect it will take time to replace those 300 skilled workers and obtain the correct visas. That site is likely to remain idled/closed until after the fall elections in Bryon County, GA. It will also likely mean American workers at the site will either be furloughed or laid off until then (of course this would also be a simple way for Hyundai & LG to stick one to the administration without really having to lift a finger). It’s going to look real good for local Republican incumbents (not).
As with many things “peak imperial stupid” ™, this is a matter of logistics. No one on the American side (at the executive level) thought through about the unsexy aspects that accompany multi-billion dollar investments—no one on the Korea side thought about it either.
Both sides focused about the dollar-sign-headlines, any junior staffer raising their hand and being “that guy-gal” was ignored.
Visa problems/labour shortages also affected the roll-out of TSM’s Arizona plant—and in AZ a significant number of the staff is Taiwanese. This is not an unknown problem.
As an aside, the Korean media-pundit “rally around the flag” effect cracks me up….. on any other day, the Korean conglomerates would be the (somewhat deserved) whipping boy for national problems from housing costs to wage suppression—even the menus of their corporate cafeterias can cause rabble.
I think it’s interesting that no one seems to be linking the target of the raid – an EV battery factory – w/ the administration’s war on renewable energy and EVs, especially after Chump’s falling-out w/ Elon. This whole fiasco doesn’t make any sense at all without that key factor. Certainly they don’t give a shit about OSHA violations or construction deaths, and I don’t understand why it’s even mentioned as if it’s a probable cause.
Thanks for the good report and the personal background. As pointed out here the other day everything Trump does is “performative” so it’s not even tactics but mainly publicity and political posturing. He’s running a TV show rather than a government. One can justly suspect that he is desperate to avoid the Dems recapturing Congress next year and turning him into a very investigated lame duck.
As for Hyundai, they did say all arrested worked for subcontractors although that may be a distinction without a difference. I have a Hyundai sedan that I like very much and that is light years ahead of the first Hyundai car to come here and that my mom owned briefly. The Asians move onward and upward as we travel the opposite direction with out politicians. Trump doesn’t even seem to be any version of “again” including Reagan who he imitates. He is uniquely weird.
Yves, thank you for making clear all the little details behind this ‘stunt.’ It upset me, because I view it as war against workers …. US nationals as well as immigrants or temporary work visa holders.
That said, my son purchased a Hyundai EV last December and I went with him to do test drives of the various candidates. I drove an American brand and it was like an ICE car, with a few EV gadgets pasted on. The Hyundai had been entirely redesigned to be an EV. Plus it came with three years of free charging! That said, the thing is sooooo digital that I won’t drive it, preferring to clatter about Seattle in an ancient Honda clunker. (OK, he did not even consider the “T” brand: not when so many of the Seattle “T” vehicles now sport ‘mea culpa’ bumper stickers saying they were bought “before DOGE.”
Yesterday I was behind a Tesla where the owner apparently removed the “T” from the trunk lid. However I am seeing more of them here in SC where they aren’t even allowed to be sold (our local law demands a dealership).
Any post-Presidency investigations of Trump are going to be hampered by the fact that the D’s discredited themselves with Russiagate, Stormy Daniels and the like. Everything they accuse him of, even if justified, will transact at a high discount among everyone but Blue-Anon types.
Or alternately the reality of Trump finally having his way with our government will have alienated the MAGA–big time.
Three workers dead within a matter of years in a standard manufacturing seting is HORRENDOUS.
I don’t disagree with any of the points in this article save the death rate. In the entire history of the Des Moines Firestone plant from WWII to present, only one worker ever died and that was a freak accident (also involving a forklift).
There is one thing that drives industrial accidents, it’s invariably a major factor and one that’s ALWAYS cited: supervisors being pressured to get the work done faster yelling at workers to hurry it up. Speed kills like nothing else in a heavy manufacturing setting. Factory work routinely gets done very quickly and when management tries to speed things up, accidents happen.
If you’ve never toured a factory that does piecework, you have no idea what efficiency looks like. Workers being paid by the piece are the most efficient workers imaginable. Then management comes along, sees things are going well and then insists the workers “do better.” Management always sees room for infinite improvement, rarely if ever acknowledges superior craft unless it’s to insist that every worker do as well as their best worker.
And if you have white collar workers doing blue collar work, the accident/injury toll will be excessive. One of the most closely held manufacturing secrets is the injury rate when workers go on strike and management tries to keep assembly lines running.
None of this is meant to diminish criticism of Trump. I was moved to comment because I can’t find any news stories about this placing these three deaths in the proper context.
Apparently there’s a nearby Hyundai car factory that was not affected by the raid. The raid was on a construction site, not a working factory.
I have to work on my reading skills but in my defense, what possible reason would they have for bringing so many white collar workers (engineers) to a construction site? I just assumed the buildings were completed and the construction was the finalization of the assembly lines. That’s when you need engineers who are less helpful when earthmoving equipment and long boom cranes are still in use.
Construction is much more dangerous work than factory jobs but three deaths is still beyond the pale. Pre-OSHA, five workers died constructing the Empire State Building but 3,000 workers built the Chrysler Building without a single fatality. The Eiffel Tower only lost one worker to a fatal accident.
To lose three workers on a factory (not hi-rise) construction site is insane but not surprising if you’re using the wrong kinds of workers.
96 deaths while building Hoover Dam.
https://www.reference.com/history-geography/many-people-died-building-hoover-dam-5263caeef7062234
The contractors were facing a financial penalty clause if they didn’t finish by a certain date. They beat the date by two years.
We have OSHA now but doesn’t Trump hate OSHA? Who knows what goes on inside his orange head. His ICE chief is no genius either apparently.
it’s a sprawling site approved during the Biden era that was supposed to be ready in October; we’re not talking about a slab of concrete. The job titles probably ranged from project manager, electrical engineer, to widget-machine technician and everything in between.
“According to the battery-maker, 47 of its direct employees were detained along with some 250 workers from partner firms involved in building the facility. Most are Korean nationals….”
https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10570128
Via e-mail, from an established reader in Georgia:
The Kemp retribution angle deserves deeper investigation. Probably not determinant, but contributing.
It sounds like the Hyundai operation was in the GA boonies with the river being a factor in the location. Finding skilled temporary labor may have been an issue.
Do you know if electrical work would qualify as manual labor? I would think that would count as something more skilled, but I’m unsure of the legal categories.
I bring it up because my initial suspicion was that the claims of Koreans doing manual labor at the plant might be a trumped up stretch of what actually occurred. In the convention industry for example, all materials must be brought into the convention venue by unionized workers, with pretty much zero exceptions. Try carrying in a suitcase with your company’s materials, and they will stop you and make you put it down. So perhaps one of the brain geniuses involved in this raid considered a Korean carrying a briefcase into the office on their own as manual labor.
I believe both workers killed while operating forklifts were Korean. And crawling around installing wiring seems pretty manual to me.
But surely as Yves says this sort of thing goes on all the time and construction work is by definition temporary. Here in SC it’s rare to see a construction site where the workers aren’t speaking Spanish and listening to Mariachi music. Of course I don’t know how legal they are but at least the Koreans had some kind of visa.
BMW is building a battery factory in my county to serve their huge factory. Look out Germans!
The Korean president literally started his career as a human rights and labor lawyer….but even as a “left of center” president (korean political left/right spectrums are a bit different than the US, but on economics broadly similar), he knows who butters the bread.
“President Lee Jae Myung on Tuesday expressed “a deep sense of responsibility” for the detention of more than 300 Korean workers in Georgia, stating that such an “unjust infringement” on Korean nationals and businesses must never recur.
The government plans to dispatch a charter flight as early as Wednesday to repatriate all detained Korean nationals under a “voluntary departure” arrangement……”
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-09-09/national/diplomacy/President-calls-US-detention-of-Koreans-an-unjust-infringement/2395153