> "One of the agents can be heard telling workers they had a search warrant for the entire site and asked that construction “be ceased immediately.”"
It's a $7.6 billion factory that produces exclusively electric vehicles, employs "1,400+" (ultimately 8,500 [b]) and is claimed as the "largest economic project in Georgia history". By way of background—here's the wiki,
There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow. Eg. Hearing of cases where people from my home country were sent home when asked on entry "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that.
This is definitely going to have effects for other companies in the USA. Eg. TSMC in the USA is currently being bootstrapped by a Taiwanese workforce. A similar raid there would just shut down the whole TSMC in USA project. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/50...
> "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that.
Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card.
Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.
> There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow.
Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...).
So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.
"confused" is a pretty generous reading of the situation. They just don't want anyone here from outside the US. Or anyone who isn't white, really. If they don't have a justification for kicking someone out they'll make one up or just use it as a way of scaring other people. Too many hispanic people are being picked up outside their immigration court hearings or lawyer's offices while trying to immigrate "the right way" for it to be confusion or coincidence.
Orders given to ICE at times have been to just independently go out and find people "you know where to find them". I don't think they so much do, any given agent isn't some super detective.
How resilient is a nation state? This is a question I keep asking myself. I was kind of surprised how the USA bounced back from Trump I. But I really wonder if there is going to be a similar recovery this time around. The amount of outright destruction is overwhelming. So, you raid the Hyundai facility. And then in a few years time you wonder why foreign companies no longer want to invest into factories on US soil. The knock on effect of all of this stuff is enormous and the consequences are going to be many years in the coming. And yet, it all just happens, there is no meaningful pushback against any of this.
I imagine that this post will be flagged or downvoted off the homepage by fellow travelers, so I will take this opportunity to promote the active front page as a way to bypass their attempts at censorship.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they were overly aggressive in what they used visas for. It’s also possible they hired a low quality firm to do their visas (some of the big 5s subcontract to some terrible sub tiers) and they simply did the paperwork wrong.
Similar situation have happened to my coworkers when going on foreign assignment.
Will this administration start costing serious people money enough that the other billionaires will get involved to kick out the nationalist idiots? That'd be nice. It's too bad we need that to be the case but.. would be a nice side effect.
No, because an unstable regime and desperate economy increases the relative power of billionaires even if it decreases their absolute wealth somewhat. You don't see oligarchs abandoning russia en masse due to the constraints the system places on their growth.
So even if this ends up direly for some of them individually, they all personally are confident that won't be them. And as long as it isn't this aligns with their general interests.
The rich in America make their money through stock market pumps and dumps. Just keep the minimum wage frozen and the tax cuts coming and they won't say a word.
As long as the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labour Statistics keep saying the right things, the market will go up. And if they don't say these things, the president will replace them with somebody who will.
Under the pretext of incompetence is the administration simply engaging in destroying the US economy to create a fortress situation in collapse that allows implementation of military jurisdiction? Clearly, there's a program running with an endgame.
1. Chaos - it’s good for kleptocracy, and is a denial-of-service attack on our attention
2. The appearance of something being done. Dems represent the status quo, people are sick of the status quo. Something appearing to happen is better than the status quo for a lot of people. Biden deported ~2x more people in 2024 than trump has so far. ICE raids are a performance.
3. Like everything else they do, it’s a shakedown. You want protection from the raids and the chaos? Come kiss the ring of your local maga don.
I'm less sure that there is an endgame. Seems more likely to me that it is being run as a reality TV show where the idea is to maintain a high level of viewer engagement.
And no-one is thinking that the only reason reality tv shows don't end in disaster is because it is a tv show, i.e. an artificial and contained/constrained environment.
It’s a reign of terror. Nobody knows who or what will be next on the chopping block. The only hope is to lick Trump’s boots to get an exemption. His gang practically holds the whole country hostage for ransom. Their tactics are working (in their own perception), why would they need an endgame?
The whole idea of building manufacturing in the US is to employ Americans. And if they can't find enough qualified Americans, it's because WAGES ARE TOO LOW.
The problem isn't wages. The problem is that Hyundai people have the knowledge about how to build a Hyundai production plant, just like Americans will go abroad working for American companies.
The Hyundai HQ is in South Korea, you can expect that they will bring people from their HQ to oversee their operations and to do knowledge transfer. It is common sense.
'Many' in the context of a claim of illegal detention, can and should be given a more precise number, otherwise it's fair to assume a narrative is being sold. ATF Atlanta claims 450 workers are 'unlawful aliens'. A counter claim should be specific or get tossed out. 10s? 100s? Vague damage control is never a good sign.
SK embassy and Hyundai itself have significant liability in admitting or even acknowledging employment of illegals.
The liars can say whatever they want, but if you want to counter them you have to be very specific. You’ve just constructed a trap that encourages lies.
In less than 24 hours ATF atlanta is confidant all 450 people arrested were working illegally? Not likely possible, so they just lied.
But if you want to refute that you have to have a specific number. So your options are go slow, take a week to validate the legal status of all 450 people, or lie also.
So, there's supposedly all these millions of 'illegals' working everywhere.
So someone hired them. What business managers and leaders are being charged with hiring illegal workers? Do we even have a single manager/leader/owner charged?
That’s the sad part of all this that enrages me, we deport a dishwasher or a roofer but the criminals getting rich off of their exploitation get off free in virtually all cases.
Locally, we had an HSI raid on a business that had 10+ illegal underage workers living in an illegal bunkhouse built in the back of their building.
No criminal charges for the owner or any managers, no fines that have been reported for the numerous amount of code violations in their flophouse, and every day I drive by the building on my way to work and a 100k truck + very expensive boat are parked out front.
It’s an affront to justice to see these crooks getting rich and laughing to the bank!
I'm made of anti-Abrahamic fermions, but in this instance I can't stop thinking of Emma Lazarus rising from the grave and striking down her own words, to instead inscribe Jeremiah 2:5 on the plaque at the base of the statue:
"What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they strayed so far from me?
They followed worthless idols..."
The US will not rank very high on annual the Economist autocratic government rankings. Low competence. Diseases will spread rampant. Wealth disappears in crypto schemes.
If US invested in training and education, we might have the necessary labor to lead manufacturing. Sadly, that’s not the case. However, this country loves to give out jobs to immigrants even in cases where you’re looking at equal talent. Look at all the jobs handed out to the Chinese and Indians (as well as Canadians) over the past three decades. On Wall Street, they blatantly favored Chinese-speaking talent because they wanted to attract businesses in China. Same goes for graduate schools. They all wanted that Chinese money. I am not saying it’s right but this country says one thing and does another. No one told Walmart to destroy retail/manufacturing in the US and ship them out to China. No one. Meanwhile, Walmart heirs are on and on about some “environmental” values while flaunting their art collection on national TV.
37 comments
[ 116 ms ] story [ 3012 ms ] threadIt's a $7.6 billion factory that produces exclusively electric vehicles, employs "1,400+" (ultimately 8,500 [b]) and is claimed as the "largest economic project in Georgia history". By way of background—here's the wiki,
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group_Metaplant_...
And (lots) more background from IEEE Spectrum (someone had recently posted to HN),
[b] https://spectrum.ieee.org/hyundai-metaplant-georgia ("Hyundai’s Metaplant Seeks Hard-Working Robots")
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-w...
This is definitely going to have effects for other companies in the USA. Eg. TSMC in the USA is currently being bootstrapped by a Taiwanese workforce. A similar raid there would just shut down the whole TSMC in USA project. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/50...
Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card.
Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.
Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...).
So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
South Korea says 'many' of its nationals detained in raid on GA Hyundai facility
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
It wouldn’t surprise me if they were overly aggressive in what they used visas for. It’s also possible they hired a low quality firm to do their visas (some of the big 5s subcontract to some terrible sub tiers) and they simply did the paperwork wrong.
Similar situation have happened to my coworkers when going on foreign assignment.
So even if this ends up direly for some of them individually, they all personally are confident that won't be them. And as long as it isn't this aligns with their general interests.
As long as the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labour Statistics keep saying the right things, the market will go up. And if they don't say these things, the president will replace them with somebody who will.
1. Chaos - it’s good for kleptocracy, and is a denial-of-service attack on our attention
2. The appearance of something being done. Dems represent the status quo, people are sick of the status quo. Something appearing to happen is better than the status quo for a lot of people. Biden deported ~2x more people in 2024 than trump has so far. ICE raids are a performance.
3. Like everything else they do, it’s a shakedown. You want protection from the raids and the chaos? Come kiss the ring of your local maga don.
And no-one is thinking that the only reason reality tv shows don't end in disaster is because it is a tv show, i.e. an artificial and contained/constrained environment.
SK embassy and Hyundai itself have significant liability in admitting or even acknowledging employment of illegals.
In less than 24 hours ATF atlanta is confidant all 450 people arrested were working illegally? Not likely possible, so they just lied.
But if you want to refute that you have to have a specific number. So your options are go slow, take a week to validate the legal status of all 450 people, or lie also.
So someone hired them. What business managers and leaders are being charged with hiring illegal workers? Do we even have a single manager/leader/owner charged?
Locally, we had an HSI raid on a business that had 10+ illegal underage workers living in an illegal bunkhouse built in the back of their building.
No criminal charges for the owner or any managers, no fines that have been reported for the numerous amount of code violations in their flophouse, and every day I drive by the building on my way to work and a 100k truck + very expensive boat are parked out front.
It’s an affront to justice to see these crooks getting rich and laughing to the bank!
Trump's own donors systematically hire illegals:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/20/uline-mexica...
"What fault did your ancestors find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols..."