Bonehead ICE raid at still-under-construction Georgia Battery Facility.
ICE arrested hundreds of Korean engineers and technicians who were here to train American workers for good paying jobs.
All of the workers have elected to go home. Many will refuse to come back.
Gigantic red flag message sent to all potential investors in the US.
Great job, team.
The electric-vehicle battery plant under construction in Georgia — a joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, which is part of the broader LG Group — represents a significant foreign investment in the United States. In 2023, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) called it “the largest project in state history.”
The Trump administration touted last week’s raid at a partially constructed Hyundai-LG car battery plant in Georgia as a victory for American labor and evidence that he won’t tolerate unauthorized workers.
But immigration and manufacturing experts say the episode lays bare how U.S. immigration rules hamper foreign companies from bringing in workers crucial to building modern manufacturing centers that President Donald Trump and his predecessors have pursued and that would ultimately employ tens of thousands of American workers.
“Episodes like this are going to make many companies way more cautious before investing here,” said Giovanni Peri, a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis. “The goal of this administration’s tariffs was luring exactly these kind of factories. And now we are closing the door to some of these companies, who fear they won’t be able to bring in the right workers to set up their plants.”
The White House also did not offer comment, but U.S. Attorney Margaret E. Heap said in a statement last week that the raid “was a significant undertaking with substantial results.”
“Over 400 agents participated in this massive event, and over 400 illegal workers were identified and detained,” Heap said. “The goal of this operation is to reduce illegal employment and prevent employers from gaining an unfair advantage by hiring unauthorized workers. Another goal is to protect unauthorized workers from exploitation.”
Building plants to manufacture the batteries and related computing chips for electric cars requires very specific technical knowledge, according to Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, former chief global economist at Ford.
“You have certain positions that are very, very technical,” said Hughes-Cromwick, now a senior visiting fellow at the center-left think tank Third Way. “These are people who have installed the equipment before. … It’s really ludicrous to think that we’re not going to have foreign-born workers as part of our workforce as we get manufacturing back on our soil.”
Battery plants require electromechanical processes that are far more complex than those at traditional car assembly plants, with proprietary industrial systems that most U.S. workers are not trained to operate. The engineers designing and building the plant need to have deep experience controlling potential contaminants, mixing volatile chemicals, and installing equipment that can handle voltage loads exponentially higher than those at legacy factories.
“We are more than capable of building and staffing those plants, but not instantaneously,” said Chris Nichols, CEO of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a group that is eager to see the United States resurgent in manufacturing these advanced technologies. “Just saying we are going to build the plant doesn’t create 500 to 1,000 highly specialized engineers and other workers who happen to be in Georgia.”
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Below, a chat with an attorney who represents a number of the workers.
Reports from Korean media are starting to come in, in which detained engineers detail the bewilderingly inhumane conditions in which they were detained. For a week.
That’s gotta be great for international trade and capital projects, right?