Democratic leaders are siding with illegal migrants and their Fortune 500 employers by condemning ICE’s detention of 475 suspected illegal workers at a Korean-run Hyundai worksite in Georgia.
“The Democratic Party of Georgia strongly condemns this week’s ICE raid at the Bryan County Hyundai plant and the increasingly aggressive presence of ICE in communities across our state,” said a statement from the party’s local spokesman, Charlie Bailey. He continued:
These raids are politically-motivated fear tactics designed to terrorize people who work hard for a living, power our economy, and contribute to the communities across Georgia that they have made their homes. The Trump administration breaking its promise to target violent criminals and instead targeting hardworking people does nothing to make Georgia stronger — it is political grandstanding at the cost of Georgia families, businesses, and livelihoods.
The raid on Friday detained roughly 475 migrants, including more than 300 Korean workers. All were working jobs that would otherwise have gone to local Americans and their families at decent wages.
“Trump promised to go after the ‘worst of the worst,’” complained Rep. Pramila Jayapal, an Indian-born, pro-migration Representative from Washington State. “Yet his ICE is targeting everyday people, many of whom have legal status or are hardworking members of our communities,” she added.
“This is no longer about dangerous criminals,” said Rep. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). ” This is about ripping communities & families apart.”
Georgia’s progressive-run AFL-CIO denounced the raid: “Arresting and detaining workers, who are exploited every day and risk their lives every day on the job, creates an atmosphere of fear that terrorizes workers and their families and increases the workload burden on their coworkers.”
The local GOP office did not release a statement.
But a local Republican, Tori Branum, wrote on Facebook that she helped trigger the ICE operation:
So I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but let me make it clear. Yes I did report the Hyundai plant to ICE and yes, I did talk to an agent. I also sent him contact info for people that had evidence… No criminal charges have been filed as of yet, and from what I understand there were some working in slave conditions that were brought here against their will allegedly. This isn’t about discrimination, it’s about slave labor and illegal workers.
The Korean workers likely used short-term B-1/B-2 tourist/business visitor visas to enter the country legally before overstaying and illegally working these jobs.
Other workers reportedly were imported by President Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, via the quasi-legal welcome policy for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The battery factory in Ellabell, Georgia, is being built for two Korean companies, Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution Ltd. More than 1,400 people are working at the site.
Hyundai “is a repeat offender,” Jay Palmer, an immigration expert who works with immigration lawyers, told Breitbart News. Like other companies, including Mercedes, Kia, and Tesla, Hyundai executives use staffing companies to legally shield themselves as they fly airport migrants to job sites, he said.
The workforce was legally distanced from the companies by a series of subcontractors.
“They push the people [job applicants] to staffing agencies, and then they hire them from staffing agencies, and then think they’re shielded by the law because they have a master service agreement that states [immigration status] is not their responsibility. This is happening in every industry, especially in meat processing plants… It’s just egregious,” Palmer explained.
National media outlets have shown a sour response to the immigration enforcement sweep.
Rolling Stone, for example, wrote:
[Branum] 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. “How do I feel about it? Good,” Branum tells Rolling Stone. “I have no feelings about the law. What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong.”
The raid follows months of strained negotiations between Washington and Seoul over tariffs and investments. In late August, Trump and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung met at the White House after Trump suggested on social media that the U.S. might stop doing business with South Korea. That meeting came after both countries agreed on the outline of a deal reached this summer that would have South Korea potentially invest hundreds of billions of dollars in business with the United States.
Minh Nguyen, who manages a Korean barbecue restaurant, read about the raid on Facebook and thought it was fake. As customers and employees trickled in throughout the day, he realized it was real. Nguyen was bracing for the impact it would have on the night’s dinner rush.
“This is really going to affect us,” he said. Neither he nor the restaurant owners are South Korean, he said, yet the restaurant still gets a large influx of diners from Hyundai. Many come in larger groups, including one last weekend of more than 30 people. “Tonight, we’ll find out how bad this is going to be,” he said.
Breitbart News has closely covered the illegal use of B-1/B-2 visas to hide the huge inflow of airport migrants from India, Mexico, and Europe into American trucking, technology, and construction industries. The inflow has helped foreign investors create multiple foreign enclaves within the United States where many U.S. laws have not been enforced.
The inflow is part of the establishment’s post-1990 economic policy of Extraction Migration, which seeks to expand Wall Street by importing government-funded consumers, apartment-sharing renters, and wage-cutting workers from developing countries.
Since his first election in 2016, Trump has partly deflated the resulting bubble of cheap labor, thereby boosting Americans’ wages, productivity, and investment.
“We have to get efficient,” Trump told Breitbart News in August. He added: “We’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically — it’s going to be robotically… It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself… we’re going to streamline things.”
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