The good news: more than 300 South Korean workers who spent eight days detained in a Georgia ICE facility after their shocking arrests at a Hyundai/LG battery plant under construction returned to Korea on Friday, to cheers and hugs.
The bad news: South Korea, once one of our closest and most trusted allies, is furious with the US all across the political spectrum, and questioning the whole relationship, including $350 BILLION-with-a-B in investment money they pledged to Trump in July in exchange for a lower tariff rate that’s now hanging in limbo.
Work has stopped on the plant, which was supposed to make 8,500 new robot-supervising jerbs for blue-collar southeastern Georgians, thanks to President Joe Biden securing a partnership in 2022. Now the factory opening has been delayed for at least several months, or as long as it takes for Hyundai and LG to find workers willing to risk prison at the capricious hands of the regime.
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It’s ICE’s Biggest Raid Yet: South Korean Business Travelers Here To Build Factories!
And now the South Korean government is saying it is investigating potential human rights violations during the episode too. Workers reported guns pointed at them, there were no translators for workers who didn’t speak English, and ICE did not read anyone their rights anyway. Agents refused to even look at their paperwork, and the workers were humiliatingly handcuffed and chained at the waist and feet with metal chains that burned them because they had been roasting in the Georgia sun. And ICE kept them chained up for the whole nine hours it took for them to raid the factory, and for the whole bus ride to the facility, as if they were violent criminals, even though everyone was cooperating.
A detainee told Yonhap News that once in detention, they were given no basic supplies for days and had moldy beds, inedible food, and no blankets.There were no windows or clocks, and it was very cold. And it took four days for all of them to be processed.
Meanwhile, dumb-as-shit ICE agents mocked them with slurs like “Rocket Man,” apparently unaware that South Korea is a whole other country from North Korea. And when the detainees asked agents what they had done that was illegal, they replied, “I don’t know either.”
Detainees said Korean consular officials pressured them to sign voluntary departure forms with language about being “illegal” in order to be able to leave, under threat of them otherwise staying detained for months or even years, which angered workers who had not actually done anything illegal. One detainee — very skilled — sketched out the whole layout, which is like something you’d see drawn in blood inside a prison uniform from a Vietnamese tiger cage, or something.
And THEN the detainees’ release and departure, originally planned for last Wednesday, was reportedly delayed for an entire 24 more hours while Donald Trump tried to negotiate for them to go back to work. And of course they were like no fucking thank you. The old man realized a few days after the raid that his ICE done fucked up, bigtime. Because the US does not have the technology, or the technological expertise, to make and install the battery and car-building autonomous robots, and South Korea has some of the most advanced robots in the world. In fact, one in 10 Korean workers IS a robot.
Trump, the Tuesday after the Friday raid:
And then on Sunday Trump went on his glitchy website and practically begged for foreign companies to return, sad laugh.
When Foreign Companies who are building extremely complex products, machines, and various other “things,” come into the United States with massive Investments, I want them to bring their people of expertise for a period of time to teach and train our people how to make these very unique and complex products, as they phase out of our Country, and back into their land. If we didn’t do this, all of that massive Investment will never come in the first place — Chips, Semiconductors, Computers, Ships, Trains, and so many other products that we have to learn from others how to make, or, in many cases, relearn, because we used to be great at it, but not anymore. For example, Shipbuilding, where we used to build a Ship a day and now, we barely build a Ship a year. I don’t want to frighten off or disincentivize Investment into America by outside Countries or Companies. We welcome them, we welcome their employees, and we are willing to proudly say we will learn from them, and do even better than them at their own “game,” sometime into the not too distant future!
Nice epiphany to have three weeks too late. And sure, that’ll help, reminding everybody that people’s lives are all one big “game” to the world’s most powerful former gameshow host.
And speaking of shipbuilding, $150 billion of that $350 billion was supposed to be for Korea to help Make American Shipbuilding Great Again, helping to modernize American shipyards to better compete with China. But guess those slow boats to China are going to be a lot slower now!
All of that, and it’s still not clear if any of the Korean workers broke the law, as no one has been charged with anything. The administration is saying the workers were detained because they did not have H-1B visas (which only 65,000 of are released per year, fewer than one-tenth of the number of workers who apply), and they had B1/B2 visas instead. But it is not at all clear that the workers actually required the longer-term H-1Bs, as they were there temporarily, working as subcontracting consultants to install the factory and being paid by Korean companies, which would seem to be the exact situation the temporary business visas are for in the first place.
Hey, remember the time the AP uncovered Melania Trump had allegedly illegally worked as a model with a tourist visa, at least 10 times?
But anyway, South Korea is now like, fine, if the US is going to be a fuckass and say everybody needs an H-1B visa all of a sudden, then work your shit out and get everybody the right visa. We’ll wait!
Meanwhile Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau went over to Seoul and privately expressed regrets to First Vice Foreign Minister Park Yoon-joo, in between bouts of siccing the State Department on any foreigner on social media not properly mourning the death of Charlie Kirk. Will private regrets be enough?
South Korea depends on the US for protection from incursions by North Korea, an ongoing risk, as Kim Jong-un reminds everyone with his constant missile tests. But the US depends on Korea for more than just Oscar-winning thrillers and K-pop, as the regime is just now coming to find out.
Anyway, so, good job there, Tori Branum. The loudmouth who claimed credit for the factory raid has deleted her TikTok account after getting slammed with negative comments, a day after vowing to never be silenced. Sounds like going after her five failed marriages was one toke over the line.
As it turns out, out the fuck your feelings crowd (and the no divorces allowed crowd) has a whole lot of them! May she have the day that she deserves.
[Yonhap News / Korea Herald / New York Times gift link / NBC]
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