Why Trump Regrets ICE’s Raid on a Korean Plant in Georgia
Here’s something I sure didn’t have on my bingo card: Donald Trump expressing regret over a major immigration raid. For the most part, his administration has gloried in the many excesses of its mass-deportation program, apparently on the theory that aggressive enforcement tactics and even cruelty would help move things along as anyone not legally in the country would self-deport instead of finding themselves in a brutal ICE detention facility or an even more brutal rent-a-prison overseas.
But an immigration raid on September 4 at an EV battery plant in Georgia, which was supervised by the elite Homeland Security Investigations arm of ICE, has caused some real buyer’s remorse for the 47th president. The 475 arrests for immigration violations included 317 South Korean citizens sent to oversee the building of the plant, and their government was not at all happy with their treatment. The busts (mostly for visa overstays) disrupted U.S.–South Korean diplomatic relations, including sensitive negotiations over tariffs, and appear to have traumatized the workers involved, as the Los Angeles Times reported:
Throughout the day, people described federal agents taking cellphones from workers and putting them in long lines … Some workers hid for hours to avoid capture in air ducts or remote areas of the sprawling property. The Department of Justice said some hid in a nearby sewage pond.
Collectively, the detained South Koreans chose to go home even after they were offered a temporary respite from deportation. Indeed, the South Korean government is investigating the possibility that the raid violated international human-rights agreements. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau has “expressed deep regret” for the raid in a meeting with South Korean diplomats. And most remarkably, the president himself backtracked in a Sunday Truth Social post:
This was a very wordy way for Trump to admit that two of his biggest priorities are in conflict. The ultimate prize at the end of the rainbow for his Liberation Day tariff initiative is to push the world’s manufacturers into relocating facilities to the U.S. That isn’t going to happen if the people they send over to set up said facilities are being rounded up by ICE and put in cages. In retrospect, it’s rather surprising the administration didn’t foresee this problem and at least provide some coordination between their economic-policy folks and the zealous deporters of DHS and ICE. And you have to wonder if anyone on the immigration side of the policy table got chewed out for blowing up U.S.–South Korean relations, making other countries nervous, and forcing the president to semi-apologize. Are there limits to Stephen Miller’s power after all?
This isn’t just an embarrassment for the administration, to be clear. The EV-battery plant was very necessary for a Hyundai EV-manufacturing plant next door. Together these facilities represented the largest economic development project in Georgia history and the crown jewel of Brian Kemp’s governorship. To add insult to injury, DHS pressed Georgia state troopers into service during the battery-plant bust, presumably as part of routine state cooperation with federal immigration-enforcement efforts. Kemp, whose relationship with the president is famously fraught but recently peaceful, couldn’t have been happy. Beyond that, though, someone needs to make the Trump administration aware that attracting foreign direct investment is one of the favorite economic-development tools of virtually every Republican governor; for some, it’s all they know how to do, other than cutting taxes, to create wealth.
It will be fascinating to see if the incident puts a bit of a damper on the nativist strain of America First politics and policy and maybe keeps a few people out of ICE-detention hell.