Hundreds of masked federal agents flooded the construction site of a future electric vehicle battery factory at Hyundai Motor’s massive manufacturing complex in Georgia on September 4 to conduct a sweeping immigration raid and a vicious attack on immigrant workers. Over 450 people were arrested at the end of their work day in what is the largest single-site workplace raid since the Trump administration launched its brutal deportation campaign across the country.
Those workers are now detained in ICE facilities, cut off from their families, and threatened with deportation. Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, the two companies building the plant, have given carte blanche to law enforcement to conduct its investigation and target the workers building the factory; meanwhile, they have assured their investors that production has not stalled at the other sites at the complex.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the majority of those arrested are South Korean nationals employed by Hyundai to get the plant up and running by the end of the year. The South Korean government has expressed “concern” at the arrests and has now sent officials to the United States to smooth things over and get construction back up and running without delay.
The raid, which was the product of months of investigation by federal and state officials, is a clear show of force from the Trump administration on the question of foreign manufacturing ventures on U.S. soil. Hyundai Motor has invested billions of dollars in the project to set up these facilities in Georgia, part of a deal made with South Korea to invest $350 billion in U.S. projects in exchange for avoiding Trump’s crushing tariffs with a reduced rate of 15 percent. At the same time that it bolsters his anti-immigrant agenda, the Trump administration is using the raid to ensure that these and future projects run on the administration’s terms, in line with his plan to revitalize manufacturing in the United States and create new terms of exploitation for workers in the United States with the xenophobic cover of prioritizing jobs for “American” workers.
The raid on the Hyundai plant comes amidst other raids in workplaces across the country, including in upstate New York where dozens of factory workers for Nutrition Bar Confectioners were arrested in a similar operation. The administration also won another battle this week as a federal court cleared an injunction to stop operations at the brutal Alligator Alcatraz camp in Florida.
These workplace raids should be a clear sign to all of us that Trump’s agenda is in large part contingent on such crushing attacks on the working class. The attacks on immigrant workers today pave the way for attacks already under way on all workers in the United States, regardless of their immigration status.
As Trump targets workplaces as part of his mass deportation plan, it is critical that workers and their organizations be the first line of defense against such attacks — whether the workers under fire are part of unions or not. The Right tries to paint these operations as “cracking down” on undocumented or foreign workers “stealing” American jobs and threatening public safety. Some in the labor movement have bought into this false logic in an attempt to negotiate better terms with the Trump government, whether it is by outwardly endorsing such attacks (in the case of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien) or staying silent as undocumented workers are criminalized and deported.
The United Auto Workers union (UAW), led by Shawn Fain, has promised to concentrate its forces on organizing workers in the South as companies invest billions there to try to take full advantage of anti-union right-to-work laws. Workers at a Hyundai plant in Alabama have even announced their effort to form a union affiliated with UAW. This puts the union in a unique position to fight for the rights of all workers by standing up to Trump’s attacks. But that means taking a definitive stance against Trump’s xenophobic agenda and how it affects workers overseas as well as in the United States, which union leaders such as Fain have refused to do, instead celebrating tariffs and Trump’s nationalist project for U.S. manufacturing. Conditions for workers in the United States will not be improved by eliminating immigrant labor or by attacks on workers in other countries, but by protecting and improving conditions for all workers. That means in the first place defending workers and communities targeted by Trump’s all-out assault on immigrants and workers everywhere.
Following the example of the protests against workplace raids in Los Angeles earlier this year — the valiant efforts of neighbors and union members to protect their communities from abduction and deportation — unions must act with their collective power to mobilize to stop such raids and demand the release of all those abducted at the Hyundai battery plant. Our workplaces should not be the places where immigrant workers are most vulnerable, but where they are strongest — standing side by side with their fellow workers to defend themselves against the attacks of the Far Right.
