Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) carried out the largest single-site immigration raid in US history on Thursday. Around 475 illegal aliens were arrested at a construction site near Savannah, Georgia. This is fantastic news! Arresting the worst illegal alien felons and deporting them was always going to have diminishing returns at a certain point. A massive worksite raid like this one indicates that the Trump administration really is on a mission to deport all illegal alien invaders.
The agreement sounded great on paper. The Hyundai Motor Group agreed to invest in a 3,000-acre site near Ellabell, GA. The $10 billion Hyundai Metaplant America will build electric car batteries and once construction is complete, it will provide 8,500 good-paying technical jobs for Americans. Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) hails it as one of the crowning achievements of his administration.
Sounds amazing, right? America still has the ability to attract world-class manufacturing jobs back to our shores. But that will only work if these foreign companies are operating in good faith. So far, our South Korean “allies” are not.
HSI spent months investigating Hyundai for unlawful employment practices. That investigation culminated in the massive raid last Thursday. Agents from HSI, ICE, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the IRS, and Georgia State Patrol officers showed up at the site. You know something is wonky when it takes that many federal agents just to carry out a raid at one construction site.
Hyundai initially tried to throw the construction company under the bus. Company executives claimed they had no knowledge of any illegal aliens being employed at the site. Funny thing about that, though. About 300 of the workers who were arrested on Thursday were illegal aliens… from South Korea.
What an odd coincidence!
When it became public that the South Korean company had smuggled 300 South Korean illegal aliens into the country, that’s when South Korea’s diplomats suddenly started rushing to the White House. The diplomats are begging the Trump administration to let the South Koreans fly back home on their own recognizance, rather than deporting them. If those workers are deported, they’re permanently barred from reentering the US.
In Hyundai’s defense, you can kind of see their point in cheating nearly 500 Americans out of good-paying construction jobs. The deal to build the Hyundai Metaplant was struck in 2022, when the unelected Biden regime was running things.
Since America wasn’t bothering to enforce immigration laws against child sex trafficking, why wouldn’t we excuse a bit of employment fraud?
A spokesperson for the South Korean foreign ministry made a particularly snotty remark in response to the arrests, stating, “Our companies’ economic activities and our people’s rights should not be infringed unfairly in the US legal enforcement process.”
If that doesn’t make your blood boil, nothing will. America is unfairly infringing the rights of the South Korean illegal aliens? America is unfairly infringing on South Korea’s economic activities on US soil? It’s somehow our fault that we want to stipulate that investing in jobs in America results in hiring Americans instead of South Koreans.
That statement alone makes us hope that the Department of Justice slaps Hyundai with the maximum fine possible. Employers can be fined up to $27,108 for every illegal alien they knowingly employ. That would put the total fine north of $13 million for employing 475 illegal aliens. Hyundai executives could also face criminal charges for conspiracy, harboring illegal aliens, and document fraud.
Something to think about before the South Korean foreign ministry continues mouthing off about how we are infringing on their rights.
President Trump has attracted more than $5 trillion in foreign investment back into America during his first months in office. There’s no point in allowing any of that investment if these foreign companies think they can move in and fill all the jobs with illegal aliens and H-1Bs.
If they were hiring illegal aliens for the construction phase, then you know that Hyundai was planning to fill the 8,500 eventual jobs in the battery plant with foreign workers. It’s amazing that these companies think they can just exploit us at every turn.
Congratulations to the Georgia construction industry! 475 new jobs just opened up. As of this writing, Georgia Governor (and Never-Trumper) Brian Kemp still has not commented on the largest worksite enforcement raid in US history, which happened in the middle of Kemp’s signature achievement.