Hyundai battery-factory raid reveals new Trump target: Employers who hire illegal workers

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: USA Today

Updated Sept. 9, 2025, 9:41 a.m. ET


Behind the shocking sight of hundreds of South Korean workers being chained and detained at a Georgia battery factory is the Trump administration's other target: companies that hire illegal workers. While President Donald Trump has launched sweeping immigration raids on a promise to deliver the largest mass deportation in history, administration officials are also taking a harder line against employers they say cheat American workers by hiring undocumented immigrants.

Since 1986, employers have required to verify workers' eligibility to work, and can be fined or jailed if caught knowingly breaking the law. But enforcement has typically focused on the workers, not those who hire them.

Because company owners and managers have rarely been prosecuted or penalized, Trump officials say some employers are too willing to exploit desperate workers through lower pay and dangerous working conditions – and then pocket the savings. Some employers argue there aren't enough willing American workers to do the toughest jobs, at the wages they're offering.

Since January, the Trump administration has targeted workers at raids of California car washes and marijuana farms, a Louisiana racetrack, a Florida construction site and a Nebraska meatpacking plant. And while those enforcement actions have not yet translated into criminal cases or fines against the employers, the raids themselves in some cases significantly disrupted business operations.

Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/09/hyundai-battery-factory-raid-trump-employment-enforcement/86043936007/

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Highly doubtful. They have yet to touch thy-holy-business owner. But it seems like their thinking is that they would just "put them out of business" instead (and that is starting to happen with the bankruptcies).

[OLDMDDEM]

1. If you are correct, some of his cronies would be affected also.

[SSJVegeta]

2. Really? Cause I only saw videos of the workers getting arrested.

[Miguelito Loveless]

3. CERTAIN employers

Like anyone building a technology Trump hates.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Or that competes with companies that paid him off (lotta overlap, I know ... ) nt

[Marie Marie]

5. Are they going to target all of Trump's resorts and golf courses? It is well known that they would

find many underpaid illegals working there. The f&@ing hypocracy.

[PCB66]

6. I suspect

that the raid had more to do with it being a future EV production facility as anything.

[travelingthrulife]

7. I'm guessing they won't be going after white, male business owners.

[FSogol]

8. I disagree. This was an attack on S Korea since

they haven't been accepting of Trumpy's idotic tariffs, reductions in foreign aid, and receiving less help vs N Korea.

This is quite simply the US government attacking a business.

[Unca Jim]

9. Nope

This is shutting down a battery factory to stop EV adoption.