The real problem with that Hyundai raid in GA | Will Bunch Newsletter

People think it’s easy being a newspaper columnist in the Donald Trump era, but the reality is that every time I settle on a topic, the president or his MAGA allies do something even more outrageous. On Monday, the Trump-toxified Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that they’re totally fine with masked ICE goons racially profiling suspects who look Latino or speak Spanish. I probably won’t live long enough to see the damage from this president, this court, and this Congress come undone.

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You don’t see too much on the news these days about workplace fatalities in America. One reason is that there are significantly fewer of them — a more than two-thirds decline since the U.S. finally got serious about worker safety and created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, in 1971 under that crazy liberal Richard Nixon.

But U.S. laborers still do die — about 100 each week, on average — or suffer grisly accidents caused by things such as falls and encounters with heavy machinery. When it happens, it tends to be a local story, if it makes the news at all. Unless you live in parts of Georgia, you wouldn’t have heard about the gruesome death of a man named Sunbok You.

In March, You — listed in news accounts as either 45 or 67 — was at his construction job just days before the grand opening of a joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solutions called HL-GA Battery Company, located in rural south Georgia not far from Savannah. Something went terribly wrong.

Bryan County, Ga. sheriff’s deputies who responded to reports of a man struck by a forklift found You dead behind the piece of rolling machinery, and a trail of blood about 10-15 feet long. “WTOC Investigates obtained photos of the scene, which we won’t be publishing because of their graphic nature,” a local TV station reported. “They show You’s body, which was severed from the waist up, laying in front of a forklift, which is labeled ‘Hyundai.’”

Accidents can happen, but it turns out they were happening a lot at the South Korean-owned joint venture making batteries for electric vehicles. In 2023, a worker at the 3,000-acre site fell 60 feet to his death, triggering multiple investigations under OSHA during the Biden administration. Just two months after You’s death, in May, another worker was killed by a load that fell off a forklift. WTOC also reported 53 calls for county emergency services at the site, including over a dozen for traumatic injuries, such as another forklift accident and a worker caught in a conveyor belt.

Last Thursday, the feds finally brought the hammer down on the Georgia plant.

But it was the wrong hammer.

A situation that seemed to scream out for more aggressive OSHA action, and perhaps citations for the factory owners was instead met with a massive immigration raid, led by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By the day’s end, a whopping 475 people — the vast majority citizens of South Korea employed by subcontractors — had been arrested and tagged for deportation.

Instead of protecting blue-collar workers in an allegedly unsafe factory, the Trump regime handcuffed them and placed them in leg shackles.

Many, if not nearly all, of the South Korean workers, according to company officials and diplomats, had at least initially entered the United States legally with a visa or through waiver programs. A special agent from Homeland Security Investigations admitted Thursday that, according to the New York Times, “some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents had been detained initially and were being released” — an all-too familiar occurrence in Trump’s brutal mass deportation drive.

Reactions to the large-scale raid were mostly negative, for a slew of reasons. The online Trump resistance saw the arrests, and pictures of Koreans in handcuffs and chains, as another human-rights violation under the regime’s deportation push, and they weren’t wrong. After its foreign ministry complained that “the rights and interests of our citizens must not be unjustly violated during U.S. law enforcement proceedings,” South Korea reached a deal to release 300 citizens still in detention and fly them home on a chartered jet.

Many business analysts said they were baffled by the raid, since foreign investment is seen as critical to rebuilding manufacturing in the United States. The harsh enforcement tactics in the Georgia raid might give some overseas executives second thoughts.

Few complained, however, about the government’s lack of interest in nailing down the worker safety issues at the site. Critics noted that employees are going to be much less likely to report hazardous conditions in the workplace — not just at the Georgia Hyundai venture, but anywhere in the country — if they fear getting on the immigration radar.

The United Auto Workers issued a statement that slammed Hyundai and its partners and subcontractors for unsafe conditions, opposing unions, and exploiting immigrant labor, but also ripped the Trump regime for how it responded to the situation.

“OSHA and the [National Labor Relations Board] have tools at their disposal to increase workplace safety,” the statement noted. “Unfortunately, the militarized federal crackdown on these workers further hurts safety at Hyundai. Workers are not the problem. Exploitative corporations are. The UAW will always stand with all workers — immigrant and native-born alike — against unsafe corporations and militarized attacks on our workplaces."

You’ve probably heard the saying that, to a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail. In turning the United States government away from its initial mission of improving people’s lives and channeling an obscene amount of its money and people power into hiring ICE agents, building concentration camps, and other immigration crackdown measures, the Trump regime seems to be hammering, viciously, at the only thing it understands.

Under Trump, workplace deaths are becoming another strain of the measles — that is, something that seemed to be on its way toward relative eradication thanks to smart human intervention, only to come roaring back in the mid-2020s under Trump’s not-so-benign neglect. After promising America’s blue-collar workers he was running to give them a voice, our Dear Leader has nothing to say to about their unsafe work conditions.

OSHA did manage to dodge one bullet when a plan by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut at least 11 key regional offices was never implemented. Likewise, a Trump proposal to eliminate most of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was shelved for now on Capitol Hill. Still, Trump has sought an 8% drop in OSHA funding for fiscal 2026, with the steepest cuts slated for enforcement. That would mean even fewer of the people who should have been raiding the Hyundai site — but didn’t.

Some day we’ll look back on the Trump nightmare and have a greater realization its worst horrors were all the things the regime didn’t even bother to do, like building up wind and solar power, or looking for a cure for cancer — or even caring when workers are gored by a forklift. That’ll have to wait until the adults are back in charge, and the masked goon squads are sent packing.

Question: Why should Democrats agree to ANY deal to prevent a shutdown? I am incensed by the use of our tax dollars to fund this [deleted]show and don’t see how giving the Republicans cover to continue the destruction of our government benefits anyone but Trump. Why should Dems act like any of this is normal? — NOW WHAT? (@mraulston.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: This is fast becoming the $64,000 Question for the month of September as a potential shutdown of the federal government on Oct. 1 looms larger. This is like one of those Oscar predictions with a “should win” and “will win” category. Should win? Shut it down, without major (and unlikely) concessions from the Trump White House. The big picture is that there will need to be a principled, moral stand against galloping fascism, so why wait a year or two, when Trump has further consolidated power. Will win? It still seems like Democrats are desperate for any kind of compromise, fearful that the president and his bully pulpit will cause voters to blame them for a prolonged shutdown. Their likely fecklessness will alienate young voters and could hurt them big-time in the 2026 election.

The online conversation about Donald Trump’s health waned a great deal after he appeared in the Oval Office last week following an unusually long absence to prove he’s neither dead nor immediately dying. Those who weighed in on the topic generally felt that his medical condition is something of a distraction from a much bigger fight. Harry Nydick wrote that “when the dust settles, [we] will then be faced with navigating not only JD Vance and the extremity of his religious and other views, but also the likes of Peter Theil, Curtis Yarvin, Russell Curtis and more.” Agreed frequent correspondent Daniel Hoffman: “Don’t waste time on this because Trump on his deathbed, comatose and in prison would still get the votes of the 77 million Americanos who elected him last year.”

📮 This week’s question: As feared, a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees has gone totally rogue, reinforcing seemingly unconstitutional policies like racial profiling by ICE agents. How would you fix the Supreme Court, including radical ideas like term limits or expanding the number of justices? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “SCOTUS reform” in the subject line.

It barely seemed to dent America’s warped consciousness, but this past weekend Donald Trump told a journalist who asked him a tough but fair question to shut up. The inquiry, on the White House lawn as Trump was leaving for the U.S. Open tennis final in New York, concerned the president’s outrageous Truth Social post that invoked the film Apocalypse Now to seemingly threaten America’s third-largest city. From the gaggle of microphones could be heard a female voice asking POTUS if he planned to “go to war with Chicago.”

Trump called the basis of the question “fake news” — and then wigged out when the woman tried to press him with a follow-up question. “Be quiet, listen! You don’t listen! You never listen,” he said. “That’s why you’re second-rate. We’re not going to war. We’re gonna clean up our cities… Clean them up, so they don’t kill five people every weekend. That’s not war, that’s common sense.” As the exchange began to percolate on social media, few were shocked to learn that the reporter who triggered Trump’s outburst was NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor.

Alcindor, widely hailed as one of the few bright lights in the current crop of White House correspondents, drew Trump’s ire several times during his first term, when she worked for PBS. The then-45th president called her query about COVID-19 “a nasty question” and in a later exchange warned her, “Don’t be threatening. Be nice.” But it’s fair to wonder how much of Trump’s ire toward Alcindor is because of her aggressive journalism, and how much is because of this: She’s a Black woman.

For a president famed for lashing out at all sorts of people, Trump’s contempt for high-profile, female African Americans truly stands out. During his first term, Trump reserved his sharpest barbs for successful Black women journalists. Once, the president was speaking in an interview about a completely different subject when he abruptly attacked April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks, calling her “a loser” who “doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.” And he complained that CNN’s Abby Phillips “asks a lot of stupid questions.”

Trump’s bashing of Black female politicians is just as bad, however. It’s notable that he’s targeted his 2024 opponent Kamala Harris and U.S. Reps. Maxine Waters and Jasmine Crockett with the same epithet, “low IQ” — a term that he rarely applies to men, or white people. Given this history of transparent racism, I found it troubling this weekend when no other journalists stepped up to defend their colleague Alcindor, or halt Trump’s press gaggle. Why can’t White House correspondents show some self-respect and declare that enough is enough?

Here’s what’s even worse, though. Trump’s dripping contempt for Black women has a way of filtering through the system. The regime recently ginned up a mortgage-fraud investigation against the first-ever African American woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, Lisa Cook, in an effort to force her to quit. ProPublica reported in June that Black women say they’ve been disproportionally targeted in a federal jobs purge linked to Trump’s anti-diversity crusade. That hostility in the government sector is seen as the key driver of a stunning statistic: that some 300,000 Black women simply left the labor force over a three-month period after Trump came into office, exacerbating their already higher unemployment rates. The president’s unacceptable treatment of Alcindor on Sunday was merely the public face of a deeply racist policy.

Football brain starts to take over this time of year. That was the case on this date eight years ago, when the peak uproar about rebel athlete Colin Kaepernick — effectively banished from the NFL, then embraced by Nike — inspired this meditation about political activism and whether only voting matters (which had, in essence, been the topic of a then-recent speech by Barack Obama). I argued that “protesting and complaining — even, yes, hashtagging — create the conditions where your vote actually matters." Read the rest: “Colin Kaepernick is proof that protest changes America, not just voting.”

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