Imagine friends invite you and your family to stay for the weekend but, in the middle of the night, they call the police, saying they’re victims of a home invasion.
When the police arrive, your friends film you all being cuffed and bundled into a police van, and then they post it triumphantly on social media.
The next day, your friends hit you with a six-figure claim for damages on an entirely fictional pretext.
How are you likely to feel about these friends of yours? Would you trust them ever again? Are they even able to behave rationally?
The South Korean government and South Korean companies are likely to be asking similar questions of the US government after the ICE raid on an EV battery plant under construction in Georgia earlier this month.
The factory is a $4.3bn joint venture developed by Korean giants Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution, exactly the sort of inward investment President Trump has built his foreign and domestic economic policies on.
Not even made in the US
On September 4th, ICE raided the site, arresting and detaining more than 300 South Korean nationals whom ICE claimed were working illegally.
A lawyer representing seven of them told GCR they were engineers and technicians installing high-tech production lines with components not even made in the US, and that they had the correct visas.
They were imprisoned in appalling conditions for six days before being released – without explanation or apology – after a high-level diplomatic intervention.
Even as this was going on, the Trump administration was trying to strong-arm South Korea into a new trade deal that would see the Koreans hand over $350bn in return for tariffs at 15% instead of Trump’s threatened 25%.
South Korea has resisted signing the deal, and the raid appears to have stiffened its resistance.
Our latest video tries to encapsulate the senselessness of what happened.
I’ve called it an “explainer”, but there is no rational explanation for what the administration did in Georgia this month.
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