Sept. 12, 2025 | Attorney for Hyundai-LG workers describes their experience

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Welcome to Daily Drive for Friday, September 12, 2025.

I'm Jake Nier in Detroit, in for Kellan Walker.

Stay on the show, Hyundai LG workers return home after being detained by ICE, while South

Korea asks for a new visa program.

We'll hear from attorney Charles Cook, who's representing some of the workers arrested in

last week's raid.

Two automotive folks have reached out that produce automotive parts.

How do we make sure this doesn't happen to us?

GM CEO, Mary Bara, says agility and resiliency are key to navigating a changing industry,

and GM is forced to close part of its text center over Legionnaires' disease cases.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

South Korea Foreign Minister Cho Hyun is calling on Congress in the U.S. to support a new

visa for Korean businesses.

That says some 300 Hyundai LG workers returned home to emotional reunions with families

one week after being detained in a U.S. immigration raid that left some questioning whether they

would ever be willing to work in the U.S. again.

The ministry said in a statement that during his meetings with U.S. senators in Washington,

Cho reiterated concerns among South Koreans over the arrests of Korean professionals that

participated in investment projects in the U.S.

The South Korean workers were held for a week by U.S. immigration and customs

enforcement before flying back to their home country.

We'll hear more about this story in a minute with attorney Charles Cook.

On Thursday at Automotive News Congress, General Motors CEO Mary Bara credited the automaker's

agility and resiliency for helping it make long-term decisions in a time of uncertainty

and upheaval.

Bara says GM has stayed focused on what she called no-regret moves that set it

up for the future, including its transition toward electric vehicles.

How do you make those big bets but do it in a way where in some cases it's how long can

I wait before I have to make the final decision?

We spent a lot of time as a leadership team looking at those tradeoffs and really trying

to say no matter what we know we want to do this for these reasons.

At the same time, she added GM executives have taken the lead from customers as they

weigh how and when to make big bets on future technology.

We'll hear more from Mary Bara's conversation at Automotive News Congress with publisher

Casey Crane in just a minute.

And GM has closed one of its main engineering buildings on its Warren Technical Center campus

near Detroit after two of its employees tested positive for Legionnaires' disease.

The automaker says it closed Cole Engineering Center Wednesday evening after being notified

by the McComb County Health Department of the positive tests.

While the building has not been confirmed as the source of the disease, it will remain

closed until at least September 22nd, pending further results.

And those are today's headlines.

You can find more details on all of those stories at AutoNews.com.

As I mentioned a minute ago, our publisher Casey Crane sat down Thursday with GM CEO

Mary Bara on stage at Automotive News Congress in Detroit, which happened to take place inside

the building GM will soon call its global headquarters.

They talked about the state of flux in the industry at the moment and the role of the

consumer in GM's decision making.

Here's an excerpt from their conversation.

I was talking a little bit about uncertainty and I think it's fair to say you've

led General Motors through a lot of different industry shifts.

But at the moment with tariffs and trade realignments, supply chain changes, it's a little unique

and I think our times are a little bit unprecedented.

General Motors have kept products flowing to customers, invested billions in US manufacturing,

and you've done a nice job sourcing parts to stay competitive.

So this is a very large question.

But how do you think about leading in this environment?

What's your framework for making long-term decisions so that General Motors can manage

to stay strong no matter how this evolves?

Well, if you go back five years, we've been through so much as a country, as a world,

as an industry, think about COVID.

You think about the semiconductor shortage.

You think about the impact that that had on our suppliers.

And we're still, I think, working through that while we're dealing with tariffs

and you didn't mention a fairly big shift from a regulatory perspective,

from a GHG and emissions perspective.

But one of our senior leaders said as we were in a meeting planning,

he said, you know, I think through all this, one of our superpowers has become agility

and resiliency of, OK, here's the situation.

What do we do?

So I think to answer your question, it starts by having a great team.

And, you know, we've got really strong leaders.

We have a mixture of people who have joined the company over the last few years.

We have people who have been there a long time like I have.

And then it's looking at what are those no regret moves?

What do you know?

I personally believe from an EV perspective that is still our North Star

because I think fundamentally as the charging infrastructure builds out the vehicles,

they're fun to drive, cost of ownership is lower from a gas perspective.

You never have to go to a gas station.

So I think we're on that journey, but we've got to be led by the customer.

And so staying focused on the customer, you know, looking at how do you make those big bets

but do it in a way where, in some cases, it's how long can I wait

before I have to make the final decision?

And that's what a lot of, we spent a lot of time as a leadership team looking at those tradeoffs

and really trying to say, no matter what, we know we want to do this for these reasons.

Yeah, speaking of customers, you might have to build a few more of those corvettes

because there's been a couple of questions about whether that one's for sale or not.

That one, I am so proud, I'm so proud of the whole product development team

that works together to do that, but the Corvette, it's pretty special.

So in all seriousness, you've talked a lot about putting the customer at the center of what you guys do.

Whether they want an EV, a hybrid, ice engines, your strategy pretty much reflects that.

You're growing EV volumes, you're also investing in ice where it makes sense.

How do you think about balancing that portfolio and how do the company's investments fit what the customers want

and what you're hearing from them?

Well, I think for the most part, I mean, obviously, up until a year ago,

we were on a journey to be in a regulatory environment where we had to drive EV adoption much faster.

And with the IRA going away, we're still all going to learn where we're at once that ends

and we get through the pull ahead volume.

But again, I think one of the great things we've done is, if you look at our Springhill, Tennessee plant

that builds both ice and EV, so we can flex between what the customer wants.

We've been very focused with our, as we put together the EV portfolio,

not just to replicate what we had from an internal combustion,

but to say how do we make sure we have affordable, we have luxury, we have the right segments.

So it was a very strategic portfolio and I'm very pleased right now that we've got this portfolio

that still meets the customer where we are and each of them are beautifully designed vehicles.

So from an ice perspective, we've looked the same way and to that point,

there was a couple of decision points over the last couple of years where if we started a new program,

we said, okay, when do we need to really make the decision of what we're going to do

and what were the milestones along the way?

As we gained more information, we're like, yes, we're going to do that program from an internal combustion.

So it's really, you've got to kind of do things under a number of scenarios

and then you do find a common set though.

Yeah, it wasn't always the easiest with all the pressure.

It wasn't always the easiest, but that's the industry we're running.

It's such an exciting industry.

GM CEO Mary Bara spoke with publisher Casey Crane at Automotive News Congress in Detroit.

After the program, she gave our own Lindsay Van Holley and Nick Bunkley an exclusive interview

which you'll hear on Monday and Tuesday, right here on Daily Drive.

Coming up, an attorney representing some of the South Korean workers who were detained by ICE last week

joins the show to talk about what they experienced

and what it means for foreign companies thinking about making big investments in the U.S. going forward.

We'll hear from Charles Cook next on Daily Drive.

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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Jake Neer.

With hundreds of Hyundai LG workers now back in South Korea after being detained by ICE last week,

questions now swirl about what happened leading up to and during the immigration raid

and what it means for foreign companies that are thinking about investing in the U.S.

Earlier this week, our own Molly Boygon spoke with attorney Charles Cook,

founding partner at Cook Baxter, who represents some of the Hyundai LG workers.

Charles Cook, founding partner at Cook Baxter, thanks so much for joining us.

My pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

How many clients of yours were impacted by the raid at the Hyundai LG site last week?

We had 12 individual clients that we've been asked to assist as part of this raid.

Two of them were actually DACA recipients. They weren't Koreans.

They were DACA recipients working in construction on the site,

legally allowed to do what they were doing, and the rest were

individuals employed within the fabrication part of the plant

as they rigid it for operations.

Can you tell us a bit more about the type of work that your clients were doing

and why these different companies were relying on,

in some cases, DACA recipients and in other cases, foreign workers?

Well, let's look at the different part. I'll do DACA as far as that's easy.

They're construction workers. They're living in South Georgia.

They lived here since they were two. That's what they do.

So if you want to build a building, those are the kind of guys you're going to hire.

But the Koreans and some Japanese that were on site,

they are subcontractors of Hyundai, and they provide the specialized equipment

that's used to fabricate batteries. We don't make that equipment in the United States.

You can't go to New Jersey and buy a battery plant or parts for that.

You import that from abroad, whether that's Japan or Germany or Korea.

And so if Hyundai, as part of the $7 billion plant,

wants to get that plant up and operating as quickly as possible,

they're going to go to the source of the labor and the product as quickly as they can.

Now, of course, we live in the United States, and our immigration laws are at best antiquated,

keeping in mind the last time we revised them was 1990.

So what kind of cars they were making in 1990, that's our immigration laws.

And so there isn't really a visa that's a special visa for, hey, I'm going to come in,

and I'm bringing this giant piece of equipment, and I'm going to get it bolted to the floor,

and I'm going to make sure it's operating, and I'm going to service it,

what we would call after-sales service and installation.

We don't really have a visa for that.

But we need that. Obviously, we need to have that type of person be able to come to the

United States, because we don't have them here. We can't provide that labor.

So we put this under the B-1 business visitor program.

B is just a category that we describe people who are coming temporarily to the United States

either for tourism, which is a B-2, or business, B-1, and that type of business

a lot of people think of, well, that's just meetings.

Well, no, it's not just meetings. It can be for investment purposes.

You can be coming for oversight. You can be coming for project reviews.

But you can also come and do after-sales installation and service.

And so there was a number of individuals that had actual B-1s.

They'd actually gone to the consulate and said, here is why I need to go to America.

Letter from their employer, consulate, you're right. I agree. You can go.

And then when they landed in Atlanta, and then they appeared in front of customs and water

protection, you know, the friendly guys in black uniforms and the guns that are behind

the glass, they also said, hey, I'm coming for this. I said, great, come on in.

Now there was a large group, however, that didn't have B-1 visas.

Well, why? Well, they have ESTA. So the best way to describe this, Molly, is if you go to

Paris, you don't go to the French embassy here to get a visa, you just go to Paris,

hop on a plane. That's ESTA. It's just, that's our version of it. And to get ESTA,

as you're a foreign national, you have to go online at least three days before your flight,

fill out a form, pass a quick background check, and then you can come to America,

either as an ESTA-T, I'm coming to Disneyland, I'm a tourist, or an ESTA-B, I'm coming for business.

It is exactly the same thing as a B-1 issued at a consulate. And you can do exactly the same

things under an ESTA that you can do under a B-1 visa. Except these guys didn't go to the consulate,

but they did go to the friendly CBP officer at the airport, presented their documents,

showed the letter from their employer, and they were allowed in. So the reason we had them,

instead of US workers, is that they weren't any US workers. I did ask one of my clients about this,

one of the companies, they said, well, why don't you have US workers? He said, well, we could.

And after they've worked three to five years in Korea, we will let them go on site and do service

and installation. But since Hyundai wanted this plant this year, and not in 2029,

we have our regular guys. What did your clients describe about the scene of the raid

last week? It's chaos. First of all, it was raid because there was no advanced notice.

Keep in mind, ICE could have just issued a notice of inspection of I-9s and done an audit

and discovered the same problem with workers that didn't have actual papers.

So ICE showed up in buses, they had a federal search warrant. That search warrant was based

on ICE claiming that there was four undocumented workers working on the site.

That's the whole basic. But they showed up with multiple buses,

believing they were going to arrest about 200 Latino workers. That's what they thought.

They ended up arresting about 175 Latino workers, including people that were legally working.

So we've got that problem. And then all the Koreans, now the Koreans were not

doing construction. They weren't putting up walls, they weren't putting on ceilings,

they weren't pouring concrete. They were inside the already completed part of the factory,

either installing equipment or many of them were actually in a meeting in a conference room. One

of my young clients had literally arrived the night before and was showing up for a meeting. He was

planning to be there a week as part of his job as an engineer. And then he was going back

to Korea. He didn't even know what was going on. What is this? It's like a welcome party

to America. So it was chaos as they lined them all, you see in the videos, they lined them all

of outside. They then began chaining them, not just handcuffs, but body chains, ankle, ankle irons

as they tried to get them on buses. They had to bring in extra buses because they didn't have

enough people there. But it's clear they did not intend to go there to pick up Korean workers

because they had no Korean speakers. They had no translator. They ended up using an app

on their telephone to try to communicate with the people when the very few Korean English speakers

were already off the scene, were already in a bus or gone. It appears that somebody thought, wow,

these could be really big numbers for this week. Stephen Miller will be very happy,

perhaps would just arrest everybody and sort it out later. And now we're in the later

part of the problem. What type of communication have the companies had with your clients?

Almost none. You can only visit them on Saturdays and Sundays and they couldn't get in on Saturday

and Sunday. So the principal contact has been through the consulates. So the Japanese consulate

and the Korean consulate have both had access to the individuals there and have communicated

on behalf of the companies. And so the companies themselves have literally not had a chance

to talk to their employees about what's going on, nor to advise them about the offer,

the quote offer that ICE is now currently making to resolve what is clearly an international incident.

And in terms of the responsibility or obligation or assistance that the companies may or may not

want to provide to their employees, I understand that there's a bit of a complex structure in

terms of Hyundai, LG, the joint venture, subcontractors. So are you saying that

none of those companies have really had the opportunity to engage with their employees

because of the limitations placed on visitation? Yes, that's correct. I mean, they've all wanted

to. I have five different employers that I'm working with. They all are super concerned

about their employees, really worried about their employees. But long before Korea says

I'm sending a plane, they were like right away, this happened, they're calling. And

they're very upset that they don't have access to their employees. We have figured out a way,

at least to get them some money so they can buy extra food instead of eating

bologna sandwiches. I mean, it's a jail. This is not like, oh, it's a nice holding facility

with the tennis court. No, this is a jail. So they've been very concerned, but the consulates

have been excellent at communication and in working with the companies and with the employees

themselves. What impact do you see this having on foreign companies that are

trying to establish manufacturing in the United States? That's kind of the $100,000 question,

isn't it? I know when I've spoken to different reporters about this, that work in the financial

industry, they've expressed deep skepticism that companies would be willing any longer

to even risk that this thing would happen to their German or their other Korean or their

Peruvian workers. Why would I even risk this at this point? So I think it's going to have

a chilling effect, at least temporarily, and at least until ICE can develop better parameters

on issues like this. You hear, of course, from the radical anti-immigrationists that they

should deport everybody. America is going to be doing these jobs. They can't because we simply

do not have the product on which these people can work. It's not like, hey, I'm going to,

here's how to sweep. Get a broom, you can sweep. These are not sweeping jobs. These are highly

technical, highly sophisticated pieces of machinery. One, I was reading an article about this plant

in a visit that had occurred just last week before the raid, and the reporter described

it as space age, just completely futuristic. We don't have stuff like that. We just

don't. We're not building it. So we import that. Can we? Of course we can. We have the ability,

but we need folks to help us get there, which is ironic in many ways. But that's how far we've

let manufacturing slip out of our hands, so we can't do what these companies can do in 2025.

So yes, I see, and it's not just cars. Two automotive folks have reached out about this,

but it's other industries as well that are thinking, oh my goodness,

Trump, I promise Trump, I'm going to invest a half a trillion dollars. How? I can't invest that without

my people running things, teaching things, servicing things, and your immigration laws stink.

When you say that two automotive folks have reached out about this, do you mean that

automotive companies have reached out to you about the security of their immigrant workforce

in the US or what do you mean by that? Two manufacturing parts that produce automotive

parts have reached out. How do we make sure this doesn't happen to us? How do we better protect

our employees that come in? We've got people that come and go all the time on B1s and ESTA.

How do we protect them? How do we make sure that this doesn't happen to us? So,

yeah, it's a learning opportunity, but it's also very scary.

You know, nobody wants to spend time in American jails. It's not a pleasant experience.

Charles Cook, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

Come back over the weekend for our weekend drive edition of the show.

Our own Molly Boygon and Larry Veliquette talk more about the ice raid near Savannah

and about what happens if the Supreme Court rules President Trump's tariffs illegal.

Consumers who paid these tariffs that were put on your MSRP, do you refund that money?

No, you're not going to refund that money. You've already declared it on your P&L statements.

It's going to be a mess. We'd love to hear from you.

Let us know what you think of the show and the topics we covered today.

Send us an email at dailydrive at autonews.com

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Sept. 12, 2025 | Attorney for Hyundai-LG workers describes their experience

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