ICE Just Destroyed U.S. Relations With South Korea

The immigration raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia earlier this month, which saw more than 300 South Korean workers detained and, last week, flown back to Seoul, has proven to be an enduring, self-inflicted disaster by the Trump administration.

Reports of the harrowing conditions the workers experienced continue to emerge, as South Korea this week announced its intention to investigate human rights violations. “One by one, we were cuffed at the wrists, then chained at the waist and shackled at the ankles. Then we were put on the bus. I couldn’t understand why we were being treated this way,” one worker told the BBC for a Tuesday story.

The worker said the detention center was “very cold. We weren’t even given blankets for 2 days. I was wearing a short sleeve T-shirt, so I put my arms inside my clothes and wrapped myself in a towel to try to stay warm at night,” he said. “The worst part was the water. It smelt like sewage. We drank as little as possible.”

Meanwhile, the raid seems poised to inflict significant economic harm on the U.S. and the Peach State. Construction on the raided facility is reportedly paused until 2026. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has warned that South Korean firms “will be very hesitant to make direct investments in the United States” in light of the incident—and indeed, several have already suspended U.S. projects.

President Trump, evidently feeling the heat, took to Truth Social on Sunday: “I don’t want to frighten off or disincentivize Investment into America by outside Countries or Companies,” he wrote. “We welcome them, we welcome their employees, and we are willing to proudly say we will learn from them.”

Much of the blame for the incident and its fallout belongs to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, according to a Tuesday report in Forbes. Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer representing several of the workers (who he says were in the U.S. on business visas and though a visa waiver program) told the publication that the arrests were “entirely driven” by Miller’s quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day.

“ICE agents screwed up by arresting people who did not abuse the visa, were eligible to engage in the type of work for which they were admitted, but ICE considered it a successful operation because they met Miller’s quota,” Kuck said.

President Donald Trump is mounting a pressure campaign to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, without providing any evidence to support the charges against her, ABC News reported Wednesday.

After five months of digging, investigators have yet to produce a shred of evidence that James falsified bank documents to secure favorable terms on a mortgage for her Virginia home, multiple sources briefed on the probe told ABC News.

Still, Trump has directed top officials at the Justice Department to aggressively pursue an investigation against James. Two Trump stooges, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s Working Weaponization Group, have urged U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert to seek an indictment against James.

When federal prosecutors declined, Pulte encouraged Trump to fire Siebert and have him replaced with someone who would do his bidding, sources told ABC News.

Pulte and Martin have staked their claim that James committed mortgage fraud on a single document claiming that the home she purchased in 2023 would be her primary residence. But investigators haven’t been able to prove she knowingly lied, or that the document was even considered by loan officers. Lawyers that drafted the document said the error was the result of a template that wasn’t corrected, sources said. Every other document submitted for the mortgage accurately stated she would not reside at the home.

Pulte has also lobbed similar claims of mortgage fraud at other Trump opponents, such as Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and Federal Reserve Chair Lisa Cook—which have already begun to fall apart.

Since Trump entered office, the administration has set off on a campaign of retribution against James. Months after the probe into her residences started in April, the DOJ launched an investigation into whether she violated Trump’s constitutional rights in taking legal action against him in a winning bank fraud case, costing him $454 million for his family’s business practices.

The Trump administration wasn’t even trying to determine if Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony could be deemed credible.

In a CNN interview Tuesday night, in which he urged Americans to hear out the convicted sex offender’s side of the story, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the point of his August interviews with Maxwell was to “give her an opportunity to speak,” which he claimed no one had done before.

“She had been in prison for many many years, and she had offered to speak on many many occasions, and she was never given that opportunity,” Blanche told CNN, referring to Jeffrey Epstein’s media-savvy criminal associate and girlfriend.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. She was deposed in the 2016 defamation lawsuit against Epstein brought by one of his most vocal victims, Virginia Giuffre, and refused to testify in her own criminal trial in 2021. She is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.

“So what I did is I gave her that opportunity to speak,” Blanche—Trump’s former personal attorney—continued. “Whether her answers were credible or truthful, there’s a lot of information out there about Mr. Epstein, about her, and whether what she said is completely wrong or completely right or a little of both—that’s the reason why we released the transcript.

“It’s really up to the American people to determine what they believe [whether] her answers were credible or whether they found her not credible,” Blanche said, again referring to an individual who refused to testify on multiple occasions and was already found guilty by a jury of her peers for sex-trafficking children.

Despite already having the Epstein files on hand, Blanche interviewed Maxwell again last month regarding details of Epstein’s potential associates, in an apparent attempt to satiate the president’s restless base.

The information exchange resulted in a very convenient transfer for Maxwell—one of the worst sex criminals of the century—shipping her from a Florida prison to a low-security prison camp in Texas that lawmakers have described as “not suitable for a sex offender.” Maxwell’s attorneys are also pressing the White House for a pardon.

While Trump administration officials attempted to publicly justify reopening conversation with Maxwell, questions abound about her credibility and why her answers in 2025 would differ from her original interviews with federal officials.

President Donald Trump went on a wild rant against former special counsel Jack Smith for allegedly investigating Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

“Why was the wonderful Turning Point under INVESTIGATION by ‘Deranged’ Jack Smith and the Corrupt & Incompetent Biden Administration,” Trump wrote. “They tried to force Charlie, and many other people and movements, out of business. They Weaponized the Justice Department against Sleepy Joe Biden’s Political Opponents, including ME!”

The short answer to Trump’s question is because of his alleged efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Chairman Chuck Grassley said that Turning Point USA, Kirk’s conservative youth organization, was one of several Republican organizations targeted by Arctic Frost, an FBI probe into Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

A read-out published by Grassley explained that operation Arctic Frost was a joint effort started in April 2022 between the FBI, the DOJ Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the National Archives and Records Administration that had been assigned to Smith.

Turning Point USA received a subpoena in December 2022, along with several other event-organizing groups, such as the Make America Great Again PAC. These groups had been subpoenaed along the “thread” of possibly supplying money for the deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Kirk had publicly promoted the January 6 rally, as well as Trump’s infamous call to “fight like hell,” before the riot turned deadly, according to The Guardian. Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of Kirk’s organization, had been one of a dozen groups to deliver busloads of Trump allies to the “March to Save America.”

Unable to dwell on a single thought, even in writing, Trump continued to rant about a gag order placed on him by New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, after the president led attacks against Merchan’s family and staff nearly a year ago.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement report revealed that officials at Camp East Montana, the new detention facility at Fort Bliss, have already violated dozens of federal standards for immigrant detention since welcoming detainees in August, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Construction began hastily in late July, after the government awarded a nearly $232 million contract to Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics to establish and operate a 5,000-bed short-term immigrant detention facility. The company specializes in supply chain management, and has no experience in detention—and it’s showing.

The first detainees arrived on August 1, only days after construction began. Just 50 days later, and with 1,400 detainees in its charge, the facility had racked up at least 60 violations, according to a recent ICE inspection.

Detainees at Camp East Montana were held in large tents on an active construction site without basic amenities, similarly to detainees at the now shuttered Alligator Alcatraz. Some toilets and sinks did not work for the first few weeks, according to an August memo obtained by the Post. Detainees were not given access to telephones, the Post reported, only tablet computers that sometimes didn’t work.

Ricardo Quintana Chavez, a 57-year-old asylum-seeker who was held at Fort Bliss for 24 days before being deported to Peru, told the Post that water seeped into his cell when other people used the showers.

Chavez also told the Post that he was rarely allowed outside. ICE policy requires one hour of recreation a day, five days per week, but inspectors at Camp East Montana found that detainees were only given 40 minutes of recreation per session, and some only received three sessions over a two-week period. Chavez also said he was fed junk food, such as cookies, candies, and potato chips, instead of substantive meals.

Detainees were kept in the dark about their cases, and many said they didn’t know who their deportation officer was, in violation of ICE standards. Chavez told the Post that he received no information about the status of his asylum case over his three-week stay at Camp East Montana.

ICE inspectors also said that officials at the detention center failed to provide proper and mandatory medical care for detainees, failing to conduct intake screenings and complete medical charts that could be used to identify medical and mental conditions.

Detainees’ family members and legal representatives struggled to get hold of them while they were at Camp East Montana, as their location was not available on ICE’s website. Legal representatives reported being turned away from the facility, as did Texas Representative Veronica Escobar. She said she’d complied with ICE’s demand for a week’s advance warning but was still told she couldn’t visit until construction was completed.

Michelle Brané, a former immigration detention ombudsman, said that the report was one of the most concerning evaluations of an immigrant detention center she had ever seen. “There is no way that this facility should be operating with their current numbers, let alone expanding,” she told the Post.