ICE Made South Korean Hyundai Workers Sign Voluntary Removal Papers: Report

Happy Monday! It’s September 15, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re looking at the conditions in which the South Korean Hyundai workers were held, as well as Stellantis’ new pro-V8, anti-EV stance. We’ll also look at the incredible sales success that is the Cybertruck, and Elon Musk’s first Tesla stock purchase in a while. 

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on Georgia’s Hyundai-LG battery plant has been, in short, a fiasco. South Korean citizens are swearing to never visit the U.S., and the nation’s companies are backing out of projects on our shores. Now that the detained workers are back home in South Korea, though, things are unlikely to get better for our international relations — especially now that people can hear testimony from the workers themselves. From Yonhap News Agency, machine-translated: 

A ‘detention log’ obtained by Yonhap News on the 14th from worker Mr. A vividly detailed the horrific conditions of the detention facility and the human rights violations he endured.

Mr. A entered the country on a legal B1 visa (a short-term business visa used for business trips, etc.). He was arrested with his wrists bound by cable ties during a two-month business trip for meetings and training.

…

At 1:20 p.m., ICE agents handed out documents related to a warrant arrest for an alien and instructed him to fill in the blanks.

During this process, there was no explanation of the documents or any Miranda rights reading. The high-pressure atmosphere made it impossible to focus on interpreting each line of English while filling out the paperwork.

Mr. A recorded the situation, stating, “The workers thought submitting this paper would get them released, so they handed it over.” After submitting the documents, red wristbands were placed on their wrists.

…

Workers dragged in without understanding why were crammed into temporary 72-person cells early in their detention. There were rooms numbered 1 through 5, and detainees were moved between them.

There were rows of bunk beds alongside four shared toilets and two urinals. There were no clocks, and they couldn’t see outside. Mold had grown on the mattress pads. 

The current question seems to be whether the Korean workers were indeed only performing work allowed under a B1 visa, or whether their job duties should have fallen under another visa option. Even the latter option doesn’t justify this kind of treatment. The images included at Yonhap show one of ICE’s documents, which states that “statements made voluntarily by the subject to an immigration officer” can be grounds for removal from the United States. This doesn’t sound voluntary to me. 

EVs are the future, our half-measure towards curbing climate change, and Stellantis is having none of it. The company’s current plan seems to be doubling down on hemi V8 power like Major Kong riding a nuke down towards humanity’s obliteration. EVs are getting shelved, and high-emissions engines that had been phased out are coming back. From Automotive News:

Under former CEO Carlos Tavares, Stellantis was focused on electrifying its portfolio while largely doing away with its family of Hemi V-8 engines.

But Antonio Filosa, who took charge of the automaker in June, is switching gears by putting an emphasis back on V-8 performance and tempering EV ambitions.

Chrysler, Alfa Romeo and Maserati have ditched plans to go all-electric by the end of the decade. Some EV projects have been shelved, including Ram’s first fully electric pickup and a planned Chrysler crossover.

Stellantis will still offer a variety of electric models in the years ahead, but the rollout will be accompanied by the return of the Hemi’s growl.

Yee haw. World ending in fire it is. 

EV pickups have had a rough go. They’ve sold, sure, but not in the numbers that traditional internal-combustion pickup trucks have. Tesla has been particularly hard-hit, as the truck that was meant to usher the company into a new era has actually done so perfectly — it’s immediately become a culture-war icon and the purest example of Elon Musk running a company according to his whims and interests over any business sense. Now, the truck is getting even more expensive. From Automotive News:

Tesla’s least expensive Cybertruck has vanished from the automaker’s U.S. order page, as battery-electric pickups across the industry struggle with lackluster sales.

At the same time, Ram canceled plans for its first fully electric pickup, attributing the decision in a Sept. 12 statement to slowing demand for battery-powered vehicles.

The industry pullback comes as the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles expires on Sept. 30.

The base all-wheel-drive trim starts at $72,490 now. Remember when it was going to be under $50,000?

Tesla has proposed a trillion-dollar pay package for Elon Musk, an interesting choice for a CEO who is as much asset as liability at this point. To show he’s dedicated to the cause, though, the billionaire has purchased about $1 billion of his own company’s stock. From Bloomberg: 

Elon Musk responded to an unprecedented pay proposal from Tesla Inc.’s board by buying about $1 billion worth of shares, sending the stock soaring in premarket trading.

The billionaire bought the shares indirectly through a revocable trust on Sept. 12, according to a regulatory filing released Monday. The purchases coincided with Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm speaking with reporters about the merits of awarding Musk upwards of $1 trillion worth of stock if the company achieves a series of ambitious market value and performance milestones.

…

Musk, 54, last bought Tesla stock in the open market in February 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. He offloaded more than $20 billion of the company’s shares in 2022, the year he acquired Twitter.

Tesla is in a tough spot here. Its entire valuation is based on Musk’s showmanship and ideas, on the long-shot hope that they work and everyone really does stuff their homes with a literally infinite number of robot servants. At the same time, his outspoken politics have alienated much of the company’s core audience, and hurt the financials that have long since unmoored themselves from the stock price. Musk, for his part, has said nothing about Tesla recently. He’s been too busy endorsing claims of “radical left-wing transgender terror cells” on Twitter. 

Random fact of the day: Lehman Brothers began as a dry goods store run by slaveowners, until the slave-picked cotton market got too lucrative and the titular Brothers got into commodities trading. Some of those that work forces, et cetera.