ICE Made South Korean Hyundai Employees Signal Voluntary Removing Papers: Report

Comfortable Monday! It is September 15, 2025, and that is The Morning Shift — your each day roundup of the highest automotive headlines from around the globe, in a single place. That is the place you may discover an important tales which can be shaping the way in which People drive and get round.

On this morning’s version, we’re wanting on the circumstances by which the South Korean Hyundai staff had been held, in addition to Stellantis’ new pro-V8, anti-EV stance. We’ll additionally have a look at the unimaginable gross sales success that’s the Cybertruck, and Elon Musk’s first Tesla inventory buy shortly. 

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on Georgia’s Hyundai-LG battery plant has been, in brief, a fiasco. South Korean residents are swearing to by no means go to the U.S., and the nation’s firms are backing out of tasks on our shores. Now that the detained staff are again dwelling in South Korea, although, issues are unlikely to get higher for our worldwide relations — particularly now that folks can hear testimony from the employees themselves. From Yonhap Information Company, machine-translated: 

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

Mr. A entered the nation on a authorized B1 visa (a short-term enterprise visa used for enterprise journeys, and so on.). He was arrested together with his wrists certain by cable ties throughout a two-month enterprise journey for conferences and coaching.

…

At 1:20 p.m., ICE brokers handed out paperwork associated to a warrant arrest for an alien and instructed him to fill within the blanks.

Throughout this course of, there was no rationalization of the paperwork or any Miranda rights studying. The high-pressure ambiance made it unattainable to give attention to decoding every line of English whereas filling out the paperwork.

Mr. A recorded the scenario, stating, “The employees thought submitting this paper would get them launched, in order that they handed it over.” After submitting the paperwork, crimson wristbands had been positioned on their wrists.

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Employees dragged in with out understanding why had been crammed into momentary 72-person cells early of their detention. There have been rooms numbered 1 by 5, and detainees had been moved between them.

There have been rows of bunk beds alongside 4 shared bathrooms and two urinals. There have been no clocks, they usually could not see outdoors. Mildew had grown on the mattress pads. 

The present query appears to be whether or not the Korean staff had been certainly solely performing work allowed below a B1 visa, or whether or not their job duties ought to have fallen below one other visa possibility. Even the latter possibility would not justify this sort of remedy. The pictures included at Yonhap present one among ICE’s paperwork, which states that “statements made voluntarily by the topic to an immigration officer” may be grounds for removing from america. This does not sound voluntary to me. 

EVs are the longer term, our half-measure in direction of curbing local weather change, and Stellantis is having none of it. The corporate’s present plan appears to be doubling down on hemi V8 energy like Main Kong using a nuke down in direction of humanity’s obliteration. EVs are getting shelved, and high-emissions engines that had been phased out are coming again. From Automotive Information:

Underneath former CEO Carlos Tavares, Stellantis was targeted on electrifying its portfolio whereas largely taking out its household of Hemi V-8 engines.

However Antonio Filosa, who took cost of the automaker in June, is switching gears by placing an emphasis again on V-8 efficiency and tempering EV ambitions.

Chrysler, Alfa Romeo and Maserati have ditched plans to go all-electric by the top of the last decade. Some EV tasks have been shelved, together with Ram’s first absolutely electrical pickup and a deliberate Chrysler crossover.

Stellantis will nonetheless provide quite a lot of electrical fashions within the years forward, however the rollout shall be accompanied by the return of the Hemi’s growl.

Yee haw. World ending in fireplace it’s. 

EV pickups have had a tough go. They’ve bought, certain, however not within the numbers that conventional internal-combustion pickup vans have. Tesla has been significantly hard-hit, because the truck that was meant to usher the corporate into a brand new period has really completed so completely — it is instantly change into a culture-war icon and the purest instance of Elon Musk operating an organization in line with his whims and pursuits over any enterprise sense. Now, the truck is getting much more costly. From Automotive Information:

Tesla’s least costly Cybertruck has vanished from the automaker’s U.S. order web page, as battery-electric pickups throughout the trade wrestle with lackluster gross sales.

On the identical time, Ram canceled plans for its first absolutely electrical pickup, attributing the choice in a Sept. 12 assertion to slowing demand for battery-powered autos.

The trade pullback comes because the $7,500 federal tax credit score for electrical autos expires on Sept. 30.

The bottom all-wheel-drive trim begins at $72,490 now. Keep in mind when it was going to be below $50,000?

Tesla has proposed a trillion-dollar pay package deal for Elon Musk, an fascinating alternative for a CEO who’s as a lot asset as legal responsibility at this level. To point out he is devoted to the trigger, although, the billionaire has bought about $1 billion of his personal firm’s inventory. From Bloomberg: 

Elon Musk responded to an unprecedented pay proposal from Tesla Inc.’s board by shopping for about $1 billion value of shares, sending the inventory hovering in premarket buying and selling.

The billionaire purchased the shares not directly by a revocable belief on Sept. 12, in line with a regulatory submitting launched Monday. The purchases coincided with Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm talking with reporters in regards to the deserves of awarding Musk upwards of $1 trillion value of inventory if the corporate achieves a collection of bold market worth and efficiency milestones.

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Musk, 54, final purchased Tesla inventory within the open market in February 2020, in line with information compiled by Bloomberg. He offloaded greater than $20 billion of the corporate’s shares in 2022, the yr he acquired Twitter.

Tesla is in a troublesome spot right here. Its total valuation is predicated on Musk’s showmanship and concepts, on the long-shot hope that they work and everybody actually does stuff their properties with a actually infinite variety of robotic servants. On the identical time, his outspoken politics have alienated a lot of the corporate’s core viewers, and harm the financials which have lengthy since unmoored themselves from the inventory value. Musk, for his half, has mentioned nothing about Tesla lately. He is been too busy endorsing claims of “radical left-wing transgender terror cells” on Twitter. 

Random reality of the day: Lehman Brothers started as a dry items retailer run by slaveowners, till the slave-picked cotton market received too profitable and the titular Brothers received into commodities buying and selling. A few of those who work forces, et cetera.