It’s 2:06 a.m. and I’m wrapping up a story at Rolling Stone that details how a Republican candidate for congress in Georgia was partly behind yesterday’s ICE raid at a Hyundai plant here. Like, as basically an informant. Pretty wild stuff!
I wish I had more time and energy to lay out more about that story below but I’m pretty tired, so the following will have to suffice. You can read more here. FYI this was not at all what I planned to spend the last 12-plus hours on but when the dystopian stuff happens right down the road from your house, you just sort of have to go. Anyway, if you appreciate this journalism please pay for it.
Oh, something cool: Here’s the cover of my first book, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press next year.
Cool, right? Anyway, on to the news…
On the drive to a massive Hyundai plant outside Savannah, I passed entire neighborhoods that have been built to house the workers there. The plant, which opened in March, was lauded as the biggest economic development project in Georgia history by elected officials like Gov. Brian Kemp. Thanks to Hyundai’s decision to build the plant on the side of the interstate in Bryan County, there are more than 7,000 new jobs there, county officials said last year. The plant and its offshoots have resulted in more than $2 billion in investments in the county.
I drove past the new neighborhoods and pulled off the interstate, passing a handful of brand new gas stations that weren’t there last year, and driving through new roundabouts on the outskirts of the plant. Then I drove around the plant for a while until I found the Georgia State Patrol cars blocking an entrance. Overhead, a helicopter hovered. Somewhere past the state troopers were the masked agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), who arrested as many as 400 undocumented immigrants there on Thursday.
I came home to check on the dogs and the wife and checked online to see what folks were saying about the raid. That’s when I found Tori Branum, a Georgia woman who is running as a Republican for the 12th congressional district. Branum claimed credit for alerting ICE to the presence of undocumented immigrants working in and around the plant that the agency raided on Thursday.
“For months, folks have whispered about what’s going on behind those gates now the truth is finally catching up (sic)” she wrote on Facebook. “I reported this site to ICE a few months ago and was on the phone with an agent.”
I called Branum up to learn more about how she helped ICE in its investigation and operation today in Georgia. She told me she simply contacted the agency on its website at first. At some point, she came into contact with a local union worker who spoke Spanish. That person had access to the facility, apparently spoke to some employees there, and reported to Branum that undocumented immigrants were on site. She then put the union worker in touch with ICE.
Barnum said she’s been getting “a lot of hate” but isn’t really bothered by it. She said she feels good about what she did. After all, she said, busting “illegal immigrants” and getting them out of the country is why she voted for Donald Trump in the first place. That, and cracking down on crime, among I’m sure many other things that we didn’t get a chance to talk about.
She told me that, if it were up to her, everyone not born in the United States should have to leave, more or less.
“Every person that wasn’t born here would go back to the country they came from and come back the right way,” she said. “And we’d have a whole reset of this whole debacle.”
Anyway, you can hear some of her comments as well as some videos from the raid above. More at Rolling Stone today and more here next week on election denier stuff.
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