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    Leaked Ice document shows worker detained in Hyundai raid had valid visa

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    At least one of the Korean workers swept up in a massive immigration raid on a Hyundai Motor factory site in Georgia last week was living and working legally in the US, according to an internal federal government document obtained by the Guardian.Officials then “mandated” that he agree to be removed from the US despite not having violated his visa.The document shows that immigration officials are aware that someone with a valid visa was among the people arrested during the raid at the Hyundai factory and taken to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention for removal proceedings, where the people arrested remained on Tuesday before expected deportation flights back to South Korea.The document in question reports on the man’s case and was leaked exclusively to the Guardian. It was written by an Ice agent. The Guardian is redacting the identity of the man in question, who arrived in the US in June, because it has not been possible to reach him directly and it is unclear whether he has any legal representation.The document says that immigration agents from Atlanta “determined that [redacted] entered into the United States in [redacted], with a valid B1/B2 visa and [redacted] was employed at HL-GA Battery Company LLC as a contractor from the South Korean company SFA. From statements made and queries in law enforcement databases, [redacted] has not violated his visa; however, the Atlanta Field Office Director has mandated [redacted] be presented as a Voluntary Departure. [Redacted] has accepted voluntary departure despite not violating his B1/B2 visa requirements.”The internal file describes “an actual crime”, according to Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney based in Georgia – but with the crime allegedly being committed by the government, not the immigrant in question. Kuck, who is representing a number of people arrested during last week’s raid, said it is illegal to detain a valid visa holder in this way.“This is outrageous,” Kuck said.The document contradicts claims by the agency that all 475 people arrested during the raid were working illegally or violating their visas. Attorneys scrambling in recent days to provide representation to the men detained had already claimed that immigrants with a valid working status were swept up alongside the people allegedly working unlawfully, and placed in removal proceedings. That view was backed up by an agency official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive government matters.It is not yet clear whether other people with valid visas were detained in the raid, nor how many were actually alleged to be working illegally at the factory.Approximately 300 people arrested could be put on flights back to South Korea as early as Wednesday, according to one source familiar with events who requested anonymity to speak about what is going on behind the scenes. Non-Koreans arrested during the operation are expected to remain in Ice detention.Last Thursday, Ice led a raid at the Hyundai battery factory under construction in Ellabell, near Savannah, Georgia, and arrested nearly 500 people, the majority of whom were from South Korea, part of a $12.6bn investment program in Georgia by the company. Construction had to be halted on the plant that is designed to supply batteries for electric vehicles.A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal parent agency of Ice, said in a statement to the Guardian that: “This individual admitted to unauthorized work on a B1/B2 visa. He was offered voluntary departure and accepted it,” despite this being the opposite of what the leaked document says. When pressed for further clarification, DHS reiterated its first statement. Ice did not respond to a request for comment about legal workers being arrested.“This is a clear violation of the law in detaining somebody who is not lawfully detainable,” Kuck said. “That’s a crime – that’s unlawful imprisonment in the United States. This isn’t an accident. People go to prison for stuff like this.”According to the file written by an agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an agency within Ice, the man entered the US “with a valid B1/B2 visa”, which allows for some business-related activities and tourism. He was at the Hyundai factory as a contractor with a South Korean company.“‘ Voluntarily’ means something different in immigration than it does in the real world,” Kuck said. “When you basically leave under Ice custody, then you have immigration consequences that come with that, including the loss of visa and possibly an inability to return [to the US].”After the raid, additional Ice officers and agents were sent to the detention facility to process the sheer number of people arrested, according to the agency official who spoke to the Guardian.Although officials say that the people arrested were in some violation of immigration laws, many others with valid legal status were offered voluntary departure, the official claimed. The official added that it is unclear what will happen with any legal immigrants who refuse to be deported voluntarily, since there is “no legal mechanism to remove them if they are not in violation” of US civil immigration laws. There is no suggestion that the Korean man in question has a criminal record in the US.“The arrest itself is illegal and this just might be a way of pushing up [arrest] numbers and covering up mistakes,” the official added.The raid angered the South Korean government, which announced billions of dollars of investment in the US following a new trade deal between the countries. On Sunday, the South Korean and US governments negotiated a deal to take the arrested workers home.“These workers were put in incredibly vulnerable positions,” said Samantha Hamilton, a litigation attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta. She emphasized that the men have ended up imperiled simply by taking up the opportunity of work on what was an ambitious international project.DHS and Ice did not respond to requests for comment on allegations that they are pressuring the detainees to agree to be deported. More

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      Fulton county election board faces $10,000 a day fine for not appointing Republicans

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      The Fulton county commission in Georgia will be fined $10,000 a day for violating a court order to appoint two Republicans associated with Trump-aligned groups pushing voter fraud conspiracies to the county’s election board.The county charter states that commissioners “shall” appoint two Republicans and two Democrats nominated by their respective county party chairperson, for two-year terms. When commissioners rejected the nomination by Fulton county’s Republican party chair, the superior court judge David Emerson issued an order requiring the board to appoint them.In a civil contempt case that threatened jail time, Emerson found the Democratic commissioners have “been stubbornly litigious and acted in bad faith in its conduct prior to this litigation by its failure to comply with clear local legislation which forced the plaintiff to file this action,” Emerson’s ruling Wednesday states. Emerson awarded attorney’s fees to the Republican plaintiffs.The plaintiffs were seeking an order of both civil and criminal contempt for failing to comply with the order. Civil contempt has historically meant an ever-increasing series of daily fines until the board complies with the order. But a finding of criminal contempt would have meant jail time until enough Democratic commissioners agree to vote for the appointment.The Fulton county Republican party chair, Stephanie Endres, nominated Jason Frazier for a term and renominated Julie Adams to serve another term.Frazier is among the most prolific challengers of voter registrations in Georgia, and unsuccessfully sued Fulton county in federal court in 2024, attempting to force the board of registration and elections to purge nearly 2,000 Fulton county voters from the state’s rolls before the presidential election.Adams is a member of an election-denial activist network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. As a member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, Adams refused to certify the May 2024 primary, which led to a Fulton county court case that ultimately compelled her to affirm the election.That case loomed large in court today. The court in Adams v Fulton county held that the act of certification was ministerial – a requirement, not a choice – because of the language in the law, noted Thomas L Oliver III, an attorney for the Republicans.Facing the court’s order, Adams ultimately complied, Oliver said. “Now they want to be on the other side of that argument. It’s pretty rich,” he added.In a previous ruling, Emerson said: “The court finds that the ‘shall’ as used here is mandatory, and the [board of commissioners] does not have discretion to disapprove an otherwise qualified nominee.” Emerson cited the mandatory nature of the language in the Adams case as applicable to the commissioners as well.Don Samuel, the county’s attorney, argued that the commissioners were refusing to complete the appointment because they were hoping to overturn the lower court’s order on appeal, and making the appointment would render an appeal moot. The ministerial function implicit in the language of the law of an elected official and an appointed official is a legal distinction for the appellate court, he said.“They are not defying this court out of disrespect of this court in any way,” Samuel said, acknowledging how their refusal to comply with the order looked in light of Democratic arguments about federal administration officials’ defiance of court orders. “We can’t help but read in the paper about the defiance of the judiciary,” he said. “We are not, despite the plaintiff’s overbroad argument here, we are not in defiance of the order. We’re trying to protect our rights in appeal.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFulton county has seven elected commissioners, five of whom are Democrats. The lawsuit only named those five: Dana Barrett, Mo Ivory, Khadijah Abdur-Rahman, Marvin Arrington and chair Robb Pitts. Pitts, Abdur-Rahman and Arrington did not vote on the appointment, leaving Barrett and Ivory to vote against it for a 2-2 tie.Social media messages from Ivory and Barrett were presented in court, in which the two Democrats pledged not to make the appointment.“Those who oversee elections must be fully independent and accountable,” Ivory said on Instagram.“No judge can compel any elected official to vote in any way,” said Barrett, also on Instagram. “Our elections are under attack in this country … This is just another arena where they’re trying to chip away at free and fair elections.”The law governing appointments to election boards in Georgia is an inconsistent patchwork. In neighboring Dekalb county, the chief judge of the county’s superior court is the appointment authority. Earlier this year, the judge allowed one controversial Republican nominee to be appointed while denying another. In Republican-controlled Cherokee county, an affluent northern suburb of Atlanta, county commissioners rejected the nomination of the county’s Democratic party to the election board, opting instead to find a Democrat they preferred to serve. More

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      ‘A new political era’: fresh Democratic faces seek office to prevent their party from ‘sleepwalking into dystopia’

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      Earlier this year, Liam Elkind seized an opportunity to ask his longtime congressman, Jerry Nadler, what everyday New Yorkers like himself could do to help Democrats stand up to Donald Trump. Nadler’s response, according to Elkind, was to “donate to the DCCC” – the group that helps House Democrats keep their seats. Deeply unsatisfied, the 26-year-old decided to run for office against the 17-term incumbent.In Georgia, Everton Blair also sought answers from his long-serving congressman, David Scott, at a panel event earlier this year. When Blair asked him about Democrats’ legislative strategy, the 80-year-old lawmaker was dismissive. “I don’t know who sent y’all,” he said. Blair, 34, is now making a bid for Scott’s seat.Jake Rakov began to worry when he noticed his former boss, 70-year-old California congressman Brad Sherman, repeating the same anti-Trump talking points he’d deployed eight years prior. To Rakov, 37, it was a sign that the Democratic party’s ageing establishment “wasn’t going to learn”. He is now one of two millennial-aged Jakes challenging Sherman.View image in fullscreenA year after Joe Biden’s age and fitness for office emerged as a major liability in the 2024 presidential election, followed by Trump’s return to power , demand for generational change has reached a fever pitch. A wave of younger, social-media savvy candidates, frustrated by what they see as an ossifying, out-of-touch Democratic establishment, is launching primary challenges against some of their party’s most senior incumbents.The insurgents charge that party elders have failed to act with urgency as Trump targets Democratic cities, voters and values, and they say they’re no longer willing to wait their turn.“If what happened last year was not a wake up call for the Democratic party that we need to do things differently and that we need to let some new voices in, then we should all be deeply worried about the future of the Democratic party,” said Luke Bronin, a 46-year-old who is running against Connecticut congressman John Larson, 77.The 119th Congress is the third oldest in US history, and three members – all Democrats – have died in office this year. More than a dozen House Democrats who will be 70 or older by election day 2026 are facing challengers, according to an analysis by Axios, though not all have said whether they plan to seek re-election.But the push to replace longtime incumbents isn’t just about age, says Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a former chief of staff to New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is running for the San Francisco congressional seat long held by the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.They say it’s about energy, vision and, crucially, how hard they’re willing to fight – which could explain why octogenarian brawlers like Maxine Waters haven’t faced calls to step aside while some relatively younger members, such as 50-year-old André Carson, have drawn challengers.“It’s being a part of a system for so long you just don’t actually think it’s your job to renew it,” Chakrabarti said.View image in fullscreenPelosi, 85, who stepped down from her leadership position to make room for a new generation in 2022, has not yet said whether she plans to seek re-election. ​A spokesperson for Pelosi declined to comment.While their campaigns are ​​textured by local​ issues and cultural references – Elkind touts his go-to bagel order (un-toasted everything with whitefish salad) and Chakrabarti pitches a publicly owned utility for San Francisco​ – their broader ​messages chime: Democratic elders have grown complacent, clinging to a broken status quo​ – with devastating consequences.Democrats’ popularity has cratered to record lows and the party has bled voters – especially young people, first-timers, and Black and Latino Americans.But the incumbents are pushing back. They argue their years of experience have delivered tangible results. “These guys would start off with zero seniority, just when the district needs the most help,” Sherman, the California congressman, said in an interview. He dismissed claims he’s been timid on Trump, noting he introduced articles of impeachment against him in 2017 and, earlier this year, confronted the president at an in-person briefing on the Palisades fire that devastated parts of his district.“The key to fighting Donald Trump is beating him in the 2026 election,” Sherman said. “If we don’t take the House back in 2026 we may not have elections in 2028.”Many challengers align politically with the incumbents they’re trying to unseat – several have voted for their opponent in the past. They argue the intraparty divide is not left-versus-center but a clash between “the fighters and the folders” – those who see the Trump era as a troubling but passing chapter and those who see it as a constitutional emergency that will determine the survival of American democracy.The younger candidates say the party needs to “meet voters where they are” – on social media, on podcasts, at red county diners and rambunctious town halls. They want leaders who can speak plainly about the ways the Trump administration is hurting working-class Americans – and how Democrats would help.But they also say it can’t only be about Trump. The party needs a full-scale reimagining of what Democrats stand for and how they communicate that to voters – a type of messaging they’ve struggled to articulate in the Trump era.Democrats haven’t always embraced primaries. They can be costly and time-consuming, and create headaches for general election races. But in the midst of deep party introspection and generational friction, more are embracing the contests as a way forward.Groups such as Leaders We Deserve, led by former Democratic national committee vice-chair David Hogg, are actively backing young candidates challenging “asleep-at-the-wheel” incumbents. The effort sparked an internal firestorm and ultimately led Hogg to step down from his role at the DNC.Republicans are watching the primary battles unfold with glee. “Democrats are engaged in a battle between the socialists and the party dinosaurs – and it’s only getting uglier,” Mike Marinella, spokesperson for the national Republican congressional committee, said.Next year’s elections will test Democrats’ desire for generational change but it may not resolve their identity crisis. Some districts will elevate centrist candidates, while others might embrace a democratic socialist. Some crave an anti-establishment streak, ideology aside.And some veteran lawmakers have already chosen to relinquish power. In May, Democratic congresswoman Jan Schakowsky announced that her 14th term representing Illinois’s ninth district would be her last, saying in a statement: “It is now time for me to pass the baton.” Before she made the decision public, Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old progressive political influencer, had already launched a campaign for the seat, asking Democrats: “What if we didn’t suck?”Primed for Congress, but not waiting for an openingAmong the contenders in Democratic primaries are local and state political leaders for whom Congress makes sense as a next logical step. In years past, they might have opted to wait for a retirement and then seek an endorsement from the outgoing congressman. Not any more.View image in fullscreenAt 46, Luke Bronin has a lengthy résumé of service: a lawyer, former Obama administration official, navy reserve intelligence officer and, most recently, mayor of Hartford, Connecticut. But he stresses that he’d also bring “an outsider’s commitment to making some bigger changes”.Bronin has spoken with Larson, the longtime incumbent in Connecticut’s first district, including an hourlong conversation in recent months. What was missing, he said, was any recognition that the job has fundamentally changed since Larson arrived in Washington in 1999.“I didn’t hear a sense of urgency that we need to hear from every single member of Congress,” Bronin said.Bronin thinks Democrats need to be “relentless and clear” about the ways Trump is making life worse for Americans, and “equally relentless and clear” about the Democratic party’s vision for improving their daily lives. He wants to see “an intense focus on issues like housing and healthcare and childcare”, and for Democrats to spread these messages in friendly and unfriendly forums.In a statement, the Larson campaign said the district needs a “proven fighter” to protect against Trump’s attacks on social security and Medicare.“That’s Congressman Larson. That’s why he’s backed by progressive groups, labor, and working people alike,” the campaign said. “What they don’t need is someone pretending to be a new voice who’s actually been in politics [for] decades that’s always been more focused on running for higher office than delivering results.”Chakrabarti, who has spend much of his political career working to elect progressives to Congress, said he began to seriously consider a run himself after listening to a New York Times podcast interview with Pelosi just days after the November election. He had expected Democrats’ crushing defeat to trigger a reckoning – but instead heard a defense of the status quo.It confirmed for Chakrabarti what he had long feared: the Democratic party was “sort of sleepwalking into this dystopia”.But progressives like Chakrabarti take hope from the success of state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary this summer.“When I look at the moment today, the appetite for change, it completely dwarfs what I saw in 2018,” Chakrabarti said, referring to the election year in which Ocasio-Cortez toppled one of the most senior House Democrats as a political unknown.“We’re at the point of a dawn of a new political era.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe crowded primariesSeveral candidates have filed to run in Georgia’s 13th district, a solidly blue area in the Atlanta suburbs, a sign of the vulnerabilities among older members and the enthusiasm to replace them. Scott, who has served in Congress since 2003, has not yet announced whether he will run again. Questions over his health and fitness for office have become public fodder – he lambasted a photographer for taking a photo of him in a wheelchair last year.Some are younger than the average age in Congress (58.9); all are younger than Scott, 80. One contender, state senator Emanuel Jones, is 66. In 2024, Scott fended off a crowded field of primary challengers to keep his seat.Jasmine Clark, 42, was first elected to the state house in Georgia in 2018. She has a PhD in microbiology, an expertise that has served her well in analyzing bills and communicating during the pandemic. If elected, would be the first woman with a science PhD in Congress.View image in fullscreenShe wants the district to have a fighter who can call out the rampant misinformation and disinformation coming out of the Trump administration. The Atlanta area is feeling the consequences of this information environment, she said, pointing to a shooting earlier this month at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by a man alleged to be fixated on the Covid-19 vaccine.“When you have the same people in the same place for a really long time, that stagnation leads to stagnation of ideas as well,” she said. “There should be a healthy turnover, where you still have institutional knowledge while ushering in new ideas. But for whatever reason, we don’t really see that in Congress.”View image in fullscreenEverton Blair, who served on the Gwinnett county board of education, is touting his deep ties to the district where he was born and raised. He sees a lot of opportunities left on the table because of inactive representation.“There’s a general sense of despondency and just apathy right now that we address and we combat by bringing those very voices and people back into the conversation and making sure that they feel represented well,” Blair said.“The leaders who got us into this mess are not the leaders who can get us out of it,” he added.Scott did not respond to a request for comment.In California, Jake Rakov, who served as a deputy communications director for Brad Sherman, the 15-term incumbent he’s challenging, is making a similar case. He hasn’t spoken to his old boss in years, but he has been talking to the congressman’s constituents. Many, he said, are shocked that any member – let alone their own – has been in Congress for nearly 30 years.“We’ve got people in office who’ve been there since the 1990s and are still legislating like it’s the 1990s,” he said, adding: “It is so antithetical to our idea of a representative democracy that it just is immediately offensive to people when they hear about it.”Sherman has also drawn a challenge from Jake Levine, a veteran of the Biden and Obama administrations whose mother lost her home in the January fires. “It’s time for something new,” Levine says in his campaign launch video.Sherman argued that calls for generational change aren’t new. Estimating that he’s taken about 5,000 votes in Congress over the past decade, the overwhelming majority of which his challengers would agree with, Sherman asked: “If you did something right 5,000 times in a row – 100% of the time – is there any chance that you should get fired?”The upstartsUpstart candidates traditionally face steeper challenges against incumbents, but, with the help of slick online content, they’re finding new ways to gain traction. In an Arizona special election earlier this year, Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old influencer and activist, came in a distant second behind a longtime Democratic official whose father held the seat until his death – but she still managed to win more than 22% of votes.Katie Bansil, a 34-year-old political newcomer who works in finance, is challenging congressman Frank Pallone, 73, in New Jersey’s sixth congressional district over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Since launching her campaign, Bansil, who immigrated to the US from the Philippines and grew up in New Jersey, says she’s seen a growing desire for new leadership.View image in fullscreen“I started calling him ‘the asterisk’, because a lot of people have told me, ‘Oh, I just vote for the guy that is labeled as the incumbent,’” she said. “But I think people are actually waking up to the truth about what’s going on.”A spokesperson for Pallone said the congressman has “proven himself to be an effective champion of progressive causes”.“With daily assaults from the Trump administration on our democracy and institutions, Pallone will continue to use every tool to stop the Republican authoritarian agenda of stealing from the poor to give to the rich,” the spokesperson said.Liam Elkind, the challenger to Jerry Nadler, announced his campaign with a splashy video that opened with dirt being shoveled into a grave and his voiceover: “The Democratic party is dying.”“Our system often tells people to wait their turn,” Elkind said. “And look where we are.”A Rhodes scholar, Elkind founded the non-profit food delivery service Invisible Hands during the pandemic. He says that work – along with own experiences as a young person living in one of the most expensive cities in the world – would shape his approach to the job.Like many his age, Elkind doesn’t have health insurance. When he recently went to get a vaccine and was told it would cost $500, “I turned my ass around,” he quipped. “But look, that’s the day-to-day lived reality of a whole lot of people in this country.”View image in fullscreenA spokesperson for Nadler emphasized the congressman’s political strength, noting that he won his most recent election with 80% of the vote.“But this is the great thing about America, it’s a democracy – hopefully still – and anybody can run,” Robert Gottheim, the spokesperson, said, adding that Nadler would “put his over-30-year record of accomplishments against anyone including someone who appears to have no record of accomplishment to speak of”.Elkind said he voted for Nadler and respected his long record as a progressive voice for New York. But, he argued, the moment demands new energy and a break from the past.“The house is on fire, and we need leaders who can meet this moment,” he said. “We deserve to know that the next time a child is kidnapped off of our streets, that our congressman will be on that street in the next hour with a megaphone demanding that child’s release and then will travel to whatever foreign gulag the president has decided to stash that kid in.” More

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      Atlanta reporter detained by Ice ‘punished for his journalism’, rights groups say

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      Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist imprisoned in a south Georgia immigration detention center after being arrested covering a “No Kings Day” protest in June, is being “punished for his journalism”, first amendment rights groups said.“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”A police officer from the city of Doraville in north DeKalb county arrested Guevara on 14 June on misdemeanor charges of pedestrian in the roadway, failure to disperse and obstruction while Guevara was covering a protest in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood. Guevara is widely followed by a Spanish-speaking audience for his coverage of immigration raids in Georgia, and more than 1 million people were watching his livestream on Facebook when he was arrested.Guevara, a native of El Salvador, has been in the US for more than 20 years. While his petition for asylum was rejected in 2012, his deportation was administratively closed in an appeal, and he has both a work permit and a pending application for a green card, his attorney Giovanni Diaz said.Though charges from the protest were quickly dropped, the sheriff of nearby Gwinnett county laid a second set of unrelated misdemeanor traffic charges shortly after Guevara’s arrest. The Gwinnett county solicitor subsequently dropped those charges as well, but not before Gwinnett’s sheriff’s office seized his cell phone with a search warrant.Guevara’s cell phone has not been returned, and it is unclear where it is, what data has been transferred from it or whether that data has been shared with federal agencies, Diaz said.“Everybody’s saying we don’t see a warrant in the system,” Diaz said, describing his office’s inquiries with the sheriff and other agencies. “So, one of two things happened. Some other agency that hasn’t contacted us took it – US attorney’s [office], Ice, somebody else has it – or the phone was just plain stolen.“I think it’s par for the course, considering the government’s conduct in this case. We’re doing this, at least initially, to see if we get the phone back, but again, if they don’t give the phone back, its another reason to file a lawsuit in federal court.”Guevara’s family was forced to make an extortion payment after another inmate threatened him while he was briefly held in general population in the federal prison in Atlanta. Guevara is now being held in isolation, which may help protect him, but also limits his ability to report on conditions at the Folkston immigration center, set to become the largest Ice detention center in the US.“With every day that passes, we are losing time that we will never get back,” said his daughter Katherine Guevara. “I know so many others in the same situation understand it all too well. I’m deeply disappointed with this country. This is not just about one journalist. This is about what kind of country we want to be. If a government can punish a reporter for doing his job, what message does this send? What protections are left for the rest of us?” More

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      Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: ‘I’m seeing what absolute power can do’

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      Prosecutors dropped the last remaining charges against Atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara last week after he was arrested while livestreaming a protest in June. But the influential Salvadorian reporter remains penned up in a south Georgia detention center, fending off a deportation case, jail house extortionists and despair, people familiar with his situation told the Guardian.Donald Trump’s administration has been extreme in unprecedented ways to undocumented immigrants. But Guevara’s treatment is a special case. Shuttled between five jail cells in Georgia since his arrest while covering the “No Kings Day” protests, the 20-plus-years veteran journalist’s sin was to document the undocumented and the way Trump’s agents have been hunting them down.Today, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, he’s the only reporter in the United States sleeping in a prison cell for doing his job.View image in fullscreen“For the first time in my life, I’m seeing what absolute power can do,” said Guevara’s attorney, Giovanni Díaz. “Power that doesn’t care about optics. Power that doesn’t care about the damage to human lives to achieve a result I’ve only heard about as some abstract thing that we heard about in the past, usually talking about other governments in the way that they persecute individuals. This is powerful.”Around Atlanta, Guevara has been the person that immigrants call when they see an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid going down in their neighborhood.Guevara had been working for La Prensa Gráfica, one of El Salvador’s main newspapers, when he was attacked at a protest rally held by the leftwing group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 2003. The former paramilitary organization viewed reporters from his paper as aligned with the rightwing government, and threatened his life. He fled to the United States in 2004, seeking asylum with his wife and daughter, entering legally on a tourist visa.He has been reporting for Spanish-language media in the United States ever since, riding a wave of Latino immigration to the Atlanta suburbs to career success and community accolades. He began reporting on immigration crackdowns under the Obama administration, one of the few reporters to note a tripling of noncriminal immigration arrests in the Atlanta area, as noted in a 2019 New York Times video profile of his work.. He meticulously documented cases and interviewed the families of arrestees. People around Atlanta began to recognize him on the street as the journalist chasing la migra.His work continued through the Trump administration, drawing an audience of millions that followed him from Mundo Hispánico to the startup news operation he founded last year: MGNews or Noticias MG.“It’s a unique niche that was met by Mario’s innovation and entrepreneurialism, if you will,” said Jerry Gonzales, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials and GALEO Latino Community Development Fund. “He developed a really strong relationship with the community. He developed significant trust with much of that community. And because of that, his eyeballs started increasing.”An immigration court judge denied Guevara’s asylum claim in 2012 and issued a deportation order. Guevara’s lawyers appealed, and the court granted administrative closure of the case. He wasn’t being deported. But he wasn’t given legal residency either. Instead, the government issued him a work permit, his lawyer said. With a shrug, he went back to work.Guevara is arguably the most-watched journalist covering Ice operations in the United States, a story that the English-language media had largely been missing, Gonzales said. And local police were well aware of his work. He has been negotiating with them for access to immigration enforcement scenes for more than a decade.“Mario Guevara is well known – sometimes liked sometimes not – but definitely well known by law enforcement agencies, particularly in DeKalb county and Gwinnett county, and also with federal agents, and particularly immigration agents,” Gonzales said.Gonzales, among others, believes this put a target on his back in the current administration.“It seems like law enforcement coordinated and colluded with the federal agents,” Gonzales said. Gonzales points to the misdemeanor traffic charges laid by the Gwinnett county sheriff’s office shortly after Guevara’s arrest in DeKalb county by the Doraville police department as evidence.“The facts and the timeline indicate that pretty clearly to anybody that’s been following this,” he claimed. “In this regard it’s particularly troubling, given that he is a journalist and his situation. He had no reason to have been targeted for his arrest.”The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment about their relationship with local law enforcement. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said in a response to a lawmaker’s inquiry that it cooperates with Ice when deemed “mutually beneficial” but has not responded to requests for additional comment.Doraville’s police chief, Chuck Atkinson, has not replied to an email seeking answers and fled from questions about the case at a city hearing. But Doraville’s mayor, Joseph Geierman, denied a connection between Ice and Doraville’s arrest of Guevara.On 14 June, the day of his arrest, in Atlanta’s DeKalb county, Guevara darted around a Doraville police truck. A group of riot cops nearby took note. One shouted “last warning, sir! Get out of the road!”Guevara was helmeted and wearing a black vest over his red shirt with the word “PRESS” in white letters. James Talley, an officer with the Doraville police department, was wearing an olive drab Swat jumpsuit with a helmet and gas mask.A masked demonstrator set off a smoke bomb near the cops. Guevara ran into the street with a stabilized camera in hand to capture the police reaction and the crowd scampering out of the way, as was shown on a police body camera video.Police had issued a dispersal order and were kettling protesters out of Chamblee-Tucker Road. They chased the suspected bomb thrower into the crowd, to no avail. But Guevara was in front of them on a grassy slope.Police from DeKalb county managing the raucous protest had been taking verbal abuse from demonstrators for a while – a sharp contrast from other protests around Atlanta held that day. The protest was winding down. Body camera video from the event suggests Talley was in an arresting mood.“Keep your eye on the guy in the red shirt,” Talley said to another Swat officer from Doraville. “If he gets to the road, lock his ass up.”Talley pulled another police officer aside. “If he gets in the road, he’s gone,” Talley said. “He’s been warned multiple times.”The other officer drew a finger across his chest. “The press?” Yep, Talley replied.The three of them waited about 50ft away as a DeKalb county police officer approached Guevara on the hill, ordering him to get on the sidewalk. Guevara backed away from the officer, his attention focused on the recording, took two steps into the street, and the Doraville police pounced.Guevara pleaded for the police to be reasonable.“I’m with the media, officer!” Guevara said. “Let me finish!”People shouted at the officers “That’s the press!” as they walked him handcuffed to a vehicle. “Why are you all taking him! He didn’t do nothing.”More than one million people were watching Guevara’s livestream when he was arrested.Trump has stepped up his rhetorical attacks on journalists since his inauguration. Last week, he described a reporter asking about warnings and emergency response in the Texas flooding disaster as “an evil person”, an epithet he has turned to with increasing frequency.The Guevara case is a sign of increasing hostility toward a free press, said Katherine Jacobsen, a program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She traced a through line from the Associated Press being barred from government briefings after it refused to accept the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”, then lawsuits and investigations reopened against media companies, then attacks on journalists covering protests in Los Angeles, then Australian writer Alistair Kitchen’s deportation seemingly in relation to his reporting on student protests.“Next thing you know, we have Mario Guevara, a long time Spanish-language reporter in the Atlanta metro area, who is in Ice detention,” she said. “It’s growing increasingly concerning by the day.”Guevara’s audience views it as more than an attack on press freedom, though. They view it as an attack on themselves.“He’s a test case to push the envelope for legal immigrants that have committed no crime, to trump up charges against them,” GALEO’s Gonzales said. “And the second piece is how to target journalists.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGuevara’s arrest set off an immigration nightmare akin to the kind he has spent the last decade documenting.His arrest on a Saturday led to a weekend in DeKalb county’s decaying jail and a bond hearing that Monday. A magistrate court judge granted Guevara a no-dollar bond, but by then Ice had become aware of the arrest and placed Guevara on a hold. The jail released him into Ice custody, and held him briefly in a metro Atlanta facility.The next day, Gwinnett county charged Guevara with three misdemeanor traffic offenses, claiming that they were related to Guevara livestreaming a law enforcement operation a month earlier. The charges would be sufficient to keep him in jail and provide Ice an argument for his deportation at a federal bond hearing. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said Guevara’s livestreaming “compromised” investigations.Guevara’s attorneys tried to work quickly, Diaz said. “The detained dockets are so backed up, and the immigration detention centers are so overwhelmed that what used to take us two or three days to get a bond hearing now is taking about a week,” he said.Attorneys working for immigration enforcement argued in court that Guevara’s reporting constituted a “threat” to immigration operations.Jacobsen with CPJ was listening to the hearing when the government made that argument.“We felt a sense of alarm,” she said. “Alarm bells were raised by the government’s argument, as well as the judge not necessarily pushing back against the government’s argument that live streaming poses a danger to threaten law enforcement actions.”View image in fullscreenThe immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond for the immigration case. But Guevara’s family was not allowed to pay it because government attorneys appealed the bond order to the board of immigration appeals. But it took seven days for the court to issue a stay to the government’s appeal. Meanwhile, Ice began playing musical jail cells with Guevara.Over the course of the next three weeks, Ice shuttled Guevara between three different counties around Atlanta and eventually to the massive private prison Ice uses in Folkston, Georgia, 240 miles south-east of Atlanta on the Florida line.“We weren’t surprised that they appealed, because the government’s reserving and in most cases appealing everything, even stuff where they shouldn’t appeal because they’re wasting everybody’s time,” Diaz said. “But we didn’t really know the breadth of what they were trying to do to him.”Earlier this week, Todd Lyons, Ice’s acting director, issued a memo changing its policy on bond hearings, arguing that detainees are not entitled to those hearings before their deportation case is heard in court. Immigration advocates expect to challenge the move in court.But Guevara is not facing a criminal charge. The Gwinnett county solicitor’s office dropped the traffic charges last week, noting that two of them could not be prosecuted because they occurred on private property – the apartment complex – and the third lacked sufficient evidence for a conviction.For now, Ice has mostly kept Guevara in medical wards in jails even though he is healthy, Diaz said. “From the beginning, they’ve been keeping Mario under a special segregation because they’re claiming he’s a public figure. They want to make sure nothing happened to him.”Doraville is a municipality of about 10,800 in DeKalb county with a separate police force, and had been asked to assist managing the protest in the immigrant-heavy Embry Hills neighborhood nearby. Protests have become a regular occurrence in DeKalb county since the Trump administration’s immigration raids began.Doraville’s cops have displayed a more cooperative relationship with immigration law enforcement than many other metro Atlanta departments, and observers have raised questions about whether its police department arrested Guevara to facilitate an Ice detainer.Geierman, the mayor, denied those accusations.“The Doraville police department was not operating under the direction of, or in coordination with, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the June 14th protest,” he said in a statement. “To the department’s knowledge, no Ice personnel were present at the event. Doraville officers were on site to support the DeKalb county sheriff’s office as part of a coordinated public safety effort.”Observers have also questioned Guevara’s charges from Gwinnett county – ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving – that stemmed from an incident that occurred in May, a month before his arrest.“Mario Guevara compromised operational integrity and jeopardized the safety of victims of the case, investigators, and Gwinnett county residents,” the department said in a statement.But Gwinnett’s belated prosecution left his attorneys gobsmacked.“In the narrative that they put out, they say he was livestreaming a police operation, and he was interfering,” Diaz said. “But when they went to a judge to get warrants, the only warrants the magistrate was able to sign for them was for traffic violations. I mean, that’s kind of telling.”“I think the whole thing is suspicious,” he added. “From the beginning, just everything seemed they were really making efforts to make it difficult for him to go free.”Marvin Lim, a Filipino American state representative whose district contains the apartment complex in Gwinnett in Guevara’s citation, has asked the sheriff’s office a detailed set of questions about the department’s relationship with federal immigration enforcement. He has not received an adequate response, he said in an open letter to the sheriff.An array of six advocacy organizations challenged Gwinnett’s sheriff, Keybo Taylor, in a letter Tuesday over Guevara’s arrest and the sheriff’s posture toward immigration enforcement, demanding details about the relationship. GALEO, among them, also issued a separate letter Wednesday calling on Taylor to be transparent about the Guevara arrest.Guevara “was arrested while doing the vital work that journalists in a democracy do”, GALEO’s letter states. “Not only do the circumstances surrounding his incarceration and subsequent immigration detainment stir serious civil rights concerns, but they also build upon an expanding sense of fear and confusion in Georgia’s most diverse county.”“I am being persecuted,” Guevara wrote in a 7 July letter seeking humanitarian intercession from, of all people, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s rightwing president.“I am about to complete a month in jail, and I need to get out in order to continue with my life, return to my work, and support my family,” Guevara wrote. “I have lived in the United States for nearly 22 years. I had never been arrested before. In these past three weeks, I have been held in five different jails, and I believe the government is trying to tarnish my record in order to deport me as if I were a criminal.”Guevara’s American-born son turned 21 this year, permitting him to sponsor Guevara’s green card and eventual citizenship. His application is pending, Diaz said. It may not matter.“This is the first time I’ve ever seen a stay filed for someone who has no convictions, has almost no criminal history in 20 years, and only had pending traffic violations,” Diaz said.“It’s clear that everybody’s working really hard to keep him detained.” More

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      Georgia Republican’s Ponzi scheme defrauded people of $140m, say officials

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      A prominent Georgia Republican was running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded 300 investors of at least $140m, federal officials alleged in a complaint filed on Thursday.The civil lawsuit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said First Liberty Building and Loan, controlled by Brant Frost IV, lied to investors about its business of making high-interest loans to companies. Instead, investigators said, it raised more money to repay earlier investors.Frost is alleged to have taken more than $19m of investor funds for himself, his family and affiliated companies even as the business was going broke, spending $160,000 on jewelry and $335,000 with a rare coin dealer. Frost is also said to have spent $320,000 to rent a vacation home over multiple years in Kennebunkport, Maine, the town where the family of late president George HW Bush spent summers.The SEC said Frost kept writing checks even after the commission began its investigation.First Liberty said in June that it would stop making loans and paying interest and principal to investors in those loans. The company said it was not answering phone calls or emails.First Liberty has not responded to an email seeking comment, and no one was present at its office on Thursday evening in Newnan, a suburb south-west of Atlanta. A lawyer who acts as the company’s registered agent for corporate purposes said earlier that he had no information.The collapse rocked the religious and political networks that the business drew investors from. It also could have ramifications in state Republican politics, cutting off funding to the far-right candidates that Frost and his family have favored. Investigators said Frost spent $570,000 from investor funds on political contributions.The SEC said the business had only $2.67m in cash as of 30 May, although regulators are also seeking to claw back money from Frost and associated companies. With 300 investors out $140m, that means the average investor put in nearly $500,000.First Liberty said it made loans to companies that needed cash while they waited for more conventional loans from the US Small Business Administration (SBA). It charged high rates of interest – 18% on some loans, according to a document obtained by the Associated Press. First Liberty promised investors equally high rates of return – 16% on the 18% loans.In recent months, the business advertised heavily on conservative radio shows promising “Wall Street returns for Main Street investors”.“The promise of a high rate of return on an investment is a red flag that should make all potential investors think twice or maybe even three times before investing their money,” Justin C Jeffries, associate director of enforcement for the SEC’s Atlanta regional office, said in a statement.The company has represented that it is “cooperating with federal authorities as part of an effort to accomplish an orderly wind-up of the business”. The SEC said Frost and his companies agreed to the SEC’s enforcement actions “with monetary remedies to be determined by the court at a later date”.While the SEC says there were loans to companies, as many as 90% of those companies have defaulted. By 2021, the company was running as a Ponzi scheme, the complaint said, even as Frost withdrew increasing amounts of money.The business is being investigated by the Georgia secretary of state for possible violations of securities law, said Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for the office.A 2023 document obtained by the AP is titled as a “promissory note”, and Sinners said anyone issuing promissory notes is supposed to be registered with Georgia securities officials.Sinners encouraged any victims to contact the state securities division.Federal prosecutors have declined to comment on whether they are considering criminal charges. Sometimes both an SEC civil case and a federal criminal case are filed over investment frauds.Frost has been an important player in Georgia politics since 1988, when he coordinated televangelist Pat Robertson’s Republican presidential bid in the state. His son, Brant Frost V, is chairperson of the Coweta county Republican party, where the company is based – and is a former second vice-chairperson of the state Republican party. Daughter Katie Frost is Republican chairperson of the third congressional district, which includes Coweta county and other areas south-west of Atlanta.At June’s state Republican convention, Katie chaired a nominating committee that recommended delegates re-elect state party chairperson Josh McKoon. Delegates followed that recommendation, rejecting a number of insurgent candidates. More

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      Want to see where Trump’s tariffs are leading US business? Look at Georgia

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      If you want a bellwether to measure the broad impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs on the economy, look south, to Georgia. The political swing state has a $900bn economy – somewhere between the GDPs of Taiwan and Switzerland.The hospitality industry is facing an existential crisis. Wine merchants wonder aloud if they will survive the year. But others, like those in industrial manufacturing, will carefully argue that well-positioned businesses will profit. Some say they’re insulated from international competition by the nature of their industry. Others, like the movie industry, are simply confused by the proposals that have been raised, and are looking for entirely different answers. So far, it’s a mixed bag.In a state Trump won by two points and with yet another pivotal US Senate race in a year, Republican margins are thinner than those of the retailers with their business on the line here.Carson Demmond, a wine distributor in Georgia, finds herself looking at seaborne cargo notices for her wine shipments from France with the nervousness of a sports gambler watching football games. She’s betting on her orders of French champagne and bordeaux getting to a port in Savannah before tariffs restart.It’s a risk. Demmond put a hold on orders after Trump enacted sky-high tariffs on European goods last month. When he paused the tariffs days later, Demmond began to assess what she might chance on restarting some purchases.But her wine isn’t showing up on a ship in France yet, she said.“I don’t see them booked on ships yet, and normally they would already be booked, and I would already have sail dates,” she said. “I see a lot of my orders now collecting in consolidation warehouses in Europe, which says to me that there’s something wrong.”Demmond suspects that shipping is suffering from a bullwhip-like effect from uncertainty around tariffs and the economy: so many buyers are trying to get ahead of tariffs that there aren’t enough shipping containers to go around to meet the short-term demand.“It means that as strategic as I’m trying to be with regards to timing my orders so I don’t get hit with lots of tariff bills at the same time, I feel like now all of that is out of my control,” Demmond said. “I never want to face a situation where I have too many orders that all sail and land at the same time, and then getting hit with really large tariff bills in one fell swoop.”US courts, meanwhile, are vacillating on the legality of Trump’s tariffs. The stock market rallied this week after the US court of international trade (CIT) ruled that Trump’s use of extraordinary powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) exceeded his authority. Less than a day later, an appellate court lifted the lower court’s block on the tariffs while the case plays out.Unpredictability is driving volatility, and volatility is poisonous to businesses built for stable markets and stable prices.Georgia’s ports have not yet witnessed the massive slowdown occurring on the west coast. Shipping at the port of Los Angeles is down by a third as buyers cancel orders from China. But Savannah – the third-busiest port in the United States behind the Los Angeles area and New York/New Jersey ports – just came off its busiest month.“We’re still watching how this goes,” said Tom Boyd, the chief communications officer for Georgia’s ports authority. “We still are having 30 to 32 vessels a week. Most everybody has been front loading to avoid any supply chain disruptions. Volumes are strong, but we expect volumes to decrease.”Savannah’s port sees more ships from the Indian subcontinent, Vietnam and Europe than from China, because it’s a few days shorter from India through the Suez Canal than across the Pacific, he said.Demmond, who runs the wine distributor Rive Gauche, watches the reports up and down the eastern seaboard carefully because many of the ships from Europe dock in New Jersey before coming south, she said. About 60% of her business is in French wine. Shipping volumes are making logistical planning difficult, she said. Amazon has hired away warehouse workers, which slows down unloading and can leave her wine on a ship for longer periods.She likened the logistical disruption today to the effects of Covid-19 shutdowns.“There’s going to be a crazy ripple effect through multiple industries,” Demmond said. “In normal times, I could count on approximately eight weeks from the time I send my purchase order to the winery for them to prepare it, to the time that it arrives at port. Now, you know, I have no idea, because everything is different and unpredictable. I have a hard time quoting arrival times to people.”Demmond is a wine merchant, not a political economist. Predicting the course of trade negotiations has become a business hazard. She and other Georgia wine distributors met with the representative Hank Johnson last month to describe the effect of a 200% tariff on European wine imports on their business.Many restaurants derive half of their revenue or more from alcohol sales. If the cost of spirits triples, many people will change their dining habits. Domestic supply can’t make up the difference, she said. A decision to expand a domestic winery made today wouldn’t produce a bottle of wine for three to five years. By then, Congress or a new president may have rescinded the tariffs, blowing up the investment.If it were just European liquor, a conservative might dismiss the disruption as something affecting well-heeled wine snobs. But the problem has wide applicability, Demmond said.“There are no American coffee growers. There are no coffee farms here,” she said. “That’s an impossibility. All you’re doing is increasing prices. You’re not helping create jobs by taxing that stuff. Some of it is impossible to re-shore.”Georgia calls itself the Peach state, but California has long eclipsed Georgia’s peach production. Instead, the most widely exported Georgia peach has been the one moviegoers see at the end of the credits: Georgia had $2.6bn in film and television production in 2023.Georgia’s tax incentive program is among the most aggressive in the US and the reason Georgia has become a rival to Hollywood. It’s an economic development strategy that has unusually bipartisan support in a state famously split down the middle politically. Studios have invested billions in Georgia over the last 10 years.Between Disney’s Marvel movies such as The Avengers, Tyler Perry’s studios in Atlanta and Netflix productions including Stranger Things, Georgia has overtaken Hollywood as a center for cinematic production. In any given year, studios spend $2-$4bn making movies in Georgia, according to figures from the Georgia Film Office.But the tax-incentive-chasing film industry is fickle. Acres of shiny new studio space springing up across the state have not prevented the movie business from slowing down a bit over the last couple of years. With the release of Thunderbolts*, for the first time in more than a decade no Marvel movies are slated for production in Georgia. Disney has shifted to studios in England and Australia.So when Trump said he wanted a 100% tariff on foreign-produced films, Georgia Entertainment CEO Randy Davidson did a double take.“It kind of took people by surprise,” Davidson said. “You know, on the one hand, you have people that have been struggling with their jobs here already, thinking initially that was going to be like a quick-fix answer to get production back here. … And then there was the other side: how is politicizing movies into the tariff discussion beneficial? Because it doesn’t make sense.”Trump’s tariff talk emerged after a meeting at the White House with actor Jon Voight and independent film producer Steven Paul. Voight proposed to support the domestic film industry with federal tax credits and international cooperative production agreements, not with a tariff, said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Sag-Aftra’s chief negotiator and national executive director.“You know, we haven’t had a federal tax incentive in the United States,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “It’s quite common in a lot of major production centers around the world now, and I think it’s definitely time for us to have that conversation.”Films are largely a digital service today. Setting aside the logistical difficulty of assessing a tariff on intellectual property, doing so would violate American law.Crabtree-Ireland suggested that Trump’s rhetoric might be an aggressive negotiating ploy, starting out with an extreme stand that moves a compromise point to a more favorable position. But a workable plan would have more nuance, Crabtree-Ireland said: “Which is what I think ultimately would be under consideration.”Crabtree-Ireland said he wouldn’t expect a federal tax incentive to supplant state tax credits. But any international agreement to level the incentive playing field would have to address it.“What Georgia can hope for is that this topic does not get entangled in a charged-up political atmosphere where it will have a shot to be an actual bipartisan effort and initiative that would actually be good for the country,” Davidson said.As Georgia companies try to manage inventory before a tariff deadline, warehouse space is only one issue. Capital is another.“Most companies can’t afford to get two years’ worth of inventory to manage their business while we figure out what’s going to happen, right? So, they’re going to buy a little time, but not a lot,” said Carl Campbell, an executive director for business recruitment at the Dalton chamber of commerce.Not that there’s a warehouse to be rented in Dalton right now. The north Georgia mill town of about 34,000 in far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district is a longstanding center of the carpet-and-flooring industry in the US. But it has had competition for warehouse and industrial space in recent years from solar panel manufacturers, spurred by state tax incentives, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and federal incentives for the semiconductor industry.“Everything’s full, you know.” Campbell said. “We’ve got companies that are going to grow manufacturing capacity. They’re currently deciding where to do it, and so the tariffs may swing it to the US. Sometimes that’s swinging that our way. Sometimes it’s making that decision happen sooner rather than later, and sometimes it makes it not happen at all.”Campbell notes that both Democrats and Republicans can lay claim to Dalton’s industrial successes. Qcells, a solar panel manufacturer owned by the Korean conglomerate Hanwha, is an example, he said.“When Trump was in office the first time, he implemented tariffs on goods from China,” Campbell said. “They suddenly got very, very serious about doing panel production and assembly in the US. And they had to do that quickly and as fast as possible.” The same tariff regime began imposing costs on imported flooring from Asia, which boosted Dalton’s flooring manufacturers.Three years later, the Inflation Reduction Act – enacted under Joe Biden – added incentives for clean energy manufacturing, and Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, worked to make sure some of the benefit landed in Georgia. About $23bn has been invested in clean energy production in the state since the act passed. Qcells used those incentives to expand in 2023, and employs more than 2,000 people today.“Tariffs are sometimes a tale of winners and losers. And so, yeah, we won a little bit on that,” Campbell said. “And of course, some of our companies got hurt, and they lost a little bit on that.”The problem, again, is uncertainty, he said.“It can create an opportunity for folks like me and companies like ours, yeah, but it can also crush business plans – if you’re reliant on foreign goods and suddenly you just took a 25% hit on your cost. It’s made some people sit on their hands and not move forward on some efforts that we were thinking would happen soon. It’s made some other folks, you know, escalate plans and have to do them faster.” More

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      Memorial Day Storms Cause Delays for Holiday Travelers

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      Thunderstorms in the south and central United States caused flight delays during Memorial Day weekend, the beginning of the summer travel season.Hundreds of thousands of people traveling in parts of the Southeast and central United States faced delays and uncertainty on Monday because of severe thunderstorms that caused damaging winds and heavy rains during the busy Memorial Day weekend.There were more than 5,000 delayed flights to, from and within the United States on Monday, according to FlightAware, a company that tracks flight information. The airports most affected were in Texas and Colorado.Dallas Fort Worth International Airport had warned that it was expecting a busy period of travel, estimating that about 1.4 million passengers would pass through the airport from May 22 through May 27. More than 1,000 flights to and from the airport were delayed on Monday.Another 600 flights were delayed in Houston, flying to and from George Bush Intercontinental Airport.Denver International Airport, where nearly 1,000 flights were delayed on Sunday, said it expected 443,000 passengers to travel through the airport during the holiday weekend. On Monday, nearly 1,000 flights were delayed to and from the airport.The Denver airport said in a statement that it had received a report that a flight was struck by lightning on its descent on Sunday. The flight arrived safely and no injuries were reported, the airport said. Southwest Airlines operated the flight, which departed from Tampa, and said the plane had been taken out of service for inspection. The storms on Monday could result in large hail, damaging winds and flash floods in parts of the Southern Plains and Lower Mississippi River Valley, forecasters said.The potential for tornadoes loomed in some areas, and tornado warnings were issued on Monday in parts of Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. In parts of east-central New Mexico and western Oklahoma, there was a slight risk of hail and strong winds.In Texas and Mississippi, more than 29,000 customers in each state were without power on Monday night, according to PowerOutage.us. In Louisiana, more than 14,000 customers were without power.More storm activity was expected on Tuesday.For the five days that started on May 22 and will end on Tuesday, AAA forecast that a record 45.1 million people in the United States would travel at least 50 miles from home. AAA said it expected 3.61 million people to travel by plane and 39.4 million people to travel by car. More

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      US police officer resigns after wrongfully arresting undocumented teen

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      A Georgia police officer resigned from his job on Friday after erroneously pulling over a teenager, causing her to spend more than two weeks in a federal immigration jail, and leaving her facing deportation.The officer, Leslie O’Neal, was employed at the police department in Dalton, a small city more than an hour north of Atlanta.His arrest of college student Ximena Arias-Cristobal not only led to a domino effect that could lead to her deportation – it also engendered anger and criticism, especially given the circumstances of her immigration-related detention.Though Dalton’s municipal government did not provide any information about why O’Neal resigned, his wife posted his resignation letter on Facebook, which said he believed the local police department did not adequately defend him.“The department’s silence in the face of widespread defamation has not only made my position personally untenable but has also created an environment where I can no longer effectively carry out my duties within the city of Dalton without fear of further backlash from the community,” O’Neal wrote in the letter.On 5 May, O’Neal pulled Arias-Cristobal over in Dalton. The officer accused her of improperly making a false turn – but those charges were later dropped after the police force admitted to mistaking her car for another.The damage, though, was done by the time Arias-Cristobal’s charges were dismissed. The 19-year-old – who is undocumented and was driving with a Mexican license – was brought to the US from Mexico in 2007, when she was just four.The timing of her having been taken to the US barely missed the deadline for her to qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a program initiated during Barack Obama’s presidency that provided children in her situation some protections from deportation.After O’Neal arrested her, local authorities contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the federal agency that detains and deports immigrants. Ice agents then transferred her to an immigration jail in the state.“I cannot go to jail,” Arias-Cristobal said during the arrest, according to dash-cam footage. “I have my finals next week. My family depends on this.”Arias-Cristobal’s plight captured national attention, with many supporting her and calling for her release. Others – including the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – agitated for Arias-Cristobal to be deported.“In Mexico, today, there’s over 1.6 million United States of America citizens, living and thriving in Mexico, and I’m sure she and her family will be able to do the same,” Greene said during an interview with Tennessee’s Local 3 News. “But it’s important for our nation, for our sovereignty, for us to uphold the law. And this is what we have to do.”The White House’s attempts to engage in “mass deportations” during Donald Trump’s second presidency has led to an increase in arrests throughout the country. Immigration enforcement operations have been aided by local jurisdictions that partner with Ice, under what are known as 287(g) contracts. These contracts deputize local officials to carry out immigration enforcement arrests, collaborating closely with Ice.The Whitfield county sheriff’s office, which runs the local jail for people arrested in Dalton, has a 287(g) contract with Ice.Additionally, a law signed last year by Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, requires local law enforcement, in the entire state, to apply to enter into 287(g) contracts with Ice. Immigration advocacy organizations have called that law “disastrous”.The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, for instance, said it would lead to “racial profiling, terrorize immigrant communities and waste local resources”.Arias-Cristobal’s father, José Arias-Tovar, had also been detained by Ice weeks earlier after another traffic stop for speeding. He bonded out of Ice detention on 16 May. Five days later, Arias-Cristobal paid a $1,500 bond, leading to her release. She was home with her family by Thursday evening.“We’re going to keep working on her case to try to keep her here permanently,” Arias-Cristobal’s attorney, Dustin Baxter, told local TV station WSB-TV.Arias-Cristobal’s arrest has prompted some to rally for her release, whether in person or online. Her advocates have criticized Ice and the local police department for how they have handled her case.A GoFundMe campaign launched for her legal defense has raised more than $90,000.The jail where Arias-Cristobal was detained before she bonded out is known as the Stewart detention center. It is a run privately in Lumpkin, Georgia, by CoreCivic under a contract with Ice and for years has been accused of violating rights and maintaining horrific conditions. More