The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 3rd (local time) that when U.S. immigration enforcement authorities arrested Korean workers in Georgia in September last year, President Donald Trump told the Georgia governor he did not know a raid was underway.
WSJ reported that Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has been leading the Trump administration's hard-line immigration enforcement and relayed this episode as one example. Miller, known as a "power broker" in the administration, is the architect of the hard-line immigration policy in Trump's second term.
According to the report, after U.S. immigration authorities arrested about 300 Korean workers on Sept. 4 last year at the construction site of the Hyundai Motor Group–LG Energy Solution battery joint-venture plant in Georgia, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp asked President Trump during a phone call to release them. During this process, Trump privately told Kemp he did not know about the arrests.
In fact, at the outset of the Georgia arrests, Trump told reporters, "I only heard about the incident right before (the authorities') press conference," adding, "I don't know anything." In an interview with The New York Times (NYT) published on the 8th of last month, he also said he was "not happy" about the large-scale sweep of Korean workers that took place at Hyundai Motor's Georgia plant.
WSJ said Miller set a deportation target of "3,000 a day" and continued to push for large-scale raids even after Trump told aides during the Georgia incident that he no longer wanted mass arrests at factories and farms. Miller is known to want to break the record of "400,000 undocumented immigrants deported" set in 2014 under the Barack Obama administration.
It was also Miller who led plans to apply the wartime Enemy Nationals Act to deport immigrants to prisons in El Salvador, conduct "The Home Depot, Inc. raids" where immigrants gather daily to find work, deploy large numbers of ICE agents to Minnesota under the pretext of "deporting Somali fraudsters," and carry out hard-line crackdowns on protesters.
Miller's hard-line anti-immigration policy ultimately triggered a "backlash" that dragged down Trump's approval ratings ahead of the midterms. According to WSJ, even Trump complained to those around him that "on some issues, Miller went too far." Still, Miller's clout inside the White House remains intact, and Trump's confidence in him is said to be strong.