Odds are they just wanted that person gone and the real reason can't be spoken out loud.

Of course, what the law is doesn’t really matter anymore.

Do you know what the actual laws/regulations are for this stuff? My understanding is that there are in fact valid and invalid reasons for denying entry to a valid visa holder, but that the valid reasons are in practice broad and subjective enough that a CBP officer could nearly always justify their decision (something like "I wasn't convinced they would abide by the terms of their visa").

911 was an inside job! Or maybe the us of a had an oopsie.

Right now they only get rewarded if they deport or collar somebody, so that's all they seem to care about, and letting in good people is seen as more of a nuisance they must do while trying to get notches for their promotion.

Doesn't seem like much of an incentive to identify good productive people if the incentive scheme is defined as "accept a couple of hundred dollars" vs "don't accept a couple of hundred dollars"...

There are already a few sprinkles here and there to reward them for stopping some of the bad people, but nothing if they let in a good person. $200 is better than nothing...

Or that people responsible for processing visas and checking papers have been restricting numbers despite what their bosses and the wider public ask for. If you want more immigrants than the guidelines and quotas permit, the route to it isn't legalising bribery.

I guess another option might be to give the similar kind of promotional awards to metrics of good immigrants being let in as they do to collaring criminals.

>If you want more immigrants than the guidelines and quotas permit, the route to it isn't legalising bribery.

I'm talking about the officer having an incentive to actually follow the "guidelines." His cost to reject someone is basically zero. He gets rewarded nothing for letting you in. I'm not talking about the officer getting paid to let in people without a visa, I'm talking about having an incentive to actually do his job and not just chase reasons to reject people with no cost to a bunch of false positives.

Edit:

(As an aside, the US actually has a loophole that allows US businesses to bribe foreign officials, including for immigration, to get them to do their job that they were already obligated to do. So really they would just be legalizing it for "them + the rest of world" instead just "the rest of world." Pure American exceptionalism to realize grease payments are legitimate and helpful everywhere but magically the US)

   Regarding payments to foreign officials, the act draws a distinction between bribery and facilitation or "grease payments", which may be permissible under the FCPA, but may still violate local laws. The primary distinction is that grease payments or facilitation payments are made to an official to expedite his performance of the routine duties he is already bound to perform.

You won't believe how many borders I've crossed without paying bribes, or for that matter how little attention to metrics or the goodness of people crossing was paid at the one border that did garnish their staff's wages with an unofficial dollar fee for everyone...

While we're telling stories, here's two tales from me

1) Robbed at the Mexican border by police. They didn't even bother asking me, just took it. They get no real reward for jailing people so they were very happy for the $180 and then left me the fuck alone.

2) Enter USA. Passport, everything good, everything legit. Insane border patrol degradingly strip searched me, watched me as I performed bowel movements, jailed me, took me halfway across the state in a prisoner van, and then ran up $1k in medical bills while they search my body for drugs that didn't exist. Unceremoniously dumped at the border with no apologies when absolutely nothing unlawful was found. Still debt collectors chasing me for this.

Now, which was fairer? Definitely getting robbed. The Mexican just wanted his reward. The US CBP could only get a reward by getting me arrested.

Now do both societal models suck? Yes they do. But as a guy on the street, I cannot change society, especially if I am an immigrant presenting at the border to a country I've never been to in my life. What I can do is get robbed of $200, and be in a fairer position than getting robbed of $1k of medical bills and a day in jail I'll never get back, or deported while some officer tries to win some dumb metric.

I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges.

That is the reality I am dealing with. Not a made up la-la land where top-down society is going to be changed by the immigrant presenting at the border. Legalized bribery is relative fairness in this world we live, compared to many of the actual alternatives many people have on the ground where they are staring at someone who gets to play god and the only question they have is how they can maximize their rewards.

I mean, why on earth wouldn't he do both if there's any incentive to do the latter, especially if he's dealing with individual immigrants rather than a people smuggling racket that might offer repeat business? You're accusing me of talking about "made up la la land" (i.e. the majority of the civilized world where border guards are paid flat salaries, not deportation bonuses) whilst inventing a society in which legalized theft from immigrants somehow results in border guards defying orders and incentives to scrupulously ensure all the "good" people get in.

Therefore in the USA corruption model you end up with a bunch of false arrests while in the LatAm corruption model you end up with a bunch of fast robberies but not so much the lengthy deportation/arrest of innocents based on the officer thinking that's the bigger reward.

The way I've had this play out time and time again is my shit gets robbed in the third world but I have no problems entering, and the exact opposite issue with the USA.

Of course you could point to say the Swedish model where as far as I can tell they have no incentive to do any job whatsoever. I've entered Stockholm straight on a flight from a sketchy part of Iraq and no one even bothered to look at me or even question where I was coming from or what I might have with me. Their border guards must just lounge in a room drinking tea and draw their salaries or something.

But for countries with obsessive security operations and deportation targets, the incentive to pass the possible criminal onto the next stage of the process involving different sets of border guards doesn't disappear after you've helped yourself to their petty cash. Indeed if they're not outraged, that's a pretty good indication they're hiding something and you're doing great detective work, and if they are, maybe you just find their comments and threats annoying and want to send them to the deportation centre to know what real mistreatment looks like.

Mine is I've both been robbed, and "not" arrested (but jailed) by border patrol. It doesn't play out how you've claimed. The robberies are swift and then they eject you so they can rob the next guy. The jailings eat up their resources for hours. No one that can rob more innocent people is going to waste their time on a long-shot arrest of the innocent when they could be out there robbing 10x more people. The jailers will actively actually complain to you while you're arrested that it's eating up their time.

Now I'm just some guy on the internet, so I don't expect you to believe my actual reality over the ideological theories you have in your head. So all I have to say is if you keep crossing borders I expect some day you'll learn it the way I've learned it. I didn't come to my conclusions through theory but rather seeing just how much fairer robbery is in real life and how it is better at producing positive incentives.

Or even less your first theory about how a bribe based system is necessary for an immigration system to "bring in good productive people" which frankly is a 180 degree pivot from a story about border guards indiscriminately thieving from everyone, as well as obviously falsified by the many countries where border staff neither demand unofficial payment for entry nor routinely assume that anyone who looks a bit funny is an illegal alien or a drugs mule.

1) US model, guards only rewarded for catching criminals or deporting. Lots of false negatives at no cost to guards so they fuck with you a lot for no apparent reason. Canada somewhat similar.

2) LatAm model, bribes/theft to incentivize the to not burn up time with false negatives, but they sonetimes are rewarded enough for true positives to not just let them go.

3) "Swedish" model. Straight salary and then not give a fuck. Seems everyone gets through with not much thought.

LatAm model seems most practical of what I've seen but I haven't spent much time in Europe or Asia, mostly middle east, the Americas, and southeast asia.

LatAm model where they're too busy robbing people to care about actual threats (who are generally particularly happy to pay them off, including offers of recurring payments) seems like obviously the worst of both worlds. Though frankly my own LatAM border highlights were watching Ecuadorian airport staff meticulously searching the multiple suitcases every local family brought with them from Colombia and then not even bothering with a token gesture at my bag, and having no real issues at land borders despite crossing them with a strikingly different-looking temporary passport. Apparently the Bolivian border guard was enthusiastic enough about his job to give US Americans a lecture on why they had to pay to arrange a visa-on-arrival everyone else got for free

There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes. The question then is how to game their robbery to best help the rest of humans, not just hope magically they will be nice.

I've lived in that world for many years.

There are just two kinds of US visas: non-immigrant and immigrant. You are not allowed to immigrate on a non-immigrant visa. "Dual intent" applies only to the issuing of a visa: by default a non-immigrant visa can only be issued to someone who has proven the lack of an immigration intent (which is assumed by default, so one has to prove the lack of thereof in order to get a visa) but there is an exception for some non-immigrant visas, which can be issued without such a proof. This is all "dual intent" means. Not "it's an immigrant visa if I intend it to be one!". These visas are still non-immigrant and carry all the restrictions of other non-immigrant visas i.e. they don't allow immigration. So while it's fine to have an intention to immigrate with such a visa, it's illegal to actually immigrate. This is not some esoteric knowledge and can be found within 15 minutes of internet search and reading.

I imagine the protagonist of the article said something that showed he has immigrated, at least the article describes him as an immigrant - he lives in the US and has nothing to come to in the home country. Thus the reason for denial of entry.

I have worked abroad many times and work permits were always under heavy scrutiny by my own company, to the degree that we send one unhappy soul home mid week because some regulations were not met and he came back week smiling because he got a pay rise as comparable rated as local was a requirement.

If the visa waiver suddenly no longer allows working business trips to the USA this is huge news. The terms of the waiver explicitly state it's allowed but it seems not in practice.

This is a definite "get out now" to anyone on a ESTA in the USA right now. Attending a conference, trade show or consulting on a build out of battery plant?" Get out now.

Have you read the requirements? Business visas or ESTA waivers have never allowed "work", there is nothing sudden about it. You can attend conferences and trade shows and have meetings. You can not "work" though.

I'm not an immigration lawyer so I don't know exactly what the requirements cover and what they don't. You are not allowed to "engage in active employment", but I have been permitted in paid for by my employer to attend meetings with company colleagues which is apparently okay.

I imagine a Korean engineer or project manager visiting to meet colleagues and inspect the site should be okay on a business visa or waiver. One who was there working on plans or overseeing construction might not be. You would hope the company had carefully checked these things.

No one was sold on throwing international professionals in jail just for showing up to do a job they took in good faith. That's clearly wrong, in a way that rounding up the "bad" people isn't. And so it shows up the horrifying implications of current policy.

Take a drive through the streets of Duluth and you will see more signs in Korean than English.

Good faith is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact, or opening your wallet to a conman, who goes back on every deal he makes.

(And this conman takes your tax money, and then instead of providing you the services that he is required to - by law, witholds it for reasons of pure spite and caprise. If he won't hold up his end of what he is required to, why should anyone else lift a finger to extend any courtesies to him?)

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-atlanta-announces-resu...

Being accurate is less important than trying to get the lie out in front of as many eyeballs as possible, so the lie can be repeated in front of people who might not realize this sort of information offhand.

450 people arrested. I am skeptical of even that number. 450 working here illegally? Ok… prove it. Names and visa statuses please. The raid happened yesterday, you’re telling me they have conclusive proof 450 people are working illegally less than 24 hours later? Not remotely likely

Much more likely? 450 koreans working here legally but not carrying papers on them because american is supposed to be a free country.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires every noncitizen who is 18 years old and over to carry evidence of their immigration “registration documents” at all times.

Noncitizens refer to lawful permanent residents (green card holders) and other nonimmigrants in the U.S., including but not limited to foreign students, exchange visitors, and foreign workers. “Registration documents” effectively refer to valid immigration documents.

Also, detained != deported. If you have been stopped by a police officer for a traffic ticket and couldn't leave at will, you were being detained too.

Hyperbole isn't helpful.

We spent the entire Cold War criticizing “papers, please” culture so at the very least seems like we should recognize this as a major change and do something old-fashioned like passing a law to make it legal. The free countries like France or Spain which have similar requirements have actual legal authorization making the terms clear.

The people detained were suspected of being here illegally and weren't citizens. Being detained is not the same as being deported, and is simply holding until more information is known. The INA was created before the cold war and only applies to non-citizens, which is a milder policy than a lot of developed countries. Plus, while I'm not inclined to believe everything the government says, immediately rejecting government data because it violates your desired world view is childish, especially when there's no reason to doubt it.

https://internationalservices.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs64...

> immediately rejecting government data because it violates your desired world view is childish, especially when there's no reason to doubt it.

You appear to have confused me with someone else. That said, given both the highly politicized climate and the many recent examples of claims being dropped or falling apart in court, I think it’s prudent to only trust things defended in a court of law. It’s certainly plausible that there was a tip about immigration fraud which meant that they had clear cause for stopping people but it also wouldn’t be surprising if people under intense pressure to hit quotas made some bad calls. I’m sure that many of the numbers they report are valid - large chunks of the economy depend on foreign labor - but expect the final numbers will be substantially lower.

The people detained included US Citizens who weren't carrying documentation of their citizenship.

> "...The judicial warrant for the search at the Hyundai plant named just four people. Relying on that warrant, ICE detained nearly 500 people. DHS admitted that included U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and people lawfully here on visas.'"

https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3lydsb...

It's an absurd law for basic reasons: if US citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship, and non-citizens are, then the law either is totally pointless and unenforceable; or (in this case) trigger-happy police unlawfully detain US citizens on suspicion. It's a Catch-22: a US citizen is not obligated to carry *the papers proving they're not obligated to carry papers*.

In 2025, people go from one to the other without ever getting a chance to legally contest it.

Hell, they go from one to the other when they win the legal contest.

There's no need to play Devil's advocate for this.

People are being ARRESTED wrongly and without due process or consequences for the mistake - not just detained.

Carrying water for the lawless kleptocracy isn’t a good look.

Looks like they did have legal visas

I am not an immigration judge or a prophet, so I don't know how every case will turn out, but 450 is a lot. It's enough that even if some are here legally, as would be expected since people are detained for reasonable suspicion not proof, it would still be hundreds of illegal immigrants.

Most of the immigrants are not from South Korea, they're from central/south america. My understanding of the situation so far is that some South Koreans came here to manage the project, some on questionable visas themselves, and they hired hundreds of laborers (illegally). If you want to build a factory in the US you should follow the laws we have, you can't pick and choose which laws to follow.

Some examples: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-don...

And no, not following you - just replying to all the comments that blindly believe a state media outlet from a gov run by kleptocrats.

"Trust the experts!"

>Much more likely? 450 koreans working here legally but not carrying papers on them because american is supposed to be a free country.

The facts will inevitably be: hundreds Korean nationals were illegally working in the US. The correction will be a small blurb somewhere, posted months from now, after the next fake new outrage comes about.

Trust the experts only makes sense if you’re talking about something where experts exist, and are speaking.

ICE et all is a goon squad, and most of their employees have only a high school diploma and a few months experience driving around in white vans disappearing seniors. If i need that done, i know who to trust. If i need the truth? They are not experts in the truth.

But ok, let’s say we believe them. By their own stats, 30% of the people they arrest are let go without charges or deportation. So by their own accounting, 450 arrests will be 315 deportation/incarcerations, and 135 people treated like cattle for having the wrong skin color or an accent. And given the complete lack of due process why on earth should we even believe them about the 315?

Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS in spite of massive lock-in because the feeling that the USA is a trustworthy partner is completely gone. You can't just 'joke about invading Greenland' and expect everybody to move on as if it didn't happen. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't just local sample bias either, NL used to be pretty laid back when it came to silly details such as hosting providers and such.

How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?

I'm not sure if that'd fully alleviate the risk for EU companies & governments, but I'd imagine it alleviates some of it.

The real question is where the CEO lives and whether their family and kids are susceptible to being kidnapped by the US govt.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone given that it is an American company. Being a multinational corporation like Microsoft or Mercedes Benz means you have to navigate rather complex legal situations, follow not just your home country's laws, but also the laws of the countries that you are operating in.

Plus, hiring for AWS / Azure / GCP experience is still much higher than for the smaller EU clouds.

The fundamental risk for the EU is the Cloud Act. Since that facility is still owned by a company that is owned by a US company, the Cloud Act applies.

Microsoft tried a similar thing in Germany and it failed.

I personally would be open to trying to change that, but I keep looking at the EU and they don't want to. Many countries are actively hostile to entrepreneurs and eg can charge taxes/fees/exit fees on unrealized cap gains. etc.

I’m an EU citizen, and think life generally was better in Belgium. But the salaries being so poor means I’m unlikely to move back.

They don't seem to want to :shrug:

If it did, and the US ordered Amazon to shut down the region, would it?

If the region kept on operating, and the US ordered Amazon to stop providing software updates, security updates, new license keys, etc. - how long could the region keep running?

How many times have we heard that? He owns the party, the courts, the legislature, and the guns.

Lots of talk, but how much action?

People are still building things that depend on American cloud, American controlled OSes (especially for mobile), American supplied hardware, American cloud services (especially AI) and the moves away are tiny by contrast.

Directly from the Windows Forum.

https://www.slashgear.com/1888658/microsoft-office-alternati...

Government's in Denmark, Germany, Spain (on the state level )

A couple more links for companies, but I trust the above is enough? The trend is definitely there and picking up speed.

Edit: a couple of days ago there was a post on HN about SAP spending 20b on cloud https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/sap_sovereign_cloud/

1. Denmark’s Ministry for Digital Affairs

2. Two Danish cities

3. One German state

4. The Italian Ministry of defence

5. One Spanish region

They also say French education ministry advised schools to move off the free versions of the "free versions" of MS Office 365 and Google Docs. They do not say anything about how many schools followed the advice, or what they moved to (a paid version of the same? another American supplier?).

Not much for a whole continent.

There will be a lot of resistance to any change. There will be a lot of people like this making the same arguments made here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/debate_for_microsoft_...

Microsoft has successfully had such decisions reversed in the past:

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...

Things are different now too because they are not the same, sure. I don't know that people who got it quite wrong are the ones to trust when it comes to predictions of trading and economics this time around.

> Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.

No doubt a lot of people have changed their minds about visiting US due to Trump -

"Overseas arrivals fell 3.4% in June compared to a year ago, bringing the YTD decline to 1.2%."

But I don't think those kinds of swings are much evidence for larger trade and investment and data sovereignty etc issues.

Everybody, EU, UK, China, Japan, India, Australia, well really just about all countries -- have made a lot of noise and care a lot about relying on US tech, having US companies and by extension the US government control their data, etc. This isn't something they've just started to try fixing in 2016 "because Trump", or in 2025 "because this time he means it". It's been much longer than that. With the exception of probably only China, nobody has been able to make a great deal of progress on it.

Until very recently the USA was the preferred technology partner for many EU ventures and was seen as a trustworthy ally because of mutual history since 1945.

> If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other.

A lot more than what? And what exactly did Europe do in recent times that would give American citizens that feeling?

> It hasn’t been a century since they tried to genocide each other

This is a complete nonsense statement.

What does this mean? Like “the nationalists” would start taking away domain names of people they don’t like or something?

https://newrepublic.com/article/196154/stephen-miller-erupts...

ICE folks seem to be sometimes confused about citizen versus non-citizen:

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-...

* https://globalnews.ca/news/11309378/kenny-laynez-ice-detaine...

- what a given visa allows

- whether or not someone is a naturalized citizen

- whether or not someone is a citizen by birth

and all kinds of things that seem like they should be core, table stakes knowledge of the job they are supposedly doing.

I'm sure ICE would be the first to point this out in court -- so it's kind of ironic having to point this out here.

Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association.

ICE agents and other Federal workers are largely insulated from consequences due to Sovereign Immunity protections. only egregious, malicious violations cause them personal liability. and Trump can dole out pardons if it comes to that.

> Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association.

it's nice that they're fighting, but the Supreme Court has shown a remarkable tolerance for flagrant lawlessness by the Administration (e.g. DHS v. DVD.) sometimes because the Court is sympathetic to Trump's objectives, sometimes because they fear he'll ignore them and do it anyway, and they'll lose the resulting power struggle (nine sedentary septuagenarians vs. the US Armed Forces.)

Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card.

Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.

I'm just saying that I advise all my friends on similar visas to say they're "working" in the US if asked, rather than say "living". Don't give people with power over you any excuse to ruin your life.

Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...).

So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.