--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, September 8th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, what another weak jobs report says about the overall economy, the patchwork group taking on Trump in court and succeeding, and the winners from this year's U.S. Open. But first, the latest on the arrest of hundreds of people at a Hyundai plant in Georgia.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The administration is describing it as the largest on-site workplace operation ever conducted by ICE, but it's quickly become a tense diplomatic issue between the U.S. and one of its closest allies, South Korea.
--:-- [Audio plays of officials storming the facility under construction in Georgia]
--:-- Shumita Basu: Footage obtained by CNN showed officials storming the facility under construction in Georgia on Thursday, where they arrested 475 people, leading detainees away shackled together.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Here's Homeland Security Special Agent Stephen Schrenk describing the operation at a press conference.
--:-- Stephen Schrenk: This has been a multi-month criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews, gathered documents, and presented that evidence to the court.
--:-- Stephen Schrenk: Homeland Security claims the workers detained there were in the U.S. illegally or working at the site illegally.
--:-- Stephen Schrenk: An official acknowledged that some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents were initially detained but were eventually released.
--:-- Stephen Schrenk: Most of those arrested were South Korean nationals.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Which led the South Korean foreign ministry to express concern and regret at the news, a rare public criticism of U.S. policy.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Their government held emergency talks on Saturday, where, according to the Associated Press, the foreign minister floated the possibility of traveling to Washington.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But after discussions over the weekend, the South Korean government says a deal has been reached.
--:-- Shumita Basu: 300 people are now being released from detention and sent back to South Korea.
--:-- Shumita Basu: CNN correspondent Mike Valerio in Seoul told the network how the news was being received.
--:-- Mike Valerio: There is an astonished and floored feeling that people have looking at this video released from ICE, seeing fellow South Korean citizens with chains around their waist led away in handcuffs.
--:-- Mike Valerio: When you're talking about a key American ally right next door to China in this critical part of the world that's trying to help out American industry, I cannot stress enough to our American audience and people watching around the world the feeling of betrayal that is emanating from all corners of South Korean society.
--:-- Shumita Basu: So far, it's not completely clear who hired the workers.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The New York Times reports among those arrested were subcontractors of both Hyundai and LG, the other Seoul-based company collaborating on the plant.
--:-- Shumita Basu: LG has responded by suspending most travel to the U.S. and brought staff on business trips home.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Hyundai says it isn't aware of any of its employees being detained, and it will investigate hiring practices by suppliers and subcontractors.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Hyundai has invested billions in the American South, and Georgia has responded by offering billions in tax breaks to Hyundai.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Around 100 Korean-owned facilities operate in the state of Georgia, according to Georgia's Department of Economic Development, and they trade more than $17.5 billion in goods.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Republican Governor Brian Kemp has made frequent trips to the country.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The timing of this raid comes on the heels of an announcement of a new trade deal between the U and South Korea.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Here's NPR's Jasmine Garst speaking on the network over the weekend.
--:-- Jasmine Garst: President Trump has made it a priority to bring manufacturing to the U.S.
--:-- Jasmine Garst: In fact, just over a week ago, he hosted President Lee Jae of South Korea, who pledged to invest an additional $150 billion in the U.S., including in battery factories.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It remains to be seen whether that deal and the goodwill generated by it will be rocked by this workplace raid.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, border czar Tom Homan told CNN the administration is planning more worksite enforcement operations like the one in Georgia.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Let's turn now to the broader economy.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest jobs report on Friday, the first since President Trump fired the official responsible for presenting the findings after weaker than expected numbers last month.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The latest report wasn't any better.
--:-- Shumita Basu: When the data came out on Friday, I think the first thought that I had and several of my other sources was, oof, yikes.
--:-- Shumita Basu: That's Courtney Brown, economics reporter at Axios.
--:-- Courtney Brown: The U.S. economy added 22,000 new jobs in August, a figure that was far below expectations and a long way behind the roughly 100,000 being added every month at the beginning of this year.
--:-- Courtney Brown: And following some revisions to June and July, it was the first time the labor market lost jobs since December of 2020.
--:-- Courtney Brown: Blue-collar industries were especially hit.
--:-- Courtney Brown: Brown told us she thinks two factors are at play here.
--:-- Courtney Brown: One, foreign goods, foreign inputs that they might use to build goods. They're way more expensive now because of tariffs.
--:-- Courtney Brown: And then you have the other side, which is even if employers, including manufacturers, want to hire, we're hearing anecdotally it's starting to get really difficult to find the workers they need because of President Trump's immigration crackdown.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Other sectors like finance, business services, and information were also hit.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Health care drove most of the jobs created, but Brown notes even that is slowing.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The other big cloud hanging over many businesses looking to recruit is tariffs, as Brown mentioned.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A court recently ruled that most of Trump's tariffs were illegal and beyond his authority, a decision that Trump has now taken to the Supreme Court.
--:-- Shumita Basu: So if I'm an employer right now, am I just going to delay as many decisions as I can until I figure out, well, how much is it going to cost me to get goods from overseas?
--:-- Shumita Basu: Am I going to agree to do a huge project when I don't know what that might cost me, what the economy is going to look like, what the tariff impact might be?
--:-- Shumita Basu: That uncertainty could also be why consumer confidence hit a three-month low in August.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But while unemployment has risen slightly from 4.2 to 4.3 percent, Brown says that's not because companies are suddenly shedding all their workers.
--:-- Shumita Basu: We are in what myself and my colleagues have been calling the frozen labor market, the no hire, no fire labor market.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Hiring is so sluggish.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But when you look on the other side of the equation, there aren't mass layoffs happening in the U.S. economy.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But what we're seeing is that if you were laid off because hiring is so sluggish, you are spending more and more time unemployed.
--:-- Shumita Basu: That means that people could be experiencing the economy very differently right now.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're in a secure job, it might not feel like there's a shortage.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And if your earnings depend on Wall Street performance, you could be having a very strong year as markets continue to perform well.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But for people out of work, the crisis could be acute, especially for certain groups.
--:-- Shumita Basu: While 4 percent unemployment is still low by historic standards, for Black Americans, that number has surged to 7.2 percent, the highest level since October of 2021.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Trump's response to the latest jobs report was more muted than last month.
--:-- Shumita Basu: He repeated his call for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, something that economists believe is more likely after this latest report.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And now a check-in on various legal challenges to the Trump administration.
--:-- Shumita Basu: President Trump took office with few hurdles to his agenda in Congress.
--:-- Shumita Basu: His party controls both houses, and among Republican lawmakers, dissent is rare.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Democrats, meanwhile, have relatively few options to check Trump's attempts to expand executive powers.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But there's one coalition that has had some success.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Lawyers, public interest groups, Democratic state attorneys general, and unions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: They really doubled down on using legal strategies, like a full-on daily battle, hundreds of cases, to resist what he was planning to do.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Michael Shearer is a staff writer for The Atlantic.
--:-- Michael Shearer: And they have a pretty decent win record.
--:-- Michael Shearer: It's not perfect. It's messy. It's really complicated.
--:-- Michael Shearer: A lot of these are preliminary injunctions that may be overturned, but they've been able to hold back and really frustrate some of the president's desires.
--:-- Shumita Basu: As of late August, 384 cases have been filed against the Trump administration, according to Just Security, a law policy journal.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And roughly a third have resulted in orders blocking at least parts of Trump's agenda.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The very first lawsuit, which sought information on how the Doge team was considering cuts, was filed just hours after Trump's inauguration.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It was sort of a shot in the dark to begin, but it was also a show of intent.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And then just a week later, you had another lawsuit.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Office of Management and Budget had put out a letter to the country basically freezing federal funding for all kinds of spending.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And an injunction quickly came afterwards, and the letter was withdrawn.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Shearer says that case involving the Office of Management and Budget created a playbook for attorneys to follow.
--:-- Shumita Basu: They drafted up legal arguments for potential moves Trump might make, made calls to find plaintiffs and supporting evidence to demonstrate alleged harm caused by the administration, and rushed to court to file lawsuits.
--:-- Shumita Basu: They've blocked executive orders, forced delays of deportation flights, and maintained foreign students' ability to continue studying at U.S. universities.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And Scheer says the lawsuits have played a critical role in keeping the public aware of the administration's actions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Because this information was being turned up in court as part of the factual record, it gave civil servants the ability to testify and give depositions about what they'd been asked to do and what they'd refused to do.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It gave local governments the ability to detail how funding cuts were affecting them and their citizens.
--:-- Shumita Basu: According to Just Security, Trump has won about 40 percent of cases brought against his administration as of mid-August.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And Scheer says the Supreme Court so far has been more favorable to his administration than lower courts.
--:-- Shumita Basu: There are roughly 150 cases still waiting on a ruling.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Courts take a long time to make these decisions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And most of the rulings we've gotten in the last six or seven months have basically been judges saying, I think the plaintiffs here are probably going to succeed.
--:-- Shumita Basu: So I'm stopping this activity.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But the next phase of all of this is to actually debate the merits of the actual arguments and to have a trial.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And we probably won't know until the end of Trump's term where the courts land on a lot of the substantive issues that have been raised.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, the groups bringing these lawsuits say they plan to keep filing more.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Palestinian gunmen killed at least six people and injured more in Jerusalem on Monday before being killed by a soldier and civilians.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The shooting took place at a busy bus depot during morning rush hour, with the footage from the scene showing the windshield of a bus riddled with bullet holes.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Hamas did not claim responsibility, but praised the shooting in a statement shortly after the attack, which it said was carried out by two Palestinian resistance fighters.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued a statement which condemned any targeting of Palestinian and Israeli civilians.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to catch everyone who helped the attackers, saying Israeli forces were encircling the villages where they believed the attackers came from.
--:-- Shumita Basu: He also praised the soldier who fired on the gunman, who he says was from a newly formed unit for ultra-Orthodox soldiers.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The attack comes as Israel mounts an expanded military effort into Gaza City and further expansion into the West Bank.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Also in international news, over the weekend, Russia hit key government buildings in Ukraine's capital for the first time since the war began in a drone and missile strike that killed at least four people, including an infant and a young woman.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Reuters reports it was the largest air attack of the war so far.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the strike as a, quote, deliberate attack and an attempt to prolong the war.
--:-- Shumita Basu: President Trump suggested on Sunday to reporters, without offering details, that he was ready to step up sanctions against Russia or its oil trading partners, two days after NBC News reported growing pessimism to ending the war from inside the White House.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Here in the U.S., thousands marched in Washington, D.C. and Chicago to protest against President Trump's use of federal agents for local law enforcement.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Dubbed the We Are All D.C. march, it was one of the first major organized marches in the Capitol since Trump sent in the National Guard and temporarily took control of the police department, a measure that's set to expire on Wednesday.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, Chicagoans were protesting the prospect of similar action in their city.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On Saturday, Trump posted to social media that Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War, alluding to the recent rebranding of the Department of Defense.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And finally, Carlos Alcaraz from Spain won the men's championship at the U.S. Open yesterday, defeating his rival Italian Yannick Sinner in four sets to take his second title at Flushing Meadows.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It was the third consecutive meeting of the men's world number one and two in a Grand Slam final.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Sinner last beat Alcaraz to win Wimbledon in July.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On the women's side, top-ranked Belarusian Irina Sabalenka beat American Amanda Anasimova in straight sets to take her second consecutive Women's U.S. Open.
--:-- Shumita Basu: President Trump was also in attendance on Sunday, the first sitting president since Bill Clinton in 2000 to attend the final.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Wired has the story of a legal battle between a Silicon Valley investor and her surrogate over the stillbirth of a baby and the complicated laws around surrogacy in America.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
