Hundreds of workers arrested in raid on Georgia factory; president signs executive order in callback to defense department’s original name – key US politics stories from 5 September 2025
South Korea’s foreign ministry has expressed concern after “many of our nationals” were among hundreds detained during a major Ice raid on a Hyundai factory in Georgia, in a dramatic iteration of the Trump administration’s harsh crackdown on immigrants in the US.
“The economic activities of our companies investing in the United States and the interests of our citizens must not be unduly violated during the course of US law enforcement,” a ministry spokesperson, Lee Jae-woong, said in a statement on Friday.
The facility is part of what would be the biggest industrial investment in the state’s history and had been hailed as a huge boost for the economy by Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
Here’s the day’s Trump administration news at a glance.
Hundreds of workers at a factory being built in Georgia to make car batteries for Hyundai and Kia electric vehicles were detained in a huge raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Thursday that stopped construction.
About 475 workers were arrested, according to US immigration officials on Friday, the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was created in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US in New York and Washington DC.
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Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947. The directive will make “Department of War” the secondary title while instructing the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to pursue congressional approval for a permanent change.
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The New York City mayor, Eric Adams, announced on Friday that he is going to stay in the fall’s highly anticipated mayoral race, just days after reports that Donald Trump was encouraging him to drop out in order to help fellow independent candidate Andrew Cuomo gain more votes against the frontrunner, the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani.
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The US jobs market stalled over the summer, adding just 22,000 jobs in August and continuing a slowdown in the labor market as businesses adjusted to disruptions caused by tariffs.
The latest jobs report also contained more bad news. The US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to the latest survey, the first time it went into the negative since December 2020.
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Donald Trump is sending 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region, it was reported on Friday. If follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers, and comments by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Wednesday that such attacks “will happen again”.
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US Navy Seals shot and killed a number of North Korean civilians during a botched covert mission to plant a listening device in the nuclear-armed country during high-stakes diplomatic negotiations in 2019, the New York Times reported on Friday.
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Communities are on edge as the long-discussed arrival of federal law enforcement and Ice agents in Chicago is reportedly set to begin in the coming days, marking the potential start of a contentious period of federal policing in the Democratic-led midwestern city.
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Ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have continued to plummet following Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s premier performing arts venue.
A potential UN-endorsed reconstruction plan for Gaza is being discussed with the US to prevent the UN general assembly descending into a bitter row about the symbolic recognition of Palestine as a state.
A federal judge on Friday ruled against the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 September 2025.