Gavin Bade

So you've got a ready-made industrial site.

You have a state that really wants the investment that's going to give you tax breaks to make an investment here.

And you have a sector that, from their perspective, is ripe for disruption.

They thought they could do well here, and they were right.

Everyone was all in on this, and it was, you know, on paper, it looked like a great idea.

And if you ask people who have jobs there, obviously they like getting paid, they like having a job.

And so there was a lot to be gained by Fuyao coming to this area, for sure.

Probably, you know, 2018, 2019, there started to be concerns from what I can tell.

But the federal investigation in this matter dates back to 2019, where the feds, and this is, you know, DHS, the Homeland Security Investigation Arm, they start tracking the workers who are coming to this plant.

Some people around Dayton who were seeing some curious things about the Fuyao factory and its labor force, right?

Dozens of workers, presumably of Chinese origin, stuffed into, you know,

what the federal complaint calls family-style hotels.

They're coming and going all hours of the day and night.

There are concerns about the sanitation there, and there are concerns about just how many people are crammed into these places.

According to the federal complaint, what the Fuyao business owners did was create this pipeline to import, house, and employ undocumented labor at this auto glass factory, obviously because they are not going to pay them as much as you would pay a documented person, and certainly not as much as a UAW union represented person at the Vitro factory.

So it's all about, it's all a cost savings ploy here.

No one's been criminally charged in this case.

I could not find if there were any people who were deported because of that raid in particular, right?

So the thing with the raid was a number of people who were undocumented and were on the rolls for Fuyao or their suppliers just didn't come to work that day.

And of the people, the federal complaint says, of the people who were absent that day, the vast majority were undocumented when they looked them up.