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2025 · A NATIONAL MOMENT ON HISTORIC FACTORY GROUND
The pattern this entry tests is a familiar modern one: a national announcement staged on a factory floor, on ground with a history. Mishawaka's factory ground supplied the setting twice in 2025, and the dated record is printed here at the size it carries.
The change of hands, June 10, 2025: On June 10, 2025, Mullen Automotive announced by Globe Newswire that it had transferred full, unencumbered ownership of its Mishawaka manufacturing facility — 12900 McKinley Highway, some 780,000 square feet on about 58 acres — to GEM, in a settlement satisfying a federal court judgment. The plant's own lineage is the point: it was originally constructed and operated by General Motors for Hummer H2 production, and later owned by AM General, before passing through SF Motors to Mullen. The boundary must be stated exactly, because the names invite the error: this is the former commercial H2 plant. AM General's military campus in Mishawaka — the Humvee and JLTV works — did not change hands in this transaction, and no part of this entry should be read onto it.
The floor as a stage, August 2025: The national moment staged on the military campus's floor came two months later and from the other direction: on August 18, 2025, Senator Jim Banks published his account of touring AM General's Mishawaka manufacturing facility with Yechiel Leiter, Israel's ambassador to the United States — the senator in the driver's seat of an armored vehicle, the party walking the line among the machines — with the Indiana-built vehicles destined for the Israel Defense Forces. The plant those photographs were taken in builds, under the follow-on Joint Light Tactical Vehicle contract worth up to $8.6 billion whose award Indiana's senators announced in 2023, the Army's and the world's tactical trucks: a foreign-policy announcement made, deliberately, on a Mishawaka factory floor.
The mayoral beat — a named gap: The specific beat the audit looked for, a Mishawaka mayor making an announcement on a factory floor, does not stand in the record searched. Mayor Dave Wood's dated public record in this period is civic in setting — his State of the City address of April 30, 2026, among it — and no factory-floor mayoral announcement of 2024–2026 was found in the press or the city's releases reached. The gap is named rather than filled: its settler is the City of Mishawaka's own press-release file and the South Bend Tribune's city coverage, where such an announcement, if one is made, will first stand in dated form.
Sources:
- Mullen Automotive, Globe Newswire release, June 10, 2025 — the transfer of the 12900 McKinley Highway facility to GEM in satisfaction of a federal court judgment; the plant's General Motors/Hummer H2 origin and its AM General chapter.
- Senator Jim Banks, Instagram post, August 18, 2025 — the Mishawaka Manufacturing Campus tour with Ambassador Yechiel Leiter, the factory floor photographs, and the vehicles' destination with the IDF.
- Office of Senator Todd Young, press release (2023) — the JLTV follow-on contract, worth up to $8.6 billion, with the vehicles built at AM General's Mishawaka Manufacturing Campus.
- City of Mishawaka — Mayor Dave Wood's State of the City address, April 30, 2026, the dated mayoral record against which the factory-floor pattern was tested.