U.S. and South Korean officials worked out a deal for the “voluntary” departures of over 300 workers detained by federal immigration authorities at a Hyundai plant in Georgia.
A total of 330 people — 316 Koreans and 14 foreign nationals — left on the chartered flight home Thursday from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested the workers a week ago during an immigration raid at the electric vehicle battery plant being built in Bryan County, Ga.
According to South Korea’s Foreign Ministry, the flight left Atlanta shortly before noon Thursday and is expected to land in South Korea on Friday afternoon.
The detention of the South Korean nationals teetered on becoming a diplomatic crisis. The raid was unusual because they are rarely caught up in immigration enforcement actions. And images of skilled technicians being arrested and handcuffed shocked South Koreans, according to reporting from left-leaning NPR.
The Foreign Ministry helped arrange their departure, which was delayed while they worked out details of their release, Yonhap News Agency reported.
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun flew to Washington, D.C., earlier this week to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss the terms of the workers’ release.
Hyun said that the U.S. had agreed to transport the workers from a detention facility to the Atlanta airport without handcuffs or other physical restraints. The other was that the workers “will face no problems reentering the United States in the future to work,” Hyun told reporters, per Yonhap News Agency.
One South Korean has chosen to remain. The foreign nationals include 10 Chinese, three Japanese and one Indonesian. Most of the detainees are men, with only 10 women among them, Yonhap reported.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for an overhaul of the U.S. visa system, saying the incident will likely deter Korean companies from future investments in the U.S.
“President Trump had directed that the (detainees) should be allowed to return home freely and those who didn’t want to go didn’t have to,” Myung said in an Associated Press report. “We were told that, because of that instruction, the process was paused and the administrative procedures were changed accordingly.”
During their meeting, Hyun and Rubio also discussed forming a “working group” to improve the visa systems for South Korean businesses, including creating a new visa category to better support their trips and operations in the U.S., Yonhap reported.
“To do that, the State Department and our foreign ministry will establish a working group to create new visas and we have agreed to continue talks swiftly in that regard,” Hyun said.
ICE special agents, in collaboration with federal, state and local law enforcement partners, executed a federal search warrant at the plant on Sept. 4 as part of an active, ongoing criminal investigation. The more than 300 South Koreans were among the total 475 arrested in the raid.
The immigration raid “focused on serious allegations of unlawful employment practices and other potential federal crimes,” ICE said in a news release. The individuals arrested were found to be working illegally, in violation of the terms of their visas and/or statuses.
Hyundai Motor Group began manufacturing EVs a year ago at the $7.6 billion plant, which employs about 1,200 people, the AP reported.
Hyundai Chief Executive Officer José Muñoz said on Thursday the raid will delay the battery plant’s construction by up to three months because it is now short of workers, Bloomberg first reported.
The high-tech factory has been touted as Georgia’s largest economic development project, which Hyundai operates with LG Energy Solutions. South Korean technicians and engineers are needed to get the plant up and running, but after that, American workers will operate it.
In a statement Wednesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s office stressed its “strong relationship with the Republic of Korea and Korean partners like Hyundai, stretching back 40 years to the establishment of Georgia’s trade office in Seoul.”
Initially, President Donal Trump defended the detention of the workers, saying “I would say that they were illegal aliens, and ICE was just doing its job.”
The Associated Press reported that a South Korean Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump had halted the process to hear from South Korea on whether the Koreans should be allowed to stay to continue their work and help train U.S. workers or should be sent back to South Korea.
“Manufacturing is different from the service industry,” Hur Jung, a professor at Sogang University, and president of the Korean Association of Trade and Industry Studies, said in an NPR report.
“It needs not only capital but also a massive amount of labor and skilled technicians. I think that, in its push to reinvigorate manufacturing, the U.S. focused too much on capital, while neglecting the labor part.”
President Myung wasn’t happy about the raid at Hyundai’s auto plant west of Savannah, warning the incident could also jeopardize future investment from South Korea in American manufacturing.
“This could significantly impact future direct investment in the U.S.,” South Korean President Lee Jae Myung warned at a press conference.
