A chartered plane is set to leave South Korea on Wednesday to retrieve hundreds of South Korean nationals detained in an immigration raid on a Hyundai facility in Georgia, though some have indicated they may stay in the United States and fight charges their attorney says are unwarranted.
About 300 South Korean nationals were among the 475 people detained Thursday in a raid by Homeland Security Investigations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal officials on a construction site in the town of Ellabell, where the South Korean companies Hyundai and LG Energy Solution are jointly building a battery plant.
The incident has strained relations between the U.S. and South Korea, a key ally in Asia that has pledged hundreds of billions in U.S. investment as part of tariff negotiations. It has also drawn attention to the difficulties foreign companies face in obtaining U.S. visas for their employees even as President Donald Trump presses them to expand U.S. manufacturing and transfer technology.
The government of Japan, another key U.S. ally, said Tuesday that three Japanese nationals were also among those detained. According to Migrant Equity Southeast, an immigrant rights advocacy group based in Savannah, U.S. officials also detained workers from Guatemala, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador and Venezuela.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said Tuesday that he felt a “profound sense of responsibility” for the safety of South Koreans, extending his “deepest sympathy” to those who “must have been greatly shocked by this sudden incident.”
“I hope that there will never again be an unjust infringement upon the activities of our people and companies in pursuit of the shared development of South Korea and the United States,” Lee, who met with Trump at the White House just weeks before the raid, told a Cabinet meeting.
“Our government will move quickly, through close consultations with the United States, to advance reasonable institutional improvements so that similar cases do not occur again,” he said.
Visa troubles
A spokesperson for Korean Air told NBC News that a chartered plane would leave for Atlanta on Wednesday.
Seoul and Washington are “conducting detailed conversations” to arrange for the detained South Korean nationals to voluntarily return home “as soon as possible,” the South Korean foreign ministry said Tuesday.
Ministry spokesperson Lee Jae-woong said the government was making its “utmost effort” to enable them to leave the U.S. by Wednesday local time, hours after the chartered plane arrives. Because of changes in time zone, the plane will land in the U.S. the same day it leaves South Korea.
“Once all preparations are complete and the departure time is confirmed, we will announce the detailed plan,” Lee said.
The foreign ministry also said it was continuing to work with U.S. officials “to address visa difficulties faced by Korean businesspeople.”
Before the raid last week, the ministry said, there had already been dozens of meetings with members of the U.S. House and Senate, congressional staff and related figures, and officials from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, the federal government and academia. The ministry said it had raised the issue “whenever there were opportunities to meet with key U.S. officials.”
“In particular, we emphasized to major U.S. figures that such visas are essential for the short-term stay of Korean professionals who are needed for the initial operation of factories and for training local staff when our companies expand to the U.S.,” it said in a statement.
Sarah Park, president of the Korean American Coalition, said the detained workers should not be blamed for their visa situation.
“The Hyundai-LG plant required highly specialized subcontractors and technicians to move the project forward,” she said Monday at a news conference in Savannah. “Visas were needed, but they were not granted at the scale required. Everyone from the companies to government leaders understood this reality.”
“When technicians entered the U.S. on a short-term visitors visa to meet urgent need, it was not about individual wrongdoing, but it was about the system that failed to align immigrant policy and economic promises,” she added.
U.S. officials said that those who were detained were working unlawfully and that the raid was the result of a monthslong criminal investigation.
Hyundai, South Korea’s biggest automaker, has said that none of those detained were its direct employees. LG Energy Solution said that 47 of its employees and about 250 workers from partner companies were detained.
The company, which has since instructed its employees to suspend most U.S. business trips, said Tuesday that it was “making active efforts to resolve visa issues in order to ensure smooth overseas assignments for its employees and partner companies.”
LG Energy Solution said that its workers had been at the factory temporarily to offer training and other support for its construction, and that the site had been shut down since their detention.
Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based attorney representing two of the detained South Korean nationals, told NBC News on Monday that they had not yet agreed to fly home on the charter flight.
Kuck said that both men were in the U.S. legally as part of the Visa Waiver Program, which allows tourism or business stays of up to 90 days, and that agreeing to a “voluntary departure” would suggest they had violated the law.
“As soon as they get released, they’re out of here,” he said. “But we want them to maintain the ability to use a visa waiver or get a visa in the future, so we want ICE just to release them with no charges.”
Kuck said he was also now representing three others detained in the raid who were in the U.S. on B-1 visas, which would allow them to conduct business in the country. He declined to identify their home country, but said they were not from South Korea.
“They were blue-collar guys doing exactly what the B-1 authorizes them to do,” he said. “Just like an American would go abroad to report on the Olympics, or they would go abroad to work for meetings at a plant in Germany, this is the exact same thing.”
According to Kuck, his three new clients work in “after-sales and service installation.”
Kuck said the detention of his five clients proved that Homeland Security Investigations “did not do their homework.”
“It seems that HSI got over a little over skis and decided just to arrest everybody and sort it out later,” he said.
Stella Kim reported from Los Angeles, Jennifer Jett from Hong Kong and Dan Gallo from Atlanta.
