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South Korea has chartered a plane to repatriate hundreds of workers detained by US federal immigration agents after a raid on an electric-car battery factory operated by Korean conglomerates Hyundai and LG.
South Korean officials completed talks with their US counterparts over the release of the workers and the government had dispatched a plane to bring them home, a senior presidential official said in televised remarks on Sunday.
The president had “stressed that our companies’ business activities and our workers’ rights should not be unfairly infringed in the US law enforcement process,” said South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik.
US authorities on Thursday arrested 475 workers at the factory in Georgia, the majority of them South Korean nationals, in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s largest single-site enforcement raid of President Donald Trump’s administration.
The raid has been met with criticism in South Korea. Tensions rose higher on Friday after ICE released a video of Korean workers in yellow vests being shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist during the raid, which involved helicopters, armoured vehicles and heavily armed agents.
On Friday, South Korea’s foreign ministry “expressed regret that this incident happened at a critical time when the two countries should maintain trust and co-operation . . . and especially that the scenes of their detainment were released”.
The raid comes less than two weeks after Lee reiterated his country’s pledge of hundreds of billions of dollars in private and state-backed US investments in an attempt to stave off steep “reciprocal tariffs” from Trump.
In March, Hyundai chair Chung Euisun stood with Trump in the White House to announce that the conglomerate would increase its investments in the US to $21bn between 2025 and 2028.
Hyundai, which operates the Georgia site as a joint venture with LG’s battery division, said last month that it would increase its US investments to $28bn. Its announcement was made on the same day that Lee had a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office.
Asked on Friday about the raid, Trump said that Hyundai “have the right to sell cars and things in our country,” but that the workers “were illegal aliens and ICE was just doing its job”.
Additional reporting by Song Jung-a
