This is an outrageous story among outrageous stories of Trump's secret police.
Just before noon local time on Sept. 11, more than 300 South Korean nationals took off on a Korean Air flight from Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
[...]
The workers had been detained for nearly a week following a sweeping Sept. 4 immigration raid at the HL-GA battery plant currently under construction near Savannah.
[...]
About 475 people were arrested in one of the largest immigration raids during Donald Trump's presidency. Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, a Georgia-based civil rights organization, said other detained workers were from China, Japan, Guatemala, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador and Venezuela.
[...]
The South Korean foreign minister said in a Sept. 10 X post that he sought assurances that the detained workers would be allowed to promptly return to South Korea without being physically restrained. U.S. immigration authorities routinely handcuff and shackle immigrants on deportation flights.
[...]
President Trump had offered to let the South Korean workers stay in the United States, hoping they would train American employees, South Korean officials said. The offer apparently delayed the workers' departure by a day. Only one of the Korean workers decided to stay in America.
[...]
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun met Sept. 10, where Rubio said the United States welcomed South Korean investments in the country and sought to "deepen cooperation on this front," according to Tommy Pigott, a principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department.
USA Today
The plant is part of a 2022 agreement between Hyundai and the state of Georgia to build the company’s first U.S. factory dedicated to manufacturing batteries and electric vehicles. The immigration raid has stopped construction of the 2,900-acre EV battery plant that is expected to employ up to 8,500 people, CNN reported.
South Korean leaders, including President Lee Jae Myung, have denounced the raid, calling it "unjust infringements on the activities of our people and businesses."
[...]
When PolitiFact asked about their status, the Department of Homeland Security did not answer the question. Steven Schrank, a special agent in charge of Homeland Security investigations in Georgia and Alabama, said at a Sept. 5 press conference that the arrested workers crossed the U.S. border illegally, violated or overstayed their visas, or had entered the United States under a visa waiver program that prohibited them from working.
[...]
The business activities permitted under a B-1 visa include consulting with business associates, attending conventions or conferences, and negotiating contracts.
[...]
B-1 visa holders cannot work full-time jobs in the United States, and they cannot be paid by a U.S. company.
People coming to the United States on a B-1 visa for those purposes must further have unique skills that are considered necessary for a company to fulfill a contract’s obligations. Visa holders can’t perform any assembly or construction work, for example, but they can supervise or train workers to do that work.
[...]
B-1 visa holders can also enter the United States "to install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside the United States or to train U.S. workers to perform such services," according to a State Department manual about B visas.
[...]
South Korea’s foreign ministry said it has told U.S. officials about difficulties its nationals face to get visas.
"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.," the foreign ministry said in a statement to NBC News.
[...]
Immigration lawyer Charles Kuck told PolitiFact he is representing 12 of the detained people, some of whom are Korean. He said some of his clients entered the United States using either a business visa or the visa waiver program that South Korea participates in. These programs allow people to legally enter the country for a limited time and perform specific business activities. But people can’t work or be paid by U.S. companies while under these immigration statuses.
Kuck said his Korean clients had been in the United States for no more than 45 days, an allowable period of time under these programs.
Kuck also told The Associated Press that the South Korean workers are engineers and specialized equipment installers who were helping set up or repair equipment at the joint plant for Hyundai and LG Energy Solution. The plant will manufacture electric vehicle batteries, which require machines that are not made in the United States, according to Kuck. Kuck added that it would take three to five years to train U.S. workers to install or repair the plant’s equipment, which is why workers have to travel from abroad to install or repair the plant’s equipment.
[...]
Immigration officials gave the detainees two options, accept deportation with a five-year reentry ban, or stand a monthslong trial while remaining in detention, according to Yonhap, a South Korean news agency.
Politifact
We've seen forcing detainees to drink like dogs before. In "Alligator Alcatraz". Trump's gestapo would have been at home in Auschwitz.
From a Korean publication:
The US could have resolved this visa issue diplomatically by giving Korea advance notice as an ally. Yet, the crackdown — complete with helicopters and armored vehicles, as if to gleefully flaunt their power — can only be explained as a political performance.
[...]
The Department of Homeland Security boasted that the raid was “the largest single-site enforcement operation in [its] history,” and Immigration and Customs Enforcement even brazenly released footage of the operation — which clearly risks human rights violations — as if to flaunt these arrests as their achievement.
[...]
While many would have you believe that the fiasco involving over 300 Korean workers being arrested and detained by US immigration authorities has been resolved by allowing the workers to “voluntarily depart” back to Korea, this is far from the truth. Korea as a nation was deeply shocked to witness our workers, who had traveled to the US to work at the request of American investors, shackled at their hands and feet with chains. This barbaric incident will leave a lasting stain on Korea-US relations.
The mass arrests are undoubtedly a wake-up call, a major rupture that opens our eyes to what is happening in the US at this moment. We must heed this warning to close the loopholes and traps in our investment projects with the US.
[...]
To understand what’s at the core of this situation, we must revisit the “Make America Great Again” movement championed by US President Donald Trump. MAGA represents a reactionary movement by white evangelical forces seeking to revert America to a time before the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Its core supporters are low-income, poorly educated white Americans and evangelical Protestants. [...] Trump has incited them to channel their anger toward the established elite and “outsiders,” such as people of color, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims.
[...]
His slogan of “Make America Great Again” would be phrased more accurately as “Make White America Great Again.” His insistence on imposing a 50% tariff specifically on steel and aluminum stems from the fact that white, Protestant populations are concentrated in the American Rust Belt.
[...]
This incident should prompt us in Korea to comprehensively reassess our investment projects in the US. We agreed to a tariff deal during a transitional period when President Lee Jae Myung had just taken office. Trump’s aggressive tactics forced us to follow Japan’s lead, but we must now take a cold, hard look at the specifics of what we agreed to. The US made outrageous demands on Japan: execute US$550 billion in investments within Trump’s term, provide funds within 45 days if Trump orders it, and hand over 50%-90% of profits to the US. Reports say the US is now making identical demands of us.
Following the footsteps of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy and a quasi-reserve currency nation, could poison our own economy. Rather than yielding to America’s unreasonable demands to avert an immediate crisis, the government must clearly distinguish what we can and cannot do and negotiate with the US.
[...]
Declining industries inevitably relocate to emerging nations over time. Even in Korea, we face difficulties in reviving such industries. How much more challenging would it be for the US, where production costs are at least 30% higher than ours, and over two decades of hollowing-out in manufacturing have collapsed the industrial ecosystem? Trump is dreaming a delusional fantasy of using imperial might to forcibly mobilize allies and reverse this trend. To make matters worse, treating allied workers who are trying their best to assist in realizing this pipe dream as if they are slaves of a vassal state will jeopardize even those projects that had some potential. We’re currently watching the US foolishly shoot itself in the foot.
Hankyoreh
You think they're coming back?US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau on Sunday expressed regret over the recent detention of hundreds of South Korean workers in Georgia.
Landau, in Seoul for a Korea-US vice foreign ministerial meeting, said that the 316 South Koreans who returned home Friday on a chartered jet after being detained in Georgia will face no disadvantage when re-entering the US, according to South Korea’s foreign ministry.
Bloomberg
UPDATE 08:59 am:
UPDATE 09/17/2025:
Labor policy analyst Sam Peak: “It's now clear that the Hyundai immigration raid was an operational mistake. A big reason why this mistake happened is because the agents who raided this plant have no experience in worksite enforcement. They previously worked on high priority counter-terrorism and child sex trafficking cases, but were reassigned to work on these low priority enforcement cases to help boost the administration's deportation numbers.”
“Because these agents did not know what they were doing, they arrested hundreds of Koreans who were legally authorized to help install equipment at the Hyundai plant in what became the largest raid in US history. Meanwhile, cases involving terror threat investigations, child trafficking, and other transnational crimes are being deprioritized.”
Meidas Touch
