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South Korean President Lee Jae Myung ordered all-out efforts on Saturday to respond to the arrests of hundreds of the nation’s citizens in a United States immigration raid on a Hyundai Motor car battery factory.
Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said the government has set up a team to respond to Thursday’s arrest of over 300 Koreans at the facility in the southern state of Georgia and that he may go to Washington to meet with officials if needed.
“We are deeply concerned and feel a heavy sense of responsibility over this matter,” Cho said.
The arrest of some 475 workers at the plant near Savannah — part of US President Donald Trump’s escalating crackdown on immigrants — was the largest single-site enforcement operation in the US Department of Homeland Security’s history.
Homeland Security officials said the workers arrested at the Ellabell, Georgia, site were barred from working in the US after crossing the border illegally or overstaying visas.
The investigation took place over several months, Steven Schrank, special agent in charge of investigations for Georgia, said during a press briefing.
“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” he said. “This has been a multi-month criminal investigation.”
The raid stemmed from a “criminal investigation into allegations of unlawful employment practices and serious federal crimes” at the Hyundai Motor-LG Energy Solution joint venture plant in the town of Ellabell, Schrank told reporters on Friday.
A Hyundai Motor spokesperson said none of the people detained were employed directly by the automaker and that it was “closely monitoring” the situation at the Georgia construction site and “working to understand the specific circumstances”.
The company said its chief manufacturing officer for North America, Chris Susock, would “assume governance of the entire megasite in Georgia”.
“We will conduct an investigation to ensure all suppliers and their subcontractors comply with all laws and regulations. Hyundai has zero tolerance for those who don’t follow the law,” it said.
LG Energy Solution said it was “gathering all relevant details” and would “fully cooperate with the relevant authorities”.
Schrank said most of the 475 people now being held at a Georgia detention facility are South Korean nationals. Korean media has put the number of South Koreans detained at roughly 300 people.
Social media video showed a man wearing a vest with the letters HIS, an acronym for Homeland Security Investigations, telling workers in yellow safety vests: “We have a search warrant for the whole site. We need construction to cease immediately. We need all work to end on the site right now.”
The US Department of Justice in a statement said several people tried to flee during the raid and some had to be fished out of a sewage pond on the site.
South Korea had already urged Washington to respect the rights of its citizens before Cho’s comments on Saturday.
“The economic activities of our investors and the legitimate rights and interests of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed in the course of US law enforcement,” foreign ministry spokesperson Lee Jae-woong said on Friday.
South Korea, Asia’s fourth-biggest economy, is a key automaker and electronics producer with multiple plants in the United States.
Its companies have invested billions of dollars to build factories in the United States in a bid to access the US market and avoid tariff threats from Trump.
The South Korean president met Trump during a visit last month, and Seoul pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in US investment in July.
Trump has promised to revive the manufacturing sector in the United States, while also vowing to deport millions of undocumented migrants.
