South Korean workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home
232 comments
·September 7, 2025givemeethekeys
tripletao
What makes you confident they were acting illegally? Here's a US embassy:
> A B-1 visa may be granted to specialized workers going to the United States to install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside of the United States, or to train U.S. workers to perform such services.
https://es.usembassy.gov/visas/commercial-industrial-workers...
Many of those detained have been reported to be employed by Hyundai's equipment vendors. That would be consistent with activities of this nature.
It's probably a coin flip whether a different DHS staffer would agree, though. Interpretation of these rules has always been notoriously inconsistent, and probably explains the problem here.
mattnewton
It’s more exasperation at how ridiculous this process is, treating foreign labor like dangerous criminals by default.
dazilcher
How do you suggest we should treat foreign illegal labor?
jayd16
Like people, maybe? What is the point of treating them like violent criminals other than to dehumanize them? Is it really any more effective than one guy reviewing the payroll and passing out fines until the issues are resolved?
Besides, they haven't been charged with anything so in the US they are considered innocent.
mattnewton
In this case, give them and the company responsible a court summons?
Instead they detained all the Koreans in the building and appear to have used them as a negotiating chip in an upcoming “deal” with the government of South Korea. This is behavior we expect of a banana republic not an allied nation of laws.
ivysly
how about like any other kind
eli_gottlieb
Like the wage-slaves of dangerous criminals.
giraffe_lady
This is easy lol you go after the people benefitting from their labor.
politelemon
Not like dangerous criminals. Not with white gloves. It isn't binary.
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seanmcdirmid
Around 90% of foreigner contractors that come to the USA to set up a factory or do maintenance on a factory are here under weird visa arrangements that the ICE would be able to poke holes in regardless. The right visa doesn’t exist, or impossible to obtain, so he Germans/swiss/japanese/koreans/taiwanese/and Chinese come here on visa waiver or simple B1 visas, or even tourist visas, to get the job the they need done out the way quickly (usually a few days or a week of work). The American visa system for short term work is simply messed up, and it’s much easier to get a visa to do the same thing in China than in the USA (surprise, guess where people decided to set up their factories?). America was really just wink/nudge before (we want you to setup a factory here! But no, we can’t really make the visa situation work out…you know what to do…), but now ICE needs to make their quotas and this is just an easy target for them.
The USA is just a bad place for foreign companies to setup factories: you need an army of immigration lawyers to do it, and be willing spending a lot of time waiting to get the “proper visas” for key personnel. South Korea’s interest in getting those engineers back isn’t just purely empathy based, there are probably only a handful of engineers in Korea that can do what they do (good luck getting that factory going before your term is out, Mr. Trump).
jacquesm
> good luck getting that factory going before your term is out, Mr. Trump
That may well have been the goal in the first place.
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rich_sasha
I haven't been following the story closely, but it is clear the Korean workers broke visa rules? Or do they just look a bit foreign and talk funny?
Even before Trump there were plenty of stories where ICE clearly didn't know their own country's visa rules.
rayiner
The New York Times write-up on this is pretty good: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/georgia-battery-plant-.... This plant was under investigation for a significant time. Some citizens and workers with visas were initially detained, but were released once their documentation was verified. The workers being deported were not Hyundai employees, and it seems clear from the company's response that they were not working in the U.S. legally.
hopelite
I can attest that’s companies, especially large ones will generally know the rules better than the various government agencies and people, precisely because they have an incentive to know, they pay people to know, and there is risk involved. They also usually make a determination that the reward is not only greater than the risk, but greater than the consequences, and they have always been proved correct in that calculation. That especially applies to the executives, the people who immensely profit and effectively never face any, let alone effective consequences, so peoples round them also just keep their heads down and look away or even just facilitate the illegal behaviors in order to brown nose and climb the corporate ladder.
It is somewhat astonishing, but it seems people are baffled when things don’t change even though consequences for corporations and executives are net positive. Why should they care when the c-suite runs off with way more money than before in the end anyways?
Take for example the recent greystar lawsuit by the government for essentially price fixing apartment rents, ie fraud, across the nation. Long story short; estimates are they profited about $2.2 billion every year, the government fined them/agreed to a measly settlement paid to the government; with zero relief or compensation to those they committed their crimes against, nor will the executives that made the illegal decisions suffer any consequences, nor will there be punitive consequences that make executives sit up in attention.
jchip303
[dead]
adolph
> amazing that theres so much sympathy towards giant Korean megacorp
At some level stories are told in a way in which there is a good-guy and a bad-guy and the megacorp drew the good-guy straw this time. It was just a few years ago a Hyundai owned subsidiary was caught in the US employing underage people from Guatemala [0].
0. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
mattnewton
When that happened, did they give the company a court date or did they raid the factory and detain the children? That’s the difference here.
adolph
The article insinuates an unannounced visit:
After Reuters documented the disappearance of the young girl who worked at SMART, a team of state and federal authorities conducted the Aug. 9 inspection at SL, in Alexander City. They discovered seven minors there, including the two Guatemalan brothers, among employees making lights and mirrors for Hyundai and Kia. Alabama’s Department of Labor fined SL and JK USA Inc, a staffing agency, $17,800 each.
bpt3
Why would you give a court date to the company and allow hundreds of people who are presumably in the country illegally to remain free until said court date?
bpt3
People don't want to think about details, they just want to continue to hate on the other team and Hyuandi (and their contractors) doing something that would be illegal in just about every country on earth could interfere with that goal.
eddythompson80
The enemy of my enemy is my friend is a common underpinning of bad faith arguments.
It has been really disheartening seeing a generation of, presumably, leftists abandon decades old demands and movements from local worker protections, global environmental causes, or democratic oversight over ivy league institutes by parroting the same bad arguments their opposition did to them over these decades.
As long as I have been alive, very progressive leftists always argued that ivy league institutions need admission reform. They receive billions from our tax dollars, yet their admission policies have always favored the already wealthy and powerful (the rich, alumnus, donors, "elite"). They only pay lip service to "low income families" while straddling most middle class students in insane levels of debt and refuse to publish admission rates. Progressives have always argued that these organizations cannot exist without public (tax payers) funding and as a result should have democratic oversight and should be required to publish their admission rates. We should be withholding that funding or using it as a forcing function for them to do so. The opposition have always argued (in bad faith) to "leave them alone. Education should be independent and they should do whatever they want". Now that a right-wing administration actually put pressure on them (for reasons I disagree with), every "liberal" I know just jumps on the simplest of arguments that "They should be independent. There shouldn't be any oversight required or expected on these educational institutes. That's illegal.". Whats worst is trying to explain how this is a bad argument just gets you yelled at because you must be a "both sides are the same"-person or a secretly republican or "but we're not talking about admission here. We need to unit against the enemy with one argument then we'll figure it out later once education is not under attack" type BS arguments.
Same for tariffs and global trade rules and all the global environmental destruction, human rights violations, and local economy mayhem they caused. The argument isn't that these laws need to be tightened and reconsidered to reduce our dependency on slave labor or funding massive environmental polluters or not incentivizing the biggest consumer base on the plant to consider the diesel emissions cost of shipping massive contains full of plastic trinkets across the pacific only for 99% of them to end up in a landfill. Suddenly the argument from progressives and the left are all about the economy. The cost of TEMU for the poor American consumer and how this is the world we live in. There is nothing we can or should do to change it.
mattnewton
How we do things matters. The rule of law and due process are important too, a strongman can’t just ignore those, muscle people around to their benefit, and pay lip service to leftist ideals to win over the left.
eddythompson80
Ok.. not really sure what that has to do with what I said. I mentioned nothing about "how we do things". I was only referring to arguments we use for or against things. It's fine to disagree with an action because of "how they are/were done". It's an argument that has thorns of its own, but, again, has nothing to do with what I said.
lokar
For people saying "they should have had the right visa", no one does this.
Any day of the week all of the big tech companies will have dozens of overseas engineers in the US attending meetings, and gasp working on-site (writing code, etc). They all have either tourist visas or visa waivers.
And it's the same thing when the US engineers visit the remote sites in other countries.
Regardless of what the letter of the law is, this has long been the practice, because it's the only workable solution and is clearly within the spirit of the law.
In this case LG was fitting out a new batter factory. That is a very complex setup with highly specialized machines. The ONLY way that was ever going to happen was with LG specialists coming over to do the setup and get the line working. And it's almost certain that getting "correct" visas for all these people would have been practically impossible, and has not been the actual practice for many decades.
general1465
What you are describing - going to a remote site, sort out something with client and going back - is a business meeting and that falls under visa waiver / tourist visa in any country, because the worker who is doing the job is not paid by the local company, but by his employer in his home country.
With this logic it would be illegal to have a vacation and also write a code in a free time.
pylua
Ianal but my understanding is you can’t do any work , even coding, debugging, if you are in the us on a non work visa.
It does not matter who is funding you.
I could be wrong though. I have personally seen companies abuse this. I’m glad it’s be cracked down on.
lokar
I agree, it's probably the law (not just in the US, but most places). But, IME, it's almost universally ignored, and has to be.
I've never worked in fab/manufacturing, but I assume if you buy a bunch of gear from ASML (100s of millions of $), they are going to send a team out to help set it up and get it working for you. How else could that work? Some story for advanced batteries.
And a similar story for large (multi-national) tech/software companies. People need to travel back and forth between sites. Getting "work" visas for these short visits would be impractical.
Why are you happy to see a crack down? How do you think this should work?
nemo44x
I’m guessing they were here on a business/consulting visa and doing more than that but it’s probably been de facto practice for years and hasn’t had issues. And I’m guessing the majority of them have skills in setting a factory up that are difficult to source locally.
dmix
They were flown in under visas to help set up the plant as consultants (at least at one of the plants). I don't think they were intended to continue working there after. Some of the visas were also expired.
The article also says:
> LG Energy Solution said Saturday that 47 of its employees were detained, 46 of them Korean. Another 250 personnel from “equipment partner companies,” most of them Korean, were also being held, it added.
So it seems there were multiple parent companies involved
givemeethekeys
Yeah, it would take a while to train the locals to speak Korean.
nemo44x
Indeed. Likely just a pragmatic thing here that’s always worked. Will likely end up with a new special kind of very short term visa to cover this sort of thing.
nasmorn
Maybe your government is also jeopardizing FDI for some political grandstanding. Then no new visa is needed. Growth simply goes down and less people have health care. Problem solved
givemeethekeys
I sure hope not.
If they want to do business here, then they should be forced to hire here and train as needed and that includes teaching people their preferred ways of communicating.
bluedino
I like how the blame for everything gets deflected to the contracting company. Like Hyundai had no idea what was going on.
Similar things happen with stuff like workplace safety. "Shouldn't that guy be strapped into that lift?" No, he's with xxxx, they don't follow any rules. You can turn them in but nobody cares.
rasz
> freed and flown home
thats called _deported_
tibbydudeza
They were LG Chem workers to set up the battery manufacturing plant at the Hyundai facility - the paperwork was not filed correctly - LG probably did this a few times already as practice - the workers are in a compound situation and don't interact with the locals.
Somebody snitched no doubt.
eunos
There's a Georgian TikTok user that is claimed snitching them. Heard also that she's running for office.
Shank
Do you have any information about this happening in the past, or the "compound situation" etc?
ocdtrekkie
Seems like the sort of thing our administration really wants to discourage, right? Definitely should deport those folks trying to... move manufacturing to America.
cmxch
[flagged]
ajross
Isn't "freed and flown home" the same thing as "deported"? These were routine professionals doing a job they took in good faith under rules and norms that have held for a century or more.
gruez
>Federal and immigration agents arrested 475 people on Thursday — mostly South Korean nationals — while executing a judicial search warrant as part of a criminal investigation into alleged unlawful employment at the facility.
> ...
>South Korea will “push forward measures to review and improve the residency status and visa system for personnel travelling to the United States.”
The implication seems to be that the workers didn't have authorization to work there.
ajross
> The implication seems to be that the workers didn't have authorization to work there.
No one ever does, by that standard. In the US, if you're a professional coming in to do some short-term thing, there's no visa process. You just fly in and get the stamp in your passport, which is technically treated as a "waiver of visa". Then you do your job and go home.
Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing. Where's the "authorization"?
gruez
>Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing. Where's the "authorization"?
Something tells me that working at a factory, even for "training" purposes is very different than attending a conference. Wikipedia confirms this:
>There are restrictions on the type of employment-related activities allowed. Meetings and conferences in relation to the travelers' profession, line of business or employer in their home country are generally acceptable, but most forms of "gainful employment" are not. There are however poorly-classifiable exceptions such as persons performing professional services in the United States for a non-U.S. employer, and persons installing, servicing and repairing commercial or industrial equipment or machinery pursuant to a contract of sale.[26] Performers (such as actors and musicians) who plan on performing live or taping scenes for productions in their country of origin, as well as athletes participating in an athletic event, are likewise not allowed to use the VWP for their respective engagements and are instead required to have an O or P visa prior to arrival. Foreign media representatives and journalists on assignment are required to have a nonimmigrant media (I) visa.[27]
lars_francke
That is not true.
There is a process, it's usually tedious but it exists. I did it for Singapore, the US and Israel. They mostly took multiple months but I never wanted to take any chances. For the US it was a "B-1 in lieu of H-1B" visa for example.
Attending a conference is something different than what these workers did. There are rules around what a "business trip" is and what is not and what "work" is.
abcd_f
> Like, have you every flown somewhere to attend a conference and a meeting? Same thing.
I flew to an expo where our company had a booth and the US border patrol took me aside and started asking if I'd be selling things there or working at the booth in some other form. I told them that I am a tech going to see other companies' stuff. They then discussed something between themselves for 10 minutes and let me pass. This was 20 years ago, so them being picky is certainly not a new thing.
nemo44x
I’m guessing they were doing that or similar but doing more than is scoped for that. And everyone has probably been doing this for a long time for short term specialist tasks, so it’s industry practice now.
wombatpm
This administration is taking people who dutifully show up for court hearings as part of their asylum claims and shipping them back to their country of origin.
To make it worse, they are sending their confidential asylum paperwork to the country directly.
The South Koreans are lucky they are being sent to the correct Korea.
Discordian93
"Deported" now seems to be an euphemism for being sent to a concentration camp in a random third world country, so I guess they have to use different language for actual deportations.
joezydeco
The one detail I can't seem to find anywhere was what type of visa these SK nationals used to enter the US, and if they overstayed.
This isn't exactly new territory. A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
ghaff
As a tech person, I've never had trouble entering Europe from the US to go to a conference or whatever but I'd be very careful with respect to honorariums or expenses being covered for speaking, etc., which I have heard of people getting in trouble over. (Of course, some countries do have explicit requirements for business-related visits.)
dmix
Every country is careful with rules like that. The main difference is the US has been the #1 destination for almost everyone in the world to work/live for decades, so it's a major supply/demand issue that border guards have to deal with. People often compare it to European countries. Random countries that are people's 15th choice to immigrate, where they don't need to try as hard with enforcement. Or at least didn't until recently, since Europe also began experiencing American-southern border style immigration issues.
BurningFrog
South Koreans, like most developed countries, get an automatic 90 day B-1 "visa waiver" visa when entering.
fsckboy
some had no visas, some had tourist visas, some had expired visas
firesteelrain
Well this extra context makes what ICE did totally understandable. I would expect any country to do the same.
ajross
> The one detail I can't seem to find anywhere was what type of visa these SK nationals used to enter the US, and if they overstayed.
Because there is no visa process for short term professional work in the US, and never has been.
> A lot of countries are very careful to avoid letting you in on a tourist visa if you give off the appearance of entering to work.
That's just wrong. Virtually the entirety of the professional world travels around between industrial countries on tourist visas. Otherwise anyone going to a trade show is an "illegal" at risk of deportation.
detaro
There's work and work. Most "tourist" visa will cover things like attending conferences or tradeshows, meetings with a different branch of your employer or customers etc, but on the other side more dedicated work, conference talks you are compensated for, ... can quickly be treated differently.
And if you don't come from a preferred part of the world even the former can quickly be quite a process to prove it.
ehnto
That is my impression of travelling to the US right now. Non zero risk of baseless detainment and deportation, and a non zero risk of being sent to a different country than the one you live in.
No thanks. I'll stream the conference online.
metrix
I don't quite understand what happened other than "deported by ICE".
sb8244
The article makes it sound as if there were govt negotiations to have them sent home. It is light on details though, but with that many people of a friendly nation / corporation I imagine they get treated differently.
I interpreted that to mean they may not have permanent US immigration issues vs "being deported".
fsckboy
the national debate and evolving policies wrt deportations the past year has focused on:
1. getting those with criminal records depoarted and not allowed back (a fair number of whom have been depoted and have violated the ban on returning)
2. getting those who've wished to settle and work jobs to leave voluntarily by buying them plane tickets and giving them cash stipends and not barring their reentry in the future
These Koreans who came to Georgia on behalf of their company will probably not have their tickets paid for by the US nor get the stipend, so yes, they are treated differently as you suggest.
after the surprise arrests executing the judicial warrant, the Korean company and government stepped forward and expressed a commitment to helping these workers, which occurred without negotiation, although you could call the flurry of phone calls after that negotiations, it was probably more like "Q; what do we need to do" "A: you need to bring them home". neither country nor the companies involved is looking to disturb relations, though perhaps this is adjacent to a tariff negotiation.
dfxm12
"Deported" has several meanings, especially in recent context for deportees from the USA. One can be deported to a detention facility in a country one has no ties to, for example. This unfortunately has happened often enough that it is important to distinguish exactly which flavor of deportation is happening...
rayiner
> One can be deported to a detention facility in a country one has no ties to, for example.
You're only sent to a third country if you insist on not being deported back to your home country.
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treetalker
Before IIRIRA in 1996, US immigration law had separate processes for deportation and exclusion. Since then, we have a single, unified process called removal. So technically deportation no longer exists. It is more proper to say that someone is being removed.
SanjayMehta
It’s a language issue.
When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
I suspect the subtle difference was not understood by the Koreans.
A shoddy way and shortsighted to deal with companies which are investing in your country.
bitcurious
> I suspect the subtle difference was not understood by the Koreans.
Why would you suspect that a company flying in hundreds of laborers can’t afford a lawyer to give the same guidance your HR company gave? It’s tax evasion and cost cutting.
jacquesm
When I was much younger I was sent 'onsite' regularly to set up machinery that had been made by the company I worked for. This is still pretty common in anything related to industry because you're just simply not going to be able to train a local to troubleshoot/install a machine that they have no clue about. Some of this stuff takes years to become familiar with.
xadhominemx
It’s not a language issue - it’s because a quirk in US immigration law means South Koreans are not eligible for the E-2 visa, and are stuck competing for capped categories like the H-1B.
A group of house reps have been trying to fix this issue since 2012, but have never gotten it through committee.
gruez
>It’s a language issue.
>When I first started travelling to the US, I was carefully coached by US HR and Legal to say I was on “business” as in meetings, and not “work.”
Were you actually there for "meetings"? or actually doing stuff like writing reports?
Jach
At a former US job of mine, for a US headquartered company, I (a US citizen) was told similarly for my trips to Canada. I don't think it was by HR or legal though, it was either an older team member or one of the managers. But they reiterated that when I would occasionally travel to our Canadian office where half my team was, I should say I was there for meetings and I was not managing anyone. (I don't know what our team's manager said if they asked on the latter bit.) The primary purpose was of course meetings (and meeting artifacts), and it was never longer than a week, though my layman understanding would still call that "work", and in any case I'd have my work-issued general purpose computer with me. But this phrasing is all just to get past border control with minimum fuss and just my passport (card). I highly doubt in this particular post's case the problem is a "language issue".
On a conference trip to Italy, they basically asked me nothing. "Where are you going? Ok, next." Hardly any security either. You even had to walk through a gift shop to get to the customs area. It was nice.
__turbobrew__
Almost everyone I know who goes to the USA for “business meetings” on a b-1 actually works while in the US whether it be coding, report writing, consulting for money, professional services, etc…
SanjayMehta
That’s for me to know and you to wonder.
Trust me, no one in my role thought travelling once a quarter through EWR was a privilege. Haven’t had to visit for ten years and will never have to again, thank goodness.
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null
I find it amazing that theres so much sympathy towards giant Korean megacorp here.
“Oh, maybe they got mixed up with the visa because language”. No they did not.
“Oh, maybe it’s really difficult to find local talent”. No it isn’t. Not for them.
There are many advantages for them to illegally fly in a whole Workforce. That is why they did it.
“