South Korea Says Over 300 Workers Detained In ICE Raid Released Before Flight Home

In a news conference marking 100 days in office, Lee Jae Myung called for improvements in the U.S. visa system.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s president said Thursday that Korean companies will likely hesitate to make further investments in the United States unless Washington improves its visa system for their employees, as U.S. authorities released hundreds of workers who were detained from a Georgia factory site last week.

In a news conference marking 100 days in office, Lee Jae Myung called for improvements in the U.S. visa system as he spoke about the Sept. 4 immigration raid that resulted in the arrest of more than 300 South Korean workers at a battery factory under construction at Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant in Georgia.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry later confirmed that U.S. authorities have released the 330 detainees – 316 of them Koreans – and that they were being transported by buses to Atlanta where they will board a charter flight scheduled to arrive in South Korea on Friday afternoon.

The massive roundup in Georgia, and U.S. authorities’ release of video showing some workers being chained and taken away, sparked widespread anger and a sense of betrayal in South Korea. The raid came less than two weeks after a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Lee, and just weeks after the countries reached a July agreement that spared South Korea from the Trump administration’s highest tariffs, but only after Seoul pledged $350 billion in new U.S. investments.

Lawmakers from both Lee’s liberal Democratic Party and the conservative opposition decried the detentions as outrageous and heavy-handed, while South Korea’s biggest newspaper compared the raid to a “rabbit hunt” executed by U.S. immigration authorities in a zeal to meet an alleged White House goal of 3,000 arrests a day.