Lawyer: Detained Koreans Had Skills for Short-Term Jobs

A lawyer for several workers detained at a Hyundai factory in Georgia says many of the South Koreans rounded up in the immigration raid are engineers and equipment installers brought in for the highly specialized work of getting an electric battery plant online. Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who represents four of the detained South Korean nationals, tells the AP that many were doing work that is authorized under the B-1 business visitor visa program. They had planned to be in the US for just a couple of weeks and "never longer than 75 days," he says.

• "The vast majority of the individuals that were detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that were South Korean were either there as engineers or were involved in after-sales service and installation," Kuck says.

• The raid Thursday at the battery factory under construction at Hyundai's sprawling auto plant west of Savannah resulted in the detainment of 475 workers, more than 300 of them South Koreans. Some were shown being shackled with chains around their hands, ankles, and waists in video released by ICE.
• South Korea's foreign minister flew to the US on Monday to secure his citizens' return on a charter flight to South Korea.
• President Trump said the workers "were here illegally," and that the US needs to arrange with other countries to have their experts train American citizens to do specialized work such as battery and computer manufacturing.
• Kuck, however, says no company in the US makes the machines that are used in the Georgia battery plant, so they had to come from abroad to install or repair equipment on-site—work that would take about three to five years to train someone in the US to do. "This is not something new," Kuck says. "We've been doing this forever, and we do it—when we ship things abroad, we send our folks there to take care of it."

• A Savannah labor union leader, however, says local unions have complained that Hyundai and its contractors were improperly using South Korean workers for basic construction that falls outside the visa waiver rules. Christi Hulme, president of the Savannah Regional Central Labor Council, says unions believe Korean workers have been pouring cement, erecting steel, performing carpentry, and fitting pipes.
• In South Korea, many people have expressed confusion, shock, and a sense of betrayal at the raid, which came only weeks after South Korea promised to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into US investments as part of a tariff deal, the AP reports.
• Appearing at a legislative hearing before his departure, Foreign Minister Cho Hyun called the raid "a very serious matter" that he hadn't anticipated at all, as many lawmakers lamented the American operation. "If US authorities detain hundreds of Koreans in this manner, almost like a military operation, how can South Korean companies investing in the US continue to invest properly in the future?" said Cho Jeongsik, a lawmaker from the liberal governing Democratic Party. Other lawmakers called for the government to investigate Americans alleged to be working illegally in South Korea.
• Cho told lawmakers that the US had "not responded adequately" to South Korea's requests to expand visas for its workers. Cho said that some of the people detained in Georgia may need to return to the site to complete their work at the factory, and that South Korean officials are negotiating to ensure they can reenter the US. "I will clearly point out to them that a delay in (the factory's) completion would also cause significant losses for the United States," Cho said.