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 US immigration raid on a Hyundai Motor car battery factory.
Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said the government had set up a team to respond to Thursday’s arrest of more than 300 Koreans at the facility in the southern state of Georgia, and that he could go to Washington to meet officials if needed.
“I am deeply concerned. I feel heavy responsibility for the arrests of our citizens,” Cho told an emergency government meeting.
The arrest of some 475 workers at the plant near Savannah, part of President Donald Trump’s escalating crackdown on immigrants, was the largest single-site enforcement operation in the US Department of Homeland Security’s history.
“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” Steven Schrank, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in Atlanta, said on Friday. “This has been a multi-month criminal investigation.”
Schrank said that those arrested were “illegally present in the United States” and “working unlawfully”.
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