South Korea says it has made a deal with the US to free its workers who were arrested during an immigration raid at a Hyundai-LG battery factory in Georgia.
Kang Hoon-sik, the president’s chief of staff, said that Seoul will send a chartered plane once the U.S. has finished its administrative work, news outlet Yonhap reported.
He also stated that the government will look at visa procedures to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
The two governments are in the middle of critical trade talks when this happens.
According to immigration officials, U.S. investigators arrested 475 people, most of them were South Korean nationals, after a months-long investigation into persons working at the facility without permission.
President Donald Trump supported the move by saying that the people who were arrested were “illegal aliens” and that ICE was “just doing its job.”
As investigators look into claims of visa and work-authorization irregularities, a lot of inmates were moved to a federal detention center in Folkston, Georgia.
LG Energy Solution reported that 47 of its employees and about 250 contractor workers at the joint-venture battery manufacturing were among those who were arrested.
Hyundai said that none of the people who were arrested were its direct employees.
Leaders in Georgia have called the facility a significant investment that would create roughly 1,200 jobs, but the timing of the raid has had people in Seoul worried that it could hurt business.
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