A whopping 475 people, mostly South Korean citizens of suspected illegal status, were detained following the federal raid of a Hyundai electric car manufacturing site in Georgia.
The raid was the “largest single site enforcement operation” in the history of Homeland Security Investigations, said Steven Schrank, the head Georgia official of the agency. The operation was the culmination of a months-long investigation into the hiring of “hundreds of illegal aliens.”
The detained individuals have not yet been charged with crimes, according to Schrank, who added that an investigation is ongoing. The identity of the “actual company or contractor hiring the illegal aliens is currently unknown,” wrote the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote in a court filing Thursday.
The Hyundai build site is distinguished as Georgia’s heftiest economic development project, according to Governor Brian Kemp and other state officials. It currently employs about 1200 people, and began making electric vehicles about a year ago.
Remarkably, this very plant was the one in which former President Joe Biden’s administration invested $5 billion as part of an effort to create “more than 8000 new American jobs.”
Schrank explained to journalists in Savannah that while some of the detained workers were living in the U.S. illegally, others had arrived legally, but had expired visas, or visa prohibitions on work in the country.
South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Saturday that South Korean detainees from the Hyundai plant numbered over 300, among a total of 475 people detained.
“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks, and put them on buses,” Schrank said. “This has been a multimonth criminal investigation where we have developed evidence and conducted interviews, gathered documents and presented that evidence to the court in order to obtain a judicial search warrant.”
The majority of detainees were transported to an immigration detention center in Folkston, Georgia, close to the Florida state line.Koreans are rarely targeted in U.S. immigration operations. During a year-long period from 2023 to 2024, only 46 of 270,000 deported illegal immigrants were Korean.
