On Thursday afternoon, a Korean Air flight carrying more than 300 South Korean workers who’d been previously detained by U.S. immigration officials left Atlanta for South Korea. The flight ended a weeklong diplomatic tussle between the United States and the South Korean government that began when ICE officials raided a Hyundai-LG battery factory in Savannah, Georgia, and arrested nearly 500 people including hundreds of South Korean nationals.
The Trump administration’s obsessive focus on mass deportations is undermining its larger political agenda.
The ICE raid, which came just 11 days after President Donald Trump sat down with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, is having far-reaching implications — and is a glaring example of how the Trump administration’s obsessive focus on mass deportations is undermining its larger political agenda.
Homeland Security officials boasted that the Hyundai raid was the “largest single-site enforcement operation” in the agency’s history. But, not surprisingly, in South Korea the detentions were met with outrage from across the country’s political spectrum.
South Korea is reportedly the largest foreign direct investor in the United States and the country’s sixth largest trading partner. As part of a recently reached trade deal, South Korea agreed to invest $350 billion in the U.S. to help revitalize the country’s manufacturing sector.
Yet that pledge didn’t exempt South Korea from the machinations of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
It wasn’t even so much that the South Korean workers were detained — it was how they were detained. ICE officials released videos of the workers with shackles on their arms and feet. “Is this any way for the US to treat an ally?” asked the left-leaning South Korean news outlet Hankyoreh, while the country’s most prominent conservative outlet, Chosun Ilbo, labeled the raid a “merciless arrest operation … that cannot happen between allies.”
These were workers with visas that allowed them to be in the United States, but the ICE videos made it appear that they were nothing more than common criminals. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Seoul’s foreign ministry said the Trump administration wanted to transport the workers in handcuffs but yielded when South Korea objected that they weren’t criminals.
President Lee has suggested that the raid is creating a “very confusing” situation for Korean companies and may lead some to question whether they should be doing business in the United States.
That’s already happening. Korean companies are freezing travel to the United States and recalling staff over concerns about new raids.
But of far greater significance, South Korean businesses have suspended at least 22 U.S. projects in the United States, many of them geared toward opening new manufacturing facilities.
South Korean engineering companies are frequently hired by American companies to set up new manufacturing facilities because it can be difficult to find American workers with the necessary skills.
But once that initial work is done, U.S. employees work the factory floors. The Hyundai-LG facility in Georgia is supposed to employ 8,500 workers. Now, all of that is on hold. Multiply that disruption across nearly two dozen factories, and potentially hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs could be affected.
Korean companies are freezing travel to the United States and recalling staff over concerns about new raids.
Part of the challenge for South Korean companies is that they have struggled to get long-term visas for their employees to enter and work in the United States. Indeed, many of those who were picked up may have been bending visa rules, but rather than look for ways to resolve this issue, the Trump administration sent ICE in.
According to a spokesman for the South Korean foreign ministry, since Trump’s inauguration, it reached out 52 times to administration officials regarding visas for highly skilled workers — but to no avail. According to Jenny Town, director of the Korea program at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, “the longer this situation goes on, the less likely [South Korean] companies will want to bring their employees into the United States. It’s completely self-defeating for what the Trump administration has been lobbying other countries to do as far as investing in the U.S.” While the repatriation of the South Korean workers is an essential first step, the Trump administration is making little effort to smooth things over with Seoul. When the South Korean foreign minister met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this week, the State Department readout made no mention of the LG raid. Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, even went so far as to claim that the raid is “a great opportunity for us to make sure that all companies are reassured that when you come to the United States, you’ll know what the rules of the game are.” Suffice it to say, that is not the view in South Korea. It’s not hard to imagine that other countries looking to invest in the United States will look at what happened in Georgia and decide that the risk to their workers is not worth it. But there are also larger political implications as well. According to Town, polling in South Korea ahead of the Trump-Lee summit showed little public support for the trade deal with the United States, with many asking, “What does South Korea get out of it?” Those views have metastasized since the LG raid. These events put “greater and greater pressure on Lee’s presidency,” said Town, “and give him less political space to address the U.S. bilateral relationship.” Moreover, the U.S. is South Korea’s largest foreign direct investment destination. “Much of that,” says Town, “may be in jeopardy.” The Trump administration is making little effort to smooth things over with Seoul. Or more directly, the Trump administration’s moves to increase manufacturing jobs are taking a back seat to the laser-like focus on deporting as many people as possible. It’s hard to separate the zealousness of the LG-Hyundai raid from the White House diktat, per deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, that ICE meet a quota of three thousand arrests a day. In fact, Tori Branum, a MAGA congressional candidate in Georgia, is taking credit for tipping off ICE about the alleged issues at the LG-Hyundai plant. For wannabe MAGA politicians, pointing the finger at potential immigration violations takes precedence over the creating jobs and growing the economy. This is the political bind in which Trump and his supporters have put themselves. They have placed mass deportation at the top of the president’s agenda and seem utterly indifferent to the consequences of that decision. It’s bad enough that ICE is creating a climate of fear across America — though that’s not something that upsets the White House. But the obsessive focus on a never-ending cycle of deportations is undermining one of the country’s key bilateral relationships and undercutting Trump’s stated aim of rebuilding American manufacturing.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
