Almost 500 people were detained Thursday in an immigration raid at a new Hyundai manufacturing complex in Georgia.
The massive raid highlights growing tensions between President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, his tariff-fueled trade negotiations, and his promise to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
“This was the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of Homeland Security Investigations,” said Steven Schrank, a special agent in charge of the agency’s Atlanta investigations, at a press conference, according to the Associated Press.
Schrank said 475 people were arrested, most of them South Korean nationals. He added that those detained had either crossed the border illegally, overstayed their visas, or were under a visa waiver program that kept them from being able to work. However, The Wall Street Journal reports that some of those arrested were LG Energy Solution employees who were in the U.S. on business travel.
South Korea’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lee Jaewoong was quick to criticize the raid.
“The business activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed in the process of U.S. law enforcement,” Lee said in a televised statement, according to the AP.
The raid comes months after the U.S. and South Korea finally reached an agreement following tense trade talks. Earlier this summer, the two sides agreed to impose a 15% tariff on South Korean imports in exchange for $350 billion in promised investments in the U.S.
Trump has repeatedly used the threat of tariffs to pressure foreign governments and corporations into pledging more investments in the United States. Companies like Apple and OpenAI have all committed billions in recent months, hoping to secure favorable treatment from the administration. Hyundai also recently promised to increase its U.S. investments to $26 billion.
Despite this, the raid specifically targeted the construction site of a new EV battery plant, a joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solution. The upcoming factory is near a separate $7.6 billion Hyundai EV-manufacturing complex in Georgia that officials have called the largest manufacturing project in the state’s history. Hyundai has said the EV complex is expected to create 8,500 jobs by 2031.
Hyundai did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo. However, HL-GA Battery Company, the joint venture with LG Energy Solution, told the AP that it is cooperating with authorities and has paused construction at the plant in the meantime.
The halting of the factory’s construction comes at a bad time when manufacturing jobs in the U.S. continue to shrink. The U.S. unemployment rate went up to 4.3% in August, its highest level since 2021, according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manufacturing jobs, specifically, fell by 12,000 jobs last month and are down 78,000 over the past year.
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