Hundreds detained in the first economic development project in Georgia

Steven Schrank, the main agent of the Georgia of Internal Security Investigations, said on Friday at a press conference that the RAID results from a one -month investigation into allegations of illegal hiring on the site and was the “biggest site application operation” in the history of two decades of the agency.

Thursday’s raid has targeted one of the most important manufacturing sites and the highest level of Georgia, where Hyundai Motor Group started a year ago, started making electric vehicles in a factory of $ 7.6 billion. The site employs approximately 1,200 people in an area at around 40 miles (40 kilometers) west of Savannah where room communities are bleeding in farms. Governor Brian Kemp and other officials presented him as the largest economic development project in the state.

The agents have concentrated their operation on an adjacent factory which is still under construction during which Hyundai has teamed up with LG Energy Solution to produce batteries that electricity electricity.

The judicial files submitted this week indicated that the prosecutors do not know who hired what he called “hundreds of illegal foreigners”. The identity of “the company or the real entrepreneur who hires illegal extraterrestrials is currently unknown,” wrote the American prosecutor’s office in a judicial file on Thursday.

The South Korean government expresses “concern”

The South Korean government has expressed “the concern and the regrets” of the operation targeting its citizens.

Koreans are rarely taken in the application of immigration to other nationalities. According to immigration and customs application, only 46 Koreans were expelled during the 12 -month period which ended on September 30, 2024.

“The commercial activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals should not be unjustly raped in the process of the American police,” said the spokesman for the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lee Jaewoong, in a television statement in Seoul.

Lee said the ministry sent diplomats from his embassy to Washington and the Consulate in Atlanta to the site and plans to form a response team.

Immigration lawyer Charles Kuck said that two of his detained customers had arrived from South Korea as part of a visa renunciation program that allows them to travel for tourism or business for 90 days or less stays without obtaining a visa.

One of its customers, he said, has been in the United States for a few weeks, while the other has been in the country for about 45 days. He did not provide details on the type of work they were doing, but said they had planned to go home soon.

Schrank told Journalists to Savannah that some of the workers owned illegally crossed the American border, others had entered the country legally but had expired visas or had entered into a waiver of the visa which prohibited them from working. He said that some of the detained people worked for the battery manufacturer, while others were employed by entrepreneurs and subcontractors on the construction site.

Schrank said he didn’t know precisely how many 475 prisoners were Korean nationals, but that they were a majority. No one has yet been charged with crimes, he said, but the investigation is underway.

“It was not an immigration operation where the agents entered the premises, gathered people and put them on buses,” said Schrank. “This is a criminal investigation of several months where we have drawn up evidence and conducted interviews, collected documents and presented these elements of evidence in court in order to obtain a mandate of judicial search.”

He said most of the detainees were taken to an immigration detention center in Folkston, Georgia, near the Florida State Line.

The Trump administration has undertaken scanning ice operations

President Donald Trump’s administration has undertaken radical ice operations as part of a mass expulsion program. Immigration agents have descended on farms, construction sites, restaurants and automotive repair workshops.

The PEW Research Center, citing data from the preliminary census office, says the American workforce has lost more than 1.2 million immigrants from January to July. This includes people who are illegally in the country as well as legal residents.

Friday, the Democratic Party of Georgia condemned the raid, with his chair, Charlie Bailey, calling the raids, “tactics of politically motivated fear designed to terrorize people who work hard to live, power of our economy and contribute to the communities of Georgia they have made of their house.”

Kemp and other Republican officials of Georgia, who had courted Hyundai and celebrated the opening of the electric vehicle factory, published on Friday saying that all employers in the state were to respect the law.

The Hyundai site is on 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) in a largely rural area of ​​Bryan County, attracting workers from several surrounding counties and communities, including Savannah.

Tanya Cox, a resident of Ellabelll, who lives less than one mile from the Hyundai site, said that she had no bad feelings towards Korean nationals or other immigrant workers on the site. But few neighbors were employed there, and had the impression that more construction jobs in the battery plant should have gone to local residents.

“I do not see how it has brought a lot of jobs to our community or to neighboring communities,” said Cox. “Where we heard birds touching and animal life here, now we hear the plant when it goes fully at night.”

Hyundai began producing electric vehicles on the site last September. A few months later, the executive president of Hyundai Motor Group, Euisun Chung, during an appearance at the White House, Trump attributed to the president the decision of the company to create more American jobs by building an EV factory in Georgia.

“Our decision to invest in Savannah, in Georgia, creating more than 8,500 American jobs, was launched at my meeting with President Trump in Seoul in 2019,” Chung said at the March event.

The battery plant should open next year

The battery plant operated by HL-GA Battery Co., a joint venture by Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, is expected to open its doors next year.

In a search warrant and related affidavits, the agents said they wanted employment files for current and old workers; personnel files; payroll information; information on the bank account; Chinecards; Video and photos of workers; and immigration documents. Social security cards, visas, passports and birth certificates have also been targeted. The agents also asked for files on the ownership and management of several construction companies and entrepreneurs appointed in the search mandate equipment.

The documents included the names and photos of four people identified as “target people” to search, without more information about them.

In a declaration to the Associated Press, LG said that it “monitored the situation closely and brought together all the relevant details”. He said he couldn’t immediately confirm how many of his Hyundai employees or workers had been detained.

The operations of the Hyundai electric vehicle manufacturing plant was not interrupted by the RAID, said spokesperson for the Bianca Johnson factory. Hyundai Motor Company said on Friday in a statement that she “worked to understand the specific circumstances” of the raid and detention.

“To date, we understand that none of those detained is directly employed by Hyundai Motor Company,” said the company’s press release.

HL-GA Battery Co. did not immediately respond to a request for comments on Friday. In a statement on Thursday, the company said that it “fully co -opted to the appropriate authorities”.

People arrested Thursday who fight against expulsion can be detained as their affairs wound by the immigration court. The number of people in police custody exceeded 60,000 in August, a summit of all time.