In Georgia, Trump’s immigration agenda and clean energy jobs are colliding
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South Korean officials are calling for more than 300 of its citizens who were detained last week during an immigration and customs application in a battery plant in electric vehicles in Georgia. The Ministry of Internal Security said it was the largest unique survey in the history of the agency. A total of 475 people were arrested.
Immigration agents arrested the workers on September 4 in a battery factory under construction, which will be part of a huge industrial manufacturing site near Savannah. The anchor of this complex is a new factory of electric and Hyundai electric vehicles where cars started to move from the line last year.
Investigators described the raid as the culmination of a long -standing investigation.
“It was not an immigration operation where the agents entered the premises, gathered people and put them on buses,” said Steven Schrank, special agent of the DHS in the region. He said that some of the prisoners were illegally in the United States, while others had exceeded their visas or used the bad visa to work.
“This is a criminal investigation of several months where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews, gathered documents and presented these elements of evidence in court in order to obtain a mandate of judicial search,” he said.
Schrank said workers were employed by entrepreneurs, subcontractors, sub-groups and investigators who were still disadvantaged where. In a statement last week, Hyundai said on the basis of her “current understanding”, none of the detained persons worked directly for the automotive company.
The South Korean government reacted quickly, expressing “the concern and regret” of the arrests. In a few days, officials had negotiated the release of South Korean workers and announced that the country was affecting a plane to bring workers back to Korea. Wednesday morning, workers are still in Georgia.
Many of them were engineers and equipment installers, according to an immigration lawyer from Atlanta by representing several. They were temporarily in the United States to put the operational factory, then train American workers, said lawyer Charles Kuck. The factory equipment is designed and manufactured in Korea and Japan, he said, it is therefore standard to bring workers from abroad to install it.
“It is not abnormal for people from another country to help create a factory,” said Kuck. “It would be abnormal if they were not there.”
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In 2022, when the governor of Georgia Brian Kemp announced for the first time that the Hyundai factory would arrive in the state, it was celebrated as “the biggest economic development project in the history of our state”. (Georgia has long prompted to become a center for the manufacture of solar panels, electric vehicles and battery, and even has its own economic development office in Seoul.) Shortly after, the president of the time, Joe Biden
Last week’s raid may have launched a key in these efforts. Indeed, commercial repercussions could be a great range, according to Andrew Yeo of the Brookings Institution.
According to Yeo, work in the battery plant has stopped. “There will be no construction for a while while civil servants are trying to sort what has happened and if Koreans can continue operations,” he said. Yeo stressed that companies should employ workers legally, and said that this raid will likely discourage future manufacturing partnerships with foreign companies – partnerships that the United States needs for the clean energy sector.
“I think it will take a break on how countries are thinking of future investments in the United States,” said Yeo. “But of course, there are other factors at stake that have already created risks to invest in the United States”
These factors include prices and reversal by the Trump administration of many Biden era policies and incentives on electric vehicles and renewable energies, which have already raised questions about the future of factories that have opened or extended in response to Biden incentives.
There is a “disconnection,” said Yeo, between Trump calls to foreign investment and away from manufacturing on the one hand and immigration repression on the other. But such problems are prior to the current administration, he said. During manufacturing growth under Biden, he said, Korean companies complained that they cannot hire skilled workers fairly quickly. This is a problem that American political decision -makers and foreign companies create EV products and clean energy products will have to settle.
“After all, this is how we create a kind of win-win economic alliance between the United States and our allies,” said Yeo.
Marlon Hyde and Emily Wu Pearson of Wabe contributed to this report.
