U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 475 people on Thursday at a battery factory in Ellabell, Ga., in what officials described as the largest single-site immigration raid in recent years. More than 300 of those detained were South Korean nationals, prompting urgent diplomatic engagement and raising concerns among business leaders that the raid could chill future foreign investment in the United States.
The factory, part of a sprawling gigafactory complex co-owned by South Korea’s LG Energy Solution and Hyundai Motor Group, has been a focal point for automaking and electric-vehicle supply-chain investment in the state. South Korean Presidential Chief of Staff Kang Hoon-sik said Sunday that the U.S. government had agreed to release the Korean nationals and arrange a charter flight to return them to South Korea as soon as Wednesday, while the companies involved and local officials scrambled to assess damage to the construction timeline.
LG Energy Solution said it was halting U.S. business travel and advising employees in the United States to return home; the company reported that 47 of its workers had been detained, 46 of whom are South Korean. Hyundai said none of its own employees were among those detained but that it was reviewing the employment practices of suppliers and subcontractors. Construction at the plant has been temporarily suspended, a move that officials and analysts say will delay hiring and hurt the local economy in southeast Georgia.
The U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Georgia said the operation was part of “Operation Take Back America,” a nationwide campaign to enforce immigration laws. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s office issued a statement saying the state would enforce federal and state immigration laws and that companies operating in Georgia must follow those laws.
President Donald Trump sought to strike a public balance on Sunday, posting on Truth Social that foreign companies were welcome to invest in the United States and could “legally bring your very smart people” to build products, but that he expected those companies to “hire and train American Workers.” The message attempted to reconcile two competing objectives of the administration: attracting strategic foreign investment while carrying out a broad crackdown on both illegal immigration and perceived visa abuses.
Business groups and experts said the raid undercut that message. Ryu Yongwook, an assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy who studies East Asian international relations, told TIME that the incident had “dampened the investment sentiments and raised concerns among Korean firms on how to approach direct investment in the USA.” Tami Overby, an international business consultant who formerly led the U.S.-Korea Business Council at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said executives in Asia had reacted to the arrests with alarm, describing “mixed messages from the Administration: You want our money, but you don’t want us.”
The raid comes amid a surge of South Korean investment in the United States fostered in part by incentives in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and by corporate commitments to expand U.S. production. Hyundai recently pledged to increase its direct investment in the United States to $26 billion by 2028, and South Korea announced multi-hundred-billion-dollar packages aimed at U.S. industries in recent months. State officials in Georgia had touted the battery and related facilities as major job creators; last week the governor announced another Korean firm would build a magnet manufacturing facility in the state, expected to create more than 500 jobs.
Local labor leaders said the raid and ensuing suspension of work had immediate consequences for residents. Barry Zeigler, business manager of UA Local Union 188, which represents plumbers and pipefitters, said the plant had been expected to generate local employment but that dozens of union members had been let go earlier in the month amid construction slowdowns.
Experts and Korean officials criticized the timing of the enforcement action, saying it complicated a diplomatic push to deepen economic ties. South Korean lawmaker Oh Gi-hyoung said the arrests had been “unnecessary and unreasonable” and urged that South Korean nationals be treated respectfully if the United States hoped to attract more investment. Ryu said the administration’s simultaneous demands — that allied firms invest in U.S. manufacturing while immigration policy makes it difficult to bring in skilled technicians and construction staff — risked undermining U.S. strategic and economic goals.
Legal and visa constraints add to the difficulty. The Trump administration has pursued tighter rules for H-1B specialty-worker visas, and U.S. employers face a quota and a lottery system that can create lengthy lead times. Chun Jong-joon, a Korean American immigration lawyer, said the H-1B process typically takes months and carries no guarantee of approval. Some Korean firms have used 90-day visa-waiver visits for rotating technical teams during construction periods, a practice critics say does not allow for legal work and has increasingly come under scrutiny.
Those constraints have forced companies to weigh compliance, project timelines and labor availability. Chang Sang-sik, head of the Korea International Trade Association’s research center on international trade, said some positions could not readily be filled by the current U.S. labor pool without raising costs or delaying projects because technicians with specialized skills were needed during construction.
The raid in Georgia has prompted calls from analysts for clearer, more flexible immigration pathways tied to foreign direct investment. Ryu said Washington’s immigration and investment priorities do not have to be incompatible, but that the government would need to produce "a fine-tuned immigration policy that eases the process of foreign direct investment" in order to avoid deterring allies whose capital and technology Washington seeks.
For now, company travel restrictions, suspended construction and diplomatic negotiations underscore the immediate economic fallout. Officials and executives said it could take weeks to resume normal operations and to assess the broader impact on pledged investments and local hiring schedules.