SEOUL, July 22 (AJP) - South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked the United States to ensure Korean nationals do not suffer unintended harm from American immigration enforcement, raising the issue directly with a senior State Department official in Seoul on Tuesday, ten months after a Georgia factory raid that saw more than 300 Korean workers detained and flown home.
Park Jong-han, Deputy Minister for Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), requested a meeting with Jason Evans, US Under Secretary of State for Management, according to a ministry statement released Wednesday. Park asked for American attention and support so that Korean nationals face no "unintended damage or unjust infringement of their rights" in connection with US immigration policy.
The language was not chosen casually. "Unjust infringement" is the same phrase President Lee Jae Myung used in September 2025, after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the Hyundai-LG battery plant construction site near Savannah, Georgia, and detained roughly 475 workers, among them more than 300 Koreans, some led away in handcuffs and leg chains. It was the largest single-site workplace enforcement operation in the history of the US Department of Homeland Security, and it ended with MOFA negotiating the workers' release and a chartered Korean Air jet bringing them home.
The raid turned a long-simmering visa problem into a diplomatic wound. Korean companies have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to US manufacturing, yet the engineers and technicians needed to build and launch those plants have no dedicated visa category. Many have entered on short-term business visas or visa waivers that sit uneasily with hands-on installation work, an ambiguity that ICE treated as illegality in Georgia. A bill to create an E-4 visa reserved for Korean professionals, similar to what Australians already hold, remains parked in the House Judiciary Committee. Lee pressed visiting US senators on the issue as recently as this spring.
The enforcement climate has only hardened since President Donald Trump began his second term. His executive orders mandate what US Citizenship and Immigration Services describes as strict screening and vetting of foreign nationals seeking entry or immigration benefits, and arrest quotas reported to reach 3,000 a day have pushed agents toward large workplace operations of the kind that swept up the Korean workers.
Evans was a fitting audience for the complaint. The undersecretary for management, a career diplomat sworn in shortly after the Georgia raid in September 2025, oversees the State Department's administrative machinery, including the consular bureau that issues visas.
Park also told Evans that active people-to-people exchange between the two countries deepens mutual understanding and serves as a core driver sustaining a future-oriented alliance, according to the ministry.
MOFA said the government plans to keep strengthening cooperation with Washington across various fields, including personnel exchanges, through the two countries' diplomatic channels.
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