Hyundai I.C.E. Raid Detained Workers With Shor-Term Business Visas

Almost 500 people were detained during a raid of a Georgia battery plant owned by two South Korean manufacturers last week, the largest immigration enforcement operation at one location in the history of the Department of Homeland Security.

But in at least one instance, officials admitted a worker was employed legally and forced him to leave the country anyway, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times obtained internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest records for 11 of the detained workers. Six entered the country with B1 or B1/B2 visas, which are issued for business trips of up to six months. Four entered through the visa waiver program, which allows travel for 90 days. In one case, the worker’s status was unclear. The records stated that all but one of the 11 were working unlawfully at the time of the raid, but did not provide details about why.

In the one exception, agents said that although the worker “has not violated his visa,” the local ICE field office director “mandated” that he be considered someone who was voluntarily departing the country. The file noted that he worked for the South Korean engineering firm SFA, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Two-thirds of the people arrested on Sept. 4 were South Koreans, and nearly all of them were flown back to their home country this week. They were expected to land in Seoul on Friday afternoon local time — only after sitting in limbo for 24 hours while President Trump told his government to consider letting them to stay and train American workers, South Korean officials said.

“What ICE is doing here is illegal, and people should be held to account,” said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta immigration lawyer who is representing some of those who were detained. “If we’re turning from ‘let’s enforce the law against people who violate the law’ to ‘let’s enforce the law against everybody regardless of their legal status,’ I think we’ve changed the kind of country that we’ve become.”

The fallout from the operation at the plant was the latest example of the dragnet-like nature of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy and how it can conflict with other stated policy objectives, such as bolstering production in the United States. It also highlighted a strategy used by multinational firms to temporarily import workers into the United States to establish new operations.

The question of who will perform both the heavy manual labor and sophisticated technical jobs associated with advanced factories has taken on greater urgency in recent years as the federal government has pushed advanced manufacturing, often led by foreign companies.

The Trump administration has told its trading partners to either make their goods in America or pay steep tariffs, and leveraged hundreds of billions of dollars in investment commitments from South Korea, Japan and the European Union. The plant, which is owned by the carmaker Hyundai and the battery supplier LG Energy Solution, is weeks from completion. Contractors were installing the sophisticated equipment needed to make batteries for electric vehicles.

Representatives from the battery plant joint venture did not return requests for comment, nor did spokespeople from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.

The B1 and combination B1/B2 visa — the kind held by several Georgia plant workers — is commonly used for business and tourism-related travel lasting less than six months, especially for consulting technical or scientific roles. A total of 4,906 B1/B2 visas were issued to South Koreans in the first five months of this year, according to government records, a small slice of the 2.86 million issued to all countries over the same period.

Robert Marton, an immigration lawyer with auto manufacturer clients other than Hyundai, said he had relied on B1 visas more in recent years as other programs for bringing in foreign workers had become more competitive.

Companies routinely bring in employees from elsewhere with H-1B visas, which allow someone to stay for several years. But those are capped in number, expensive to apply for and in high demand.

“The H-1B program has been restrictive as it’s been for years,” Mr. Marton said. “So I think lawyers like us are looking at workarounds and getting people in quickly.”

Obtaining a B1 visa requires submitting proof of the worker’s credentials, such as degree certificates, and proof of employment in someone’s home country. It is supposed to be used for consulting with business associates, negotiating contracts or attending conferences.

Jongwon Lee, a lawyer in Duluth, Ga., who has worked with South Korean companies operating in the state, said the official guidance left little clarity on how expansively the B1 visa could be interpreted.

“Installing software, giving instructions of how to set up machines, is that consulting or not?” Mr. Lee said. “Nobody knows. No update, no instruction, no case law.”

Instead, enforcement can play out in real time. ICE planning documents suggest that agents were not necessarily targeting temporary South Korean workers last week.

The original warrant for the raid listed only four Hispanic individuals. According to Mr. Kuck, agents did not have any Korean speakers on hand during the raid and had to use apps to translate.

“It was an accident” that ICE picked up the South Korean workers, Mr. Kuck argued. “They just transported everybody to the jail to sort it out later.”

The raid was part of an expansive deportation effort that the White House has choreographed throughout the United States this year, roping in several agencies that typically did not handle immigration matters as a way to meet Mr. Trump’s campaign promises. Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff, has targeted 3,000 arrests a day. Work site enforcement is seen as a way to put large numbers on the board.

Nearly all of the 317 ​detained South Korean workers had planned to return home to rest but may consider returning to the construction site later, officials in Seoul said this week.​ One worker chose to stay in the United States with relatives who have green cards.

Typically, when foreigners accept a “voluntary departure,” it means they have acknowledged that they violated immigration laws and will not be allowed back into the United States. In this case, removal documents did not contain an admission of wrongdoing, and South Korean officials have demanded that the workers not face adverse consequences.

Along with the South Koreans, ICE agents picked up workers from Japan, China and Indonesia at the Georgia plant. The Mexican Consulate in Atlanta said 23 of its citizens had been detained, and the Colombian Consulate said it was aware of 19 Colombians.

Some of those from Central and South America, according to lawyers and an organization called Migrant Equity SouthEast, had valid work permits and were legally present in the country with Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Both are programs that the Trump administration has sought to dismantle.

Short-term business visa programs have been abused in the past — by employees who overstay their limits, as well as by employers. A pending class action lawsuit alleges that a contractor for a Hyundai subsidiary recruited engineers and technicians to work at a Georgia warehouse on TN visas. That visa category is intended for educated professionals from a prescribed list of occupations, but the workers say they were instead forced to do security, cleaning and packaging jobs.

It’s not clear whether anything similar was underway at the Hyundai-LG plant. Julia Solórzano, the legal and policy director of the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, an immigrant rights group that helped bring that case, has been coordinating the response to the raid. Unlike workers in such operations in the past, she said, those who were not flown back to Seoul have not been released on bond.

“In this raid, it is notable that they seem to have taken so many of the workers into detention,” Ms. Solórzano said. “It makes it very hard to support people, and it creates conditions that make it hard for workers to fairly assess their immigration options.”

Choe Sang-Hun and Aaron Krolik contributed reporting.