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Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Business

Anger in Seoul as Trump calls detained South Korea workers ‘illegal aliens’

US President Donald Trump and South Korea's President Lee Jae-myung during a meeting in the White House, August 25, 2025 [AL DRAGO/EPA]

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung has ordered all-out efforts to respond to the arrests of hundreds of the country’s citizens in an immigration raid on a Hyundai Motor-LG car battery factory in the United States.

Thursday’s arrest of some 475 workers – more than 300 of them South Korean nationals – at the plant near Savannah in the southern US state of Georgia was the largest single-site enforcement operation carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an arm of the US Department of Homeland Security.

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