Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained 475 workers last week at an under-construction Hyundai-LG battery plant in Georgia. That number included about 300 South Korean citizens, who had been working for the two South Korean companies, which led South Korean officials to charter a flight to get the group home. That rescue flight was meant to leave September 10, but now there’s some unknown issue on the U.S. side preventing the South Koreans from leaving — and forcing them to spend further time in ICE detention.
South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a statement saying that the charter flight had run into unexpected delays on the U.S. side, according to South Korea’s JoonAng Daily news. The issue, apparently, lies squarely on the U.S.’s side of the playing field. Being a diplomatic message, there’s little in the way of specifics, but it sure seems like South Korea wants its people back ASAP:
The chartered flight initially set to fly detained Korean workers from the United States to Korea is “facing difficulty meeting the Sept. 10 departure date,” according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday.
“The departure has been delayed due to issues regarding the U.S. side,” according to a Foreign Ministry official. No details of the reason or a later schedule were revealed.
“We will keep our cooperation with the United States to resume the departure as soon as possible,” said the ministry, adding that it will notify the press of any other changes.
Hopefully the workers can get home
Given the chaos of our current immigration enforcement, it’s unclear what exactly the issue could be. On the one side, Hanlon’s Razor says to credit general bureaucratic incompetence; on the other, the administration’s general the-cruelty-is-the-point approach may lead them to think that releasing foreign nationals to the nation they’re from — rather than a totally random nation they’ve never been to like Uganda — looks weak or ineffectual, like showing its belly to the raving hordes of MS-13 smuggling fentanyl in from Venezuela.
South Korean officials have offered safe passage to citizens of other nations aboard the rescue flight, according to JoongAng Daily, but it’s not clear who’s actually accepted the offer. This certainly seems like a major international mess to make out of one woman’s report of four undocumented immigrants, especially when many of the workers were documented — documents that, apparently, meant nothing in the face of ICE’s demands for people to leave the United States. If we’re now rounding up people based on racial profiling, as explicitly permitted by the Supreme Court, and ordering them to countries they’ve never visited despite valid paperwork, then it’s increasingly clear this is no longer about undocumented immigration.
