More than 300 Korean workers who had been detained in the U.S. state of Georgia left the detention facility at dawn on the 11th (local time) to return home.
Those who had been held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Folkston, Georgia, began moving to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at 2:16 a.m. that day (3:16 p.m. on the 11th, Korea time) by boarding eight regular buses. It was seven days after they were arrested in a U.S. immigration sweep on the 4th at the construction site of the Hyundai Motor–LG Energy Solution joint battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia.
The detainees, wearing everyday clothes and without physical restraints such as handcuffs, walked through the steel gate and boarded the waiting buses. At the airport, they are to board a Korean Air charter and depart at noon on the 11th local time (1 a.m. on the 12th, Korea time), arriving at Incheon International Airport on the afternoon of the 12th.
A total of 330 people will board this charter: 316 Koreans and 14 foreign nationals (10 from China, three from Japan, and one from Indonesia). Among the Koreans, one person expressed an intention to remain in the United States, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
They were initially slated to leave the detention facility at dawn on the 10th and return home on a charter later that day, but the schedule was pushed back by a day after the U.S. government unilaterally halted the process the previous night.
Earlier, U.S. authorities arrested a total of 475 people in the sweep on the 4th, including more than 300 Koreans.
Minister Cho Hyun of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs met with reporters at the Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C., on the 10th and said, "Our nationals will be able to return home on a charter on the 11th, and I reconfirmed that there will be no handcuffs in the process." Cho also said, "We received a firm assurance that there will be no problems for them to reenter the United States and work in the future."