South Korea is dispatching its top diplomat to the United States as it tries to prevent swirling discontent over an immigration raid at a factory in Georgia from ballooning into a crisis that could do long-term damage to relations with its most important ally.
Foreign Affairs Minister Cho Hyun was scheduled to leave Monday evening local time for Washington, DC, officials in Seoul said.
Hours earlier, the government announced that some 300 South Koreans who were detained in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid last Thursday on the Hyundai-LG joint factory in southern Georgia will return to Korea on a chartered flight following negotiations with the US.
A Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the chartered plane schedule has not been set yet, but the government is trying to bring back the nationals as soon as possible.
The raid was one of the largest by US immigration enforcement agencies in recent years. Images of workers, many of them Korean, being shackled and led away into detention have circulated widely across South Korea and sparked criticism at a time when the country is pouring multi-billion-dollar investments into the US, much of it at the behest of US President Donald Trump.
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