It is unclear when the South Korean detainees will be repatriated. They were previously scheduled to depart the United States on Wednesday.
www.nytimes.com
The repatriation of hundreds of South Korean workers arrested in an immigration raid in the United States has been delayed, officials in Seoul said on Wednesday, as frustration and anger with the Trump administration here began to mount.
It was unclear when a chartered Korean Air flight, which was previously scheduled to fly from Atlanta on Wednesday, would take off. But the plane’s departure was delayed because of issues on the American side, the South Korean foreign ministry said, without elaborating.
Last week’s images of armed U.S. agents dragging away South Korean workers in handcuffs and ankle chains from a
Hyundai-LG battery plant in Ellabell, Ga., outraged many in South Korea. Seoul has tried to prevent the raid from unsettling its decades-old alliance with Washington, a key to South Korea’s security. And it has scrambled to diffuse the tension by hurriedly negotiating the workers’ release and sending a plane to pick them up.
But the raid has been raising political hackles in a country where people are known to take to the streets in
anti-U.S. protests when they feel their national pride has been slighted by the Americans.
...
“Why should we be treated like this when we are providing the United States with our technology, our money and our investments?” Kim Joon-hyung, an opposition lawmaker said during a parliamentary hearing on Monday.
Mr. Kim urged the government to tally all the Americans visiting South Korea on tourist visas and making money by teaching English. He said he suspected that their number could be in “thousands or tens of thousands.” He stopped short of asking the South Korean government to detain and deport them but asked: “Isn’t that illegal?”
...
Lee Eun-ju, a top member of the president’s governing Democratic Party, suggested that if necessary, South Korea would withdraw all its nationals working on investment projects in the United States and suspend all its investments, including factories under construction, until the safety of South Korean workers is guaranteed.
Ms. Lee said South Korea cherished its ties with the United States and respected the American-led international order. But there is a limit, she said.
“It’s just too much,” she said, referring to South Korean workers in shackles. The U.S. Embassy in Seoul did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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