Jack Kennedy
In September, the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a battery plant in Georgia. The plant was operated by South Korean companies Hyundai and LG Energy Solution. Of the 475 people detained, over 300 were South Korean nationals. ICE claimed the workers had overstayed their visas or committed other violations of immigration law, but did not provide evidence. In recent months, ICE has frequently detained people, including US citizens, without legal justification.
The raid has caused outrage in South Korea across the political spectrum, and Seoul has announced it is investigating whether human rights abuses occurred. Following the incident, the former mayor of South Korea’s third-largest city Daegu, Hong Joon-pyo, reportedly said that the US raid is evidence that the country must acquire its own nuclear weapons.
Hong’s is merely one voice and calls for an independent South Korean nuclear deterrent are nothing new, particularly on the political right. (Hong is a member of the right-wing People’s Power Party.) More notably, however, Hong characterized the ICE raid as an “intentional provocation” and “both humiliating and disgraceful… Why are we still perceived as a subordinate rather than an equal?” His comments encapsulate the breadth and depth of the South Korean fury over the raid. While the People’s Power Party has supported nuclear armament for some time and has traditionally represented the most pro-American wing of South Korean politics (particularly in the era of Trump), Hong’s use of defiant language is rare for a prominent party member—and it revives the problem of South Korean proliferation.
Washington’s missteps. The images of Korean workers being paraded in shackles by ICE agents were bad enough on their own, but they come as part of a parade of missteps and poor policy decisions Washington made in its dealings with Seoul in recent years.
South Korea and the United States are embroiled in tariff negotiations, and President Lee Jae-myung has said that agreeing to the current US demands would cripple the South Korean economy. South Korean companies have made enormous investments in the United States (and vice versa) in recent years, particularly in critical areas such as electric battery and semiconductor manufacturing. But this has not been enough for the Trump administration, which has demanded hundreds of billions in additional upfront South Korean investment in the United States, a concession which Lee has said would get him “impeached”.
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