A South Korean worker who witnessed a massive immigration operation at a car factory in Georgia has told the BBC of panic and confusion as federal agents descended on the site and arrested hundreds.
The man, who asked to remain anonymous, was at the factory which is jointly owned by Hyundai and LG Energy when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 475 people, including 300 South Korean nationals, with some being led away in chains.
He said he first became aware of the Thursday morning raid when he and his colleagues received a deluge of phone calls from company bosses. Multiple phone lines were ringing and the message was to shut down operations, he said.
As news spread of the raid, the largest of its kind since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the man said panicked family members tried to contact the workers.
They were detained and they left all their cell phones in the office. They were getting calls, but we couldn't answer because [the office] was locked, he said.
According to US officials, some workers tried to flee including several who jumped into a nearby sewage pond. They were separated into groups based on nationality and visa status, before being processed and loaded onto multiple coaches.
Some 400 state and federal agents had gathered outside the sprawling $7.6bn factory complex, which is about half an hour from the city of Savannah, before entering the site at around 10:30 on Thursday.
The 3000-acre complex opened last year and workers there assemble electric vehicles. Immigration officials had been investigating alleged illegal employment practices at an electric vehicle battery plant that is being built on the compound.
The operation ultimately became the largest single-site immigration enforcement operation in the history of Homeland Security investigations, officials said, adding that hundreds of people who were not legally allowed to work in the US were detained.
One video posted on social media shows men lined up in a room as a masked man, wearing a vest with the initials HSI and holding a walkie-talkie, tells them: We're Homeland Security, we have a search warrant for the whole site. We need construction to cease immediately, we need all work to end on the site right now.
The worker we spoke to said he was shocked but not surprised by the immigration operation. He said most of the workers detained were mechanics installing production lines at the site, employed by a contractor.
He also mentioned that some of those arrested had come from the head office in Seoul for training purposes. He believed nearly all the workers had some legal right to be in the US but were on the wrong type of visas or their right to work had expired.
Hyundai and LG Energy issued a joint statement saying they were co-operating fully with the appropriate authorities regarding activity at our construction site and had paused construction to assist in the investigation. Hyundai added that none of the detained individuals is directly employed by them.
In the wake of this raid, the worker expressed concern that international investments in the US might decline due to the operational risks and challenges associated with the immigration process.
Many companies will think again about investing in the United States because setting up a new project might take so much longer than before, he said.
