Today, the CEO of Hyundai sought to distance his company from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid earlier this month at the company’s battery factory in Georgia, which resulted in the arrest of hundreds of South Korean workers.
The factory is operated by LG Energy Solutions, and most of the workers that were detained were employed by suppliers for that company, not Hyundai, José Muñoz said in a briefing with reporters on Thursday after the automaker’s CEO Investor Day event in New York City.
“I could not believe what I saw because I would have known, probably before the news,” Muñoz said, when asked about his initial reaction to the raid. “So I said, something is weird here. How can something happen [and] nobody told me? And when I go into the details, then I realize it’s not our facility. It’s LG’s battery plant.”
“So I said, something is weird here.”
“It’s like something happened in Fox News,” he continued, in response to a question from a CNN reporter. “And they said, ‘How come you didn’t know?‘ I said, ’Hey, I’m working for CNN,’ right? So same deal.”
Muñoz griped that all the media’s photos of the raid have shown Hyundai’s Metaplant facility rather than the neighboring LG factory. “All the pictures that were shown everywhere, they are pictures of a facility which is different from where the raid happened,” he said.
His remarks come a few days after he confirmed that the plant’s construction would be delayed two to three months due to labor shortages. And they come amid the growing fallout from the September 4th raid, which resulted in the arrest of 475 workers, most of whom were from South Korea, at the battery plant that is jointly operated by Hyundai and LG Energy Solutions.
President Donald Trump has sought to placate South Korea after the raid, announcing that he will allow foreign companies to temporarily bring in “people of expertise” to train American workers. But critics say the damage may already have been done, as foreign companies now realize their own workers could get rounded up in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The Hyundai-LG raid was so unusual because it seemed to target a fairly typical situation. When opening a new facility in the US, foreign automakers typically bring a cadre of their own employees to help with the construction and then, once it’s completed, train American workers to operate it. Labor experts warn that the ICE raid in Georgia could chill foreign investment in the US and target particular industries, especially automakers working on EVs.
Muñoz defended the foreign workers who were in Georgia to help build the factory, arguing that the expertise to build these specialized factories doesn’t exist in the US. And he called for the creation of a new type of visa for highly skilled workers who help develop these enormous projects, to ensure future raids don’t happen.
“I think the US government has acknowledged that there needs to be a better solution to address this type of situation,” he said. “I think both governments in South Korea and the US are working actively to try to ensure that situations like this don’t happen again.”
