Immigrant Workers exploitation exposed when ICE raided Hyundai LG Georgia Plant

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There's a massive Hyundai LG construction site in Georgia which became the center of a really surprising story. On September 4, 2025, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the 3,000 acre megasite near Savannah. They had over 450 workers detained and that made this the largest immigration raid during President Trump’s second term.

The disturbing thing was that most of these workers were not even supposed to be doing manual labor to begin with. A lot of them were Korean immigrants on ESTA visas, which only allow teaching or instruction work but they were performing dangerous, hard labor on the construction site. Authorized or forced by who?

The raid they performed brought out some serious problems at Hyundai and LG’s site. In just a few months earlier this year, two workers died in an accident that could have been avoided. One worker named Sunbok You, who is a 67 year old construction laborer, was killed when a forklift dragged him, severing his body.

Another worker named Allen Kowalski, he's 27, much younger, died when a load fell from a forklift.

You could easily consider this as an accident but after their investigation, they realized it was not an inevitable accident but signs of a dangerous workplace that ignored worker safety. Despite these previous tragedies, Hyundai continued to rely heavily on subcontractors to staff the site.

The reason they go for them is that subcontractors usually bypass labor laws, and that just leaves workers without protections and allow the parent companies to avoid the responsibilities of ensuring so many things are fine about the worker, thereby saving them a ton of cash.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid focused on immigration law violations but some of the labor advocates say the real problem is exploitation of workers. The workers were pretty much forced to do dangerous jobs they were not legally allowed to do, meaning chances of fatal mistakes is quite high.

And I did not want to talk about wage theft in this article but they were paid far less than what other workers earned for the exact work. Some Mexican engineers on TN visas were brought for professional roles but ended up doing strenuous manual labor for $11 an hour while other workers made $17 to $18 for that same work. It's really not just a visa issue, it is an obvious case of labor abuse.

Forcing immigrants to work illegally under threat of deportation is almost like human trafficking if you ask me.

When workers are put in a situation where they have to depend on their employer for immigration status, they are really left with no choice but to follow unsafe orders, the employer owns them, basically.

The approach picked by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement punished the workers instead of addressing the corporate practices that created the danger that led to disaster. Over 300 Korean workers were quickly returned to South Korea, but the remaining, most of which were Latino workers, remained in detention. The problem I think about is that these detained workers have families and those families are struggling without their loved ones. The communities have stepped in to provide food, housing and legal support so at least that's a silver lining here.

If you do some research on it, you'll find out that Hyundai has a history of labor violations. They did investigations in the past which exposed the use of child labor in Alabama plants and repeated safety violations. By always going for subcontractors, they create a system that almost shields them from accountability.

Corporate greed and reliance on cheap labor have caused avoidable injuries, deaths and exploitation.

Workers usually do the suffering while the corporations do the major profiting. And come to think of it, not all the immigrant workers want to get rich from another nation, it's just a search for financial opportunities so they can feed their families and while doing so they're even contributing to the economy, yet look how some get treated. Instead of holding Hyundai heavily accountable, the raid put the focus on punishing the vulnerable workers themselves. This approach is just unfair and I would say morally wrong.

Unions in the U.S. and Korea are calling for solidarity and I hope they achieve their set goal. Immigrant workers and all laborers deserve safe conditions, fair pay and respect. When companies like Hyundai can easily exploit workers through subcontractors, they end up undermining unions and create a system where such abuses keep happening and left unchecked.

The accountability must come from the companies, not the workers who have been exploited.

Screenshot from this site showing the Hyundai plant