Zip ties. Helicopters. Crowded cells. Guns trained on bewildered workers. Foul water. Forced vaccinations. An unconscious detainee left on the floor by negligent guards. A pregnant woman in handcuffs. A detainee being called “Rocket Man” (Donald Trump’s nickname for Kim Jong Un) by sneering federal agents. A menstruating woman forced to attend to her period with only toilet paper.

These are the details of 316 South Korean nationals’ experiences in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention that have flooded the country’s media in the weeks after the September 4 raid on a Hyundai-LG electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia. A wave of fury is now pouring forth from across South Korean society — and the political consequences are only just beginning.

There is far more at stake than a single factory in Georgia, which by itself represented 8,500 jobs and $4.3 billion in investment, and is just one of 23 plants being built across the U.S. by Korean conglomerates. Since the raid, the U.S. and South Korea have announced that Korean workers will be able to use B-1 visas and ESTA visa waivers to continue working in the U.S. A new bill in Congress, the Partner with Korea Act, also seeks to extend 15,000 professional E-4 visas to South Koreans for the first time.

But U.S. flexibility on immigration is not all that matters. Seoul and Washington have yet to finalize their trade deal instigated by Trump’s threat to impose a 25 percent blanket tariff on South Korean goods. At the current stage of negotiations, South Korea has agreed to accept a 15 percent tariff on its exports and provide tremendous investments and other financial agreements: $350 billion in state-backed short-term investment, $150 billion in private sector contracts with U.S. corporations, and a guarantee to purchase $100 billion in U.S. liquid natural gas. Despite so much on the table, a written agreement has yet to be produced, and negotiations are proving tense as the Trump administration presses for Seoul to provide the lion’s share of its $350 billion commitment in cash. While some of the shock over the ICE raid has died down, Washington’s conduct over the course of months of negotiations has also raised deeper questions in South Korea about the real nature of the alliance — and whether this is a relationship that can last.

The Art of the Steal

The anger unleashed by ICE’s abuse of Korean workers has been building for some time. Trump’s tariff threats, announced in March, hit South Korea at a difficult time, when the impeachment of former President Yoon Suk Yeol was unresolved, and the country was reeling from years of flagging economic performance.

The issue was not only a matter of timing. The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act also used similar (though less onerous) tariff threats to force South Korean conglomerates to transfer production and make large investments in the U.S. — which is how the Hyundai-LG plant made its way to Georgia in the first place. Having already complied with the previous administration, South Korea nevertheless now finds itself facing an even graver economic threat that could lead to recession: not just a 25 percent tariff on all exports (since reduced to 15 percent), but sector-based tariffs impacting most of South Korea’s key industries as well.

While much of the anger on either side of the Pacific has focused on the current administration in Washington, Trump’s tariffs are just the latest in a string of U.S. policies that have sought to deny South Korea its economic sovereignty, open its markets to foreign takeover, and degrade the rights and dignity of its working people.