Hundreds of S.Korean workers return home

Aljazeera :

A chartered flight carrying hundreds of South Korean workers arrested in a major United States immigration raid has landed in Incheon, ending a weeklong saga that rattled Seoul and cast a dark shadow over its ties with key ally Washington.
Television footage showed a Korean Air Boeing 747-8I touching down at Incheon International Airport on Friday with more than 310 passengers who had been arrested in the US state of Georgia.
The workers made up the bulk of the 475 people swept up during a raid at a Hyundai-LG battery plant construction site – the largest single-site immigration operation since US President Donald Trump resumed office and pledged to intensify crackdowns.
“Everything at Atlanta went smoothly,” a South Korean Foreign Ministry official told the AFP news agency, confirming the flight left as scheduled.
President Lee Jae-mMyung called the raid “bewildering” and warned it could deter future investment. He said Seoul was pressing Washington “to ensure that visa issuance for investment-related purposes operates normally”.
Al Jazeera’s Jack Barton, reporting from Incheon airport, said US officials had insisted “right up until the last moment that they were going to be deported and that there would be restrictions on re-entry for at least the next five years”.