It will undoubtedly have negative financial effect on those same constituents, but there's always someone else to arrest and take the blame. It's fantastic politics.
Good for them. If USA is not a reliable ally anymore, not a surprise there are active talks on free trade agreement between China, Japan and Korea.
If Trump wanted leverage in negotiations and to appear strong on immigration... fine.
But there are so many ways of accomplishing that that didn't also alienate and piss off an ally to the extent this perp photo shoot did.
Hell, the government could have just politely detained them, put out a big splashy press release, then worked with the South Korean embassy to repatriate them. Same benefit, fewer hard feelings.
In contrast, as a result now there's going to be much higher government and South Korean domestic pushback on exactly the kind of US investment Trump wants.
It's one thing when someone does something distasteful but gets benefit out of going that far. It's another when they do it because they're inept.
The only people this excess played well for was Trump's base, and as others pointed out, there are plenty of less trade sensitive immigrant groups that could have been substituted, if that was the goal.
How sure are we of that? Did we really get this information from trustworthy sources?
I was speaking solely about politics, i.e. winning elections. And if you can't win elections, none of your other policies matter.
From my reading, this is what they seem to have meant by "bad politics". It's just not clear that OP meant "politics" strictly as "winning elections". I agree that it's good domestic politics. It may have even been seen as a tradeoff by the administration.
Did America run out of Hondurians? Going after Koreans is just dumb on so many levels it's like America wants China to win.