https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-will-allow-south-kor...
> South Korean companies have been mostly relying on short-term visas or a visa waiver program called the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, to send workers needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.
It sounds to me like they had relied on a grey area. The most obvious conclusion is that pressure from the top down in ICE caused their agents to "hunt around" and look for "big arrests." When political pressure from South Korea mounted they had to reverse themselves.
Either way, if these were actually workers in the country temporarily and in good faith to set up manufacturing, then it would neither seem to be a particularly good crackdown on illegal immigration nor encouraging manufacturing to be set up in the US.
The entire article you posted just referenced short term visas after the raid and said nothing other than the nationals who were arrested were flown home. The article spent less than a sentence with what OP posted:
The announcement came weeks after South Korea flew home more than 300 of its nationals who had been detained in a massive immigration raid at a battery factory being built on Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant campus near Savannah, Georgia.
From September when the raid happened:
"This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses," Steve Schrank, the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Atlanta, said at a news conference on Friday.
"This has been a multi-month criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews gathered documents and presented that evidence... in order to obtain a judicial search warrant," Schrank added.
He said it was "the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of homeland security investigations".
"These [workers] are people that came through with Biden. They came through illegally."
Some 475 people who were in the country illegally or working unlawfully were detained in the operation, immigration officials said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xe5d6103o
>> frozen water gang
>> the current admin and the frozen water gang
Why do you have a problem using the term ICE??
>The statement was consistent with earlier remarks by South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, who, after traveling to Washington to negotiate the workers’ release, said that U.S. officials had agreed to allow them to return later to complete their work.
You dont suddenly allow to return someone who was justifiably deported, regardless of what the agent in charge said in the immediate aftermath at a press conference.