As many as 500 people were arrested at a Hyundai factory in the US state of Georgia by immigration authorities in the largest workplace raid of President Donald Trump's second term. A majority of those detained during the raid are Korean nationals.

The 3,000-acre site was built by the Korean company to manufacture electric vehicles and has been operational for a year. The Department of Homeland Security told the BBC that agents executed a search warrant due to allegations of "unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes".

According to immigration officials, the arrested individuals who were in the country illegally or working unlawfully were detained in the operation. They were being held at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Folkston, Georgia, until the agency decides where to move them next. Of those detained, 300 are reported to be Korean nationals.

Videos on social media show agents lining workers up and telling them they have a warrant to search the facility. The agents can also be seen talking to some of the employees in the videos.

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Hyundai responds to Georgia ICE raids

Hyundai has responded after around 500 people were detained during an immigration raid at a sprawling Georgia site. "We are aware of the recent incident at the HL-GA Battery Company construction site in Bryan County, Georgia."

"We are closely monitoring the situation and working to understand the specific circumstances," the spokesperson wrote. "As of today, it is our understanding that none of those detained is directly employed by Hyundai Motor Company," Hyundai said in a statement to NewsWeek.

Steven Schrank, special agent in charge, Homeland Security Investigations, said at a news briefing Friday that the majority of the people detained were from South Korea. He said it was the "largest single site enforcement operation" in the agency's two-decade history.

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The raid is the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US in New York and Washington DC, as per Guardian.

"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.

Many of the car workers arrested in a huge US workplace immigration raid had violated their visitor visas, officials told the BBC. "People on short-term or recreational visas are not authorized to work in the US," ICE said, adding that the raid was necessary to protect American jobs.

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Trump's illegal immigration crackdown

Donald Trump has launched a nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration, acting on his campaign promise to enact the largest mass deportation of such persons in the US history. Immigrants in the country with both legal and illegal residency have been caught up in the crackdown, raising concerns about the scope and impact of the initiative.

President Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday: "They were illegal aliens and ICE was just doing its job."

Asked by a reporter about the reaction from Seoul, he said: "Well, we want to get along with other countries, and we want to have a great, stable workforce. "And we have, as I understand it, a lot of illegal aliens, some not the best of people, but we had a lot of illegal aliens working there."

"These [workers] are people that came through with Biden. They came through illegally."

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Responding to the arrest of hundreds of its citizens by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during a raid at a factory being built in Georgia to manufacture car batteries, South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, has ordered “all-out efforts". Cho Hyun, the foreign minister, said the government had set up a taskforce following the arrest of 300 South Korean nationals.

He would travel to Washington if necessary and felt a “heavy responsibility” over the arrests, he added. "The economic activities of Korean investment companies and the rights and interests of Korean citizens must not be unfairly infringed upon during US law enforcement operations," South Korea's foreign ministry said in a statement.