A South Korean worker who witnessed a massive immigration operation at a car factory in Georgia has told the BBC of panic and confusion as federal agents descended on the site and arrested hundreds.
The man, who asked to remain anonymous, was at the factory which is jointly owned by Hyundai and LG Energy when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 475 people, including 300 South Korean nationals, with some being led away in chains.
He said he first became aware of the Thursday morning raid when he and his colleagues received a deluge of phone calls from company bosses. 'Multiple phone lines were ringing and the message was to shut down operations,' he said.
As news spread of the raid, the largest of its kind since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the man said panicked family members tried to contact the workers.
'They were detained and they left all their cell phones in the office. They were getting calls, but we couldn't answer because [the office] was locked,' he said.
According to US officials, some workers tried to flee including several who jumped into a nearby sewage pond. They were separated into groups based on nationality and visa status, before being processed and loaded onto multiple coaches.
Some 400 state and federal agents had gathered outside the sprawling $7.6bn factory complex, which is about half an hour from the city of Savannah, before entering the site at around 10:30 on Thursday.
The 3,000-acre complex opened last year and workers there assemble electric vehicles. Immigration officials had been investigating alleged illegal employment practices at an electric vehicle battery plant that is being built in the compound.
The operation ultimately became the largest single-site immigration enforcement operation in the history of Homeland Security investigations, officials said, adding that hundreds of people who were not legally allowed to work in the US were detained.
BBC Verify has been reviewing footage posted on social media and apparently filmed inside the battery plant. One video shows men lined up in a room as a masked man, wearing a vest with the initials HSI - Homeland Security Investigations - and holding a walkie-talkie, tells them: 'We're Homeland Security, we have a search warrant for the whole site. We need construction to cease immediately, we need all work to end on the site right now.'
The man said he was 'shocked but not surprised' by the immigration operation. He said the vast majority of the workers detained were mechanics installing production lines at the site and were employed by a contractor.
He also said a minority of those arrested had been sent from head office in Seoul and had been carrying out training, which the BBC has not been able to confirm.
The man said he believed nearly all the workers had some legal right to be in the US but were on the wrong type of visas or their right to work had expired.
Hyundai and LG Energy said they were 'co-operating fully with the appropriate authorities regarding activity at our construction site. To assist their work, we have paused construction.'
ICE has released footage of the raid showing federal agents arriving in armored vehicles and lining up workers outside the factory, with some shown chained together before being loaded onto coaches.
The worker we spoke to said he had sympathy for those who had been detained, but he said a crackdown was not a surprise under the Trump administration. 'Their slogan is America first, and if you work in America legally, you won't have an issue,' he noted.
'I mean, after this happened, many companies will think again about investing in the United States because setting up a new project might take so much longer than before,' he added.
When the BBC visited the site over the weekend there were few visible signs of Thursday's raid, although two security teams asked us to move on as we filmed from the side of the road.
