Plane carrying deported South Koreans arrives in Incheon

GA leaders react to Charlie Kirk's assassination, Deported South Koreans arrive home | FOX 5 morning headlines

Georgia leaders are reacting after Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus in Utah. More than 300 deported South Koreans are back home after their country chartered a jet to fly them home. Former Atlanta Hawks player Jason Collins is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor. FOX 5 has you covered with Friday's morning headlines.

INCHEON, South Korea - More than 300 South Korean workers detained in an immigration raid at a Georgia Hyundai plant last week have arrived in South Korea.

What we know:

The group was taken back to their home country on a charter plane Thursday, and flew overnight to get back to their families.

After their charter plane, a Boeing 747-8i from Korean Air, landed at Incheon International Airport, just west of Seoul, they appeared in an arrivals hall, with senior officials including presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik clapping hands, the Associated Press reported.

What they're saying:

"We feel sorry that we failed to bring them back home much earlier, though we did our best," Kang later said in televised comments.

The plane carried 330 people who were detained in the Georgia raid — 316 of them are South Koreans, including a pregnant woman, and the rest are Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian workers. They had been held at an immigration detention center in Folkston, 285 miles (460 kilometers) southeast of Atlanta.

On the flight back home, Kang said the workers clapped and shouted with joy.

The backstory:

The South Koreans were among about 475 people detained during the Sept. 4 immigration raid at a battery factory under construction on the campus of Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant west of Savannah. Their roundup and the U.S. release of video showing some Korean workers shackled with chains around their hands, ankles and waists have caused public outrage and a sense of betrayal in South Korea, a key U.S. ally.

South Korea said Sunday it had reached an agreement with the U.S. for the Korean workers’ releases.

The South Korean government originally sought to bring them back home on Thursday, but said the plan was shelved due to a reason involving the U.S. side. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry later said President Donald Trump had halted the departure process to hear from South Korea on whether the Koreans should be allowed to stay to continue their work and help train U.S. workers or should be sent back to South Korea.

South Korean officials said that one South Korean national who has relatives in the U.S. eventually chose to stay in the U.S.

Why you should care:

The battery plant, a joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, is one of more than 20 major industrial sites that South Korean companies are currently building in the United States.

Speaking at the airport, Kim Dong Myung, the chief executive officer of LG Energy Solution, downplayed concerns that the raid would cause major delays to the launch of the Georgia factory, saying disruptions "would be within a level we can manage."