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Notes -
Which side? I'd guess that more than 0 but less than 10% of those arrested were not violating the terms of their visa. It's still obnoxious to do a raid; I'd expect violations like this by a corporation (especially when they were countenanced by the previous administration) to be handled via a warning/demand to the corporation. Of course, if they were warned and just didn't listen... there probably isn't any escalation that isn't obnoxious.
I would not be surprised if half of the workers were arguably violating the terms of their visas, but I expect the modal case here looks like "a worker for one of Hyundai's subcontractors was here on a B1 to suprvise the installation of equipment, and demonstrated to a worker on site how the machine was supposed to be hooked up when they're technically only allowed to describe" not like "Hyundai shipped in 500 Koreans on tourist visas to do unskilled construction work building the factory". In other words, I expect that the majority of detainees were authorized to work in the US, but I would be unsurprised if some were doing types of work they were not authorized to do, though I expect the majority were at least ambiguously authorized to do the sort of work they were doing.
Under my model I would be unsurprised if e.g. DOJ and Korean company disagree about whether work should fall under "contracted after-sales service" or "supervising installation of equipment". But under my model "chain them all up" is not a reasonable response to "people who are not flight risks were doing normal business things but we think they might have technically violated the terms of their visa, we'll find out in court".
I am unsure if there are any good and timely metrics but I would be quite surprised to see e.g. table 42d here showing 475 more (or even half that more) noncitizen enforcement returns to South Korea in 2025 than in 2024 - for reference the current latest data is 713 returns in 2022. (The latest available year here is 2022, so it might be a while before 2025 daya shows up). And my read is that DHS would enforce if they have even a vaguely plausible case of visa violation, so I think absence of this particular evidence would be evidence of absence of such a case.
There might be less janky ways to operationalize this, I'm open if you have ideas.
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