An undocumented migrant worker injured while fleeing an immigration crackdown has been recognized as having suffered an industrial accident. After the Ulsan District Court ruled that the Korea Workers' Compensation & Welfare Service acted unlawfully in denying his medical benefits claim, migrant support groups urged the agency to accept the ruling and scrap the internal guideline behind it.
The Ulsan District Court on the 29th disclosed that on the 22nd of this month it had ruled in favor of a Sri Lankan migrant worker identified as Iranga in his lawsuit against the agency seeking to overturn the denial of medical benefits. On June 20, 2024, Iranga broke his leg and injured ankle ligaments at a workplace in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, while trying to evade a joint crackdown by the Ulsan and Daegu immigration offices. His application for medical benefits was rejected, and after his administrative appeal was also dismissed, he filed suit in April last year.
The agency is said to have denied the claim under its "Guidelines for Handling Accidents Occurring While Fleeing Crackdowns on Undocumented Residents," citing the absence of any instruction from the employer to flee or of training on how to respond to crackdowns. The guidelines, adopted in March 2019, recognize such cases as work-related accidents only when three conditions are all met: the employer knew the worker was undocumented, the employer instructed the worker to flee, and the sequence of actions was connected to the performance of work.
The court found that Iranga's flight served his own interests but also served to help the employer, who had hired an undocumented worker, avoid fines and other penalties. While no direct instruction to flee was established, the court cited evidence that broad instructions to flee in the event of a crackdown had been given at the workplace and that workers' sharing of crackdown information and the installation of ropes had been tacitly condoned. It concluded that it was reasonable to view the injury as one sustained while performing work under an employment contract and under the employer's supervision and control.
In a statement the same day, the Ulsan-North Gyeongsang Joint Response Council on Migrants and the network "Saram-i Watda — Network for the Abolition of Discrimination Against Migrant Workers" said discriminatory application of the law had blocked treatment and that, without health insurance coverage, the injured worker had been left to shoulder enormous medical bills. They demanded that the agency accept the court's judgment, immediately recognize the injury as work-related, and abolish the guidelines. Whether the agency will appeal has not been confirmed.
This is not the first case in which an injury during a crackdown has been recognized as work-related. Two Vietnamese migrant workers who fell while fleeing a crackdown in Sacheon, South Gyeongsang Province, in September 2025 were granted industrial accident approval in January this year, according to the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions' South Gyeongsang regional chapter.
