During the first four days of Operation Tidal Wave, a multi-agency immigration-enforcement crackdown that is still ongoing, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) worked with Florida law enforcement to arrest nearly 800 illegal immigrants.
“I think the main reason why this operation is significant is because it’s the first of its kind,” acting ICE director Todd Lyons told ABC News. “It’s one that not only we’ve been doing what we have, but we have surged all our federal partners together along with Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement [and] Removal Operations, which are all the enforcement arms of ICE, but we’re also using all our 287(g) partners in the state of Florida. We’re using state, local and county law enforcement agencies to assist us in our operations.
Of the 780 arrests, 275 were arrested with final orders of removal, which allows them to be removed from the country in short order. According to National Review ICE’s 287(g) authority allows state and local law enforcement agencies to be deputized to arrest illegal immigrants. Nearly 230 Florida law enforcement agencies have signed 287(g) agreements, including 130 that are under a task force model allowing the agencies to enforce some immigration powers with ICE oversight.
“So this is one of the first large-scale missions we’ve done like this ever,” Lyons said. “We brought a ‘whole the government’ approach with cooperative jurisdictions that want to help ICE secure communities in neighborhoods and remove public safety threats from our neighborhoods.”
“State troopers, local police officers, county sheriffs — they’re our eyes and ears,” he said. “They encountered these criminal aliens out and about during their regular duties, and they’re able to go ahead and identify those public safety threats for us.”
According to Fox News, the arrests included a convicted Colombian murderer and several illegal immigrants who are said to be gang members.
Among those arrested include:
Jose Sanchez Reyes, who entered the U.S. as a getaway after having been convicted of homicide in Colombia. Rafael Juarez Cabrera is allegedly a member of MS-13 and has been convicted of felony reentry after having illegally reentered the U.S. three times. Agents also detained Savva Klishchevskii of Russia, who has an Interpol Red Notice for vehicular manslaughter.
