‘Tidal Wave’: ICE arrests 800 illegal immigrants in Florida operation

Authorities identified Jose Sanchez Reyes, a Colombian national convicted of homicide in his home country. Also included in the arrests was Rafael Juarez Cabrera, a Guatemalan national and alleged MS-13 member who had illegally reentered the U.S. three times and was convicted of felony reentry.

The operation also resulted in the arrest of Savva Klishchevskii, a Russian national wanted in Russia for vehicular manslaughter.

Operation Tidal Wave utilizes ICE’s 287g authority, which deputizes state and local law enforcement officers to arrest individuals illegally present in the US.

"I think the main reason why this operation is significant is because it's the first of its kind," Todd Lyons, the acting ICE director, explained to 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.”

"So this is one of the first large-scale missions we've done like this ever," he continued. "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."

ICE officials and Florida law enforcement arrested 275 people with final orders of removal in the first four days, This means these individuals can be removed from the US in short order.