NYC ICE director: It’d ‘take a lifetime’ to deport city’s migrant criminals

There are thousands of migrant criminals roaming the streets of Gotham, the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s NYC field office told The Post.

“In New York City, it would take a lifetime to clear the city of the criminals that we have” if the status quo remains the same, Kenneth Genalo said Friday in his first interview since Donald Trump was elected president.

“We need additional resources,” insisted the 33-year ICE veteran who oversees nearly 400 staffers as regional director of the NYC-area office.

“In New York City, it would take a lifetime to clear the city of the criminals that we have,” the city’s ICE director Kenneth Genalo said. ICE

“The fact is that I have to focus all of my resources on the worst of the worst, the most egregious violators. All I can tell you is we have leads that we work every day — and it’s not in the hundreds,” added Genalo, all but admitting for the first time that the number is in the thousands.

Of the nearly 7.8 million illegal immigrants in the United States, 662,586 are convicted felons or havecriminal charges pending, the agency said of data through July 21.

More than 223,000 migrants have poured into the Big Apple since the immigration crisis began in the spring of 2022 — and at least 58,000 are still being cared for by taxpayers in city-funded shelters. ICE did not provide the exact number of criminals among them.

Genalo wouldn’t say how the agency will transform under Trump, who plans to launch a mass deportation of illegal, criminal migrants after being sworn in as president in January.

But he’s so “frustrated” over New York’s sanctuary laws preventing migrant criminals from being rounded up and deported under his watch that he wants to testify before the City Council and “educate” it’s far-left majority about the damage these policies are doing.

“The only people they’re shielding are the criminals, and they’re shielding the criminals from us,” Genalo said.

He continued: “The majority of these crimes that are being committed are against the most vulnerable people in the community, and that’s the migrant females and the migrant children. I don’t understand how they believe sanctuary policies are helping or assisting.”

Genalo said immigration-law enforcement in NYC was all but thrown out the window when avowed Marxist Bill de Blasio became mayor. In 2014, de Blasio teamed up with the Council and signed a bill into law barring the NYPD from working with federal immigration officials when they’re seeking to boot dangerous migrants from the US.

Tents house migrants at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Aristide Economopoulos

Then, in 2018, he took it a step further by issuing citywide guidance and new NYPD protocols to codify the Big Apple’s policy of not cooperating with the feds.

The revisions have had serious consequences. Murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was murdered by an illegal migrant who had been in custody in NYC on child-endagerment charges but set free, might still be alive if the woke rules were not in effect, critics have told The Post.

In February, Mayor Eric Adams called for the sanctuary rules to be loosened so migrants “suspected” of “serious” crimes could also be turned over to ICE. However, he doesn’t have the political support needed on the City Council to change the laws.

“The mayor knows we need to cooperate,” said Genalo. “He sees what’s going on in New York City, and he wants help from the federal government.”