Ex-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly warned Sunday that the country’s largest Police Department is still badly “hemorrhaging” staff and should team up with the FBI to take on the migrant gang Tren de Aragua.
“The problem in the NYPD now is personnel. They can’t hire enough people to backfill the people that are leaving. They are still experiencing hemorrhaging,” said Kelly, the longest serving police commissioner in the history of the department, on 770 WABC radio’s “The Cats Roundtable.”
He said he doubled the size of the NYPD’s gang unit to crack down on thugs during his 12-year reign as commissioner — but today, it’s not enough for such threats as the notorious Venezuelan-based Tren gang.
“What has to be done is [creating] a task force with the NYPD involving the FBI,” Kelly said.
He said the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is unfortunately “out of the game” in New York City because of the “sanctuary’ laws that bar city officials from cooperating with them on illegal immigration and deportation.
The sanctuary law “makes New York City unsafe,” he told radio host John Catsimatidis.
“I say [team with] the FBI because, I think, they have interstate activity on the part of this particular gang, which gives them jurisdiction,” Kelly said.
The Post has reported extensively on how Tren de Aragua has infiltrated New York and other urban areas of the country.
The gang members have exploited the US migrant crisis and hold sway in and around migrant shelters, particularly the encampment on Randall’s Island off Manhattan.
The thugs terrorize Gotham with gun-toting moped-riding hoods, sell illegal guns under the very noses of private shelter security guards and run sleazy prostitution rings in neighborhoods suddenly besieged by the marauding migrants.
The gang, which also peddles a lethal fentanyl mix called Tussi, or “pink cocaine,” has grown so fast that it has overwhelmed the city’s elite police force, some observers say.
Kelly’s comments come as the NYPD is also ensnared in a FBI corruption probe that led to the departure of former Police Commissioner Edward Caban.
Mayor Eric Adams was indicted last week on bribery and wire fraud charges.
No one has been accused of wrongdoing in the NYPD, and Adams denies he committed any crimes.
Neither the NYPD nor the mayor’s office immediately responded to Post requests for comment.
Kelly, who served as commissioner of US Customs and in the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, claimed the goal of the Democratic White House’s essentially open-border policy “is to get additional voters into the country.”
