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They’re getting out of Dodge.
Migrants shacked up at Big Apple shelters are jittery over promised ICE raids on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration Monday — and many are ditching their tax-funded digs to duck deportation.
“It is better to leave before,” Venezuelan migrant Kervin Nava, 31, said outside a Long Island City shelter Sunday. “I am making arrangements, somewhere else.”
One Manhattan migrant who asked to be identified only as Rafael said the fear has gripped his shelter.
“It’s in God’s hands, but there are people who have started leaving the hotels because they’re scared,” he told The Post. “When ICE came a few weeks ago they had an arrest warrant for someone who lived here.
“Nothing they could do.”
Other migrants said they were just angry at their suddenly dim prospects.
Trump has long promised mass deportations of illegal immigrants in the US, and has designated Tom Homan, his new tough-as-nails border czar, to start making it happen as soon as he’s in office.
Homan, who has identified immigration asylum cities like Chicago and New York as the first priorities, told Fox News Sunday that he’s “reconsidering” when and how to pull the trigger after some details of the planned raids were leaked to the press over the past week.
“It’s going to be a big raid all across the country,” he told Fox on Friday. “Chicago is just one of many places. We’ve got 24 [ICE] field offices across the country. On Tuesday, ICE is finally going to go out and do their job. We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens.
“That’s what’s going to happen.”
Delayed or not, Homan assured the raids are coming — and it has migrants shaking in their boots.
“Some people think they will come in buses and load people up from the shelters, take them to the airport,” migrant Limame Gueye, 29, told The Post.
Colombian national Kevin Llena said he’s been waiting one year at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown waiting for a work permit — and now is concerned it may never come.
“The idea of raids at the hotel, that worries me,” said Llena, 29. “We work hard to keep up with the news every day, but hearing about raids worries me.
“I have my wife and two kids here. I try to keep my head down and get work done, but if something like a raid happens, I need to protect my family,” he said.
Rafael, a 35-year-old Venezuelan national, said he still doesn’t believe that Trump will kick migrants who are willing to work and make their own way out of the country.
“Trump won’t send people back who are here to work and make an honest living,” he said. “Only the people who are causing problems or relying on the government.”
Others, like Francis, a 44-year-old Venezuelan mom, are leaving everything to fate.
“Everything is in God’s hands,” she said. “I just have to trust him.”
Officials at City Hall said the number of migrants housed at city shelters, once surpassing 65,000, has waned and is now under 51,000, with the city announcing it will close larger facilities like tent cities at Randall’s Island in Manhattan and Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
City reps declined to comment when asked if migrants had been fleeing the shelters in recent days.
However, the migrant crisis has presented a challenge for the NYPD, with the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua establishing a foothold in the shelter system since 2022, wreaking havoc in the streets.
Additional reporting by Carl Campaine and Jennie Taer
English (US)