Indefensible judgment

Only in Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s fringe-dwelling City Council would an unprecedented $26 million to provide free, taxpayer-funded attorneys to 15,000 immigrants facing deportation be greeted as an outrage demanding immediate correction. Mayor de Blasio’s sin? Leaving out of the program human traffickers, violent assailants and other serious felons, a tiny but real fraction of New York City’s undocumented immigrants.

Hence a frenzied few hours before the City Council passed next year’s $85.2 billion budget, Mark-Viverito inserted a line guaranteeing that all immigrants detained while awaiting deportation proceedings will get a lawyer no matter their criminal conviction record, provided their low income qualifies them.

For the love of this immigrant-built, immigrant-loving sanctuary city, Mark-Viverito should show a fraction of the respect for the taxpayers footing the bill — not to mention the noncriminal immigrants who need legal help just as badly.

Much credit remains due to Mark-Viverito for launching the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project in 2013 before assuming the speakership, and since nurturing it into a $6 million-a-year success serving hundreds of clients annually, most of them detained by the feds with their deportation cases heard at Manhattan’s Varick St. immigration court.

But a few years in, certain glaring problems are clear. One: Quite a few of the detainees, who are a small fraction of the great many immigrants facing deportation, have criminal records, some of them serious.

Among them at any time are dozens with records so serious that the City of New York hands people with them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement from police or prison custody — yet here we are then paying for their defense.

What’s more, if they are poor enough to qualify for the Council aid, they were eligible for taxpayer-funded criminal defense. They had a fair shot at American justice, including appeals, and lost.

De Blasio was absolutely right to say that for the city to then pay for lawyers to ward off deportation makes no sense; better to reserve limited public funds for otherwise law-abiding immigrants.

What’s more: A significant share of detained immigrants the Council, with tax dollars, paid to defend are not New York City residents and are benefiting from the city’s aid only through the accident of having their case heard here.

De Blasio must get out his rusty veto pen, never before used, and get on with a deportation defense program worthy of our city’s values.