They keep getting busted, but it’s the cops who are handcuffed.
The pint-sized migrant punks who ganged up on an autistic teenager on Staten Island this month continue to run amok in the Big Apple — because the state’s lax laws are putting up barriers for the NYPD.
The cowardly baby-faced goons in “Diablos de la 42,” an underage offshoot of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, have racked up dozens of felony busts over the past three years, but continue to roam the streets because they’re too young to be locked up under the law.
“We’re not talking petty larceny, and he’s not stealing a stick of gum,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told The Post this week. “We’re talking robberies, we’re talking felonies, we’re talking stabbings. And there’s really no recourse.
“You know, there’s no consequences,” the chief said.
One teen terror has been so mischievous that he’s been dubbed the poster boy for the gang, whose name translates to “Devils of 42nd Street” for their reign of terror in Midtown Manhattan.
The troublesome 15-year-old has more than a dozen busts on his rap sheet — and it took the May 5 attack on the disabled teen at the Staten Island Mall to finally get him locked up on Wednesday.
Yet, he had been loose on the streets for months despite repeated busts for robbery and assault — the uncomfortable norm for dozens of other underage migrant marauders who know they’re gonna walk, law enforcement sources said.
One cocky Diablo bunch nabbed for ganging up on cops in Times Square this month was so brazen that they flashed gang signs from inside an NYPD stationhouse on pics posted to social media.
And cops were investigating an armed robbery in Lower Manhattan shortly before 4 p.m. Thursday — with the 15- and 17-year-old suspects, believed to be part of the gang, snatching a sneaker at gunpoint from another teenager before running off.
The crew, which law enforcement sources said now consists of about 40 minors, are largely migrants from Venezuela who were part of a wave of asylum seekers who began flooding the five boroughs in 2022, sources said.
Cops have busted Diablos as young as 11 for a rash of assaults and robberies in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, the sources said — with the crimes typically involving groups of young migrants who gang up on vulnerable victims like the 16-year-old autistic boy at the mall.
“It makes me sick these kids are still here,” the victim’s mother said Wednesday. “They should have been deported a long time ago. I had to keep my son home for a week because he was so scared.”
The Diablos identify with their “older brothers” in TdA, a violent gang that established a criminal foothold in the city by recruiting new members from inside tax-funded migrant shelters.
Crews from both gangs have specialized in violent robberies, including grab-and-run scooter and moped robberies and armed robberies of retailers in the city.
According to police stats, TdA and Diablos together have accounted for more than 400 arrests since the start of 2022 through the end of April this year — including nearly 120 busts for robbery, 82 for grand larceny and more than 50 for petty larceny.
Most of the crimes involved some form of assault, the data shows.
“You know, this goes for their older brothers, TdA as well,” Kenny said. “Don’t think that it’s just a juvenile problem.”
Albany’s Raise the Age initiative was part of the sweeping criminal justice reforms that critics contend has led to a spike in crime in the Empire State.
The statute, which was implemented in two stages in 2017 and 2018, raised the age of criminal responsibility in the state to 18, and allowed for criminal defendants to remain in juvenile facilities as old as the age of 21.
Before, suspects as young as 16 could be automatically tried in adult criminal court.
On the heels of Raise the Age, state lawmakers also adopted measures that prohibited judges from setting bail on nearly all criminal cases, save for the most violent felonies.
Despite several tweaks spearheaded by Gov. Kathy Hochul, most crimes remain ineligible for bail.
For New York’s Finest, that means many of the migrant gangbangers they pick up are released without bail because their crimes don’t qualify for bail under the statutes.
For underage migrants, the ride is even sweeter.
The teens are typically released to their parents with a future family court date — where the most they can get is a reprimand and a slap on the wrist.
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