Rudy Giuliani Says He Wished He Could Have Deported All Illegal Immigrants

From FoxNews.com:

WASHINGTON — Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani — whose GOP rivals have been hammering him for weeks, accusing him of running a "sanctuary city" friendly to illegal immigrants — now says he wanted to depart all 400,000 of them from New York City, but federal officials' incompetence made him tailor policy friendly to immigrants.

"If they could [have deported them], I would have have turned all the people over. It would have helped me. I would have had a smaller population. I would have had fewer problems," Giuliani said in an interview given for an upcoming book.

Click here to read the excerpt from, "Meet the Next President," published in The (Washington, D.C.) Examiner.

Giuliani has faced heavy criticism from his more conservative rivals along the campaign trail for a number of moderate positions he has taken on immigration, homosexuality and abortion.

With respect to immigration, Giuliani in 1994 said: "Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens. ... If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you're one of the people who we want in this city. You're somebody that we want to protect, and we want you to get out from under what is often a life of being like a fugitive."

In the interview, Giuliani laid blame on the U.S. immigration system, saying that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service — now Immigration and Customs Enforcement — was unable to handle the crush of deportation referrals made by city law enforcement. Given that, he said, he was left with a population that could either be marginalized or put under the law.

"My objective was to make New York City safe," Giuliani told author Bill Sammon.