Metro

JFK terror griller: ICE froze me out of job

Embattled anti-terrorism chief Janet Napolitano is being sued by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who claims he was yanked from his post interviewing suspicious travelers at JFK Airport after making a series of employment-discrimination complaints, The Post has learned.

Sunil Walia, an Indian-born Sikh, was recruited to join the Homeland Security Department after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and is among the few agents who knows languages spoken by many terrorists.

In 2007, he won a government award that noted his “outstanding debriefs of targeted arriving passengers” at JFK, many of whom were denied entry to the United States as suspected threats to national security, court papers say.

But after filing two successful discrimination complaints, Walia, 45, says he was reassigned in 2010 to a downtown Manhattan office where he now works mainly on “administrative immigration matters.”

The transfer cost him a shot at a coveted job with the elite Joint Terrorism Task Force last year, because only agents with two or more years in their current assignment were eligible to apply.

Walia’s Brooklyn federal court suit seeks $2.5 million in damages for alleged discrimination and retaliation.

Walia is pressing his case amid a surge in retaliation complaints by ICE workers since President Obama put Napolitano in charge of the DHS, which oversees ICE.

Napolitano was also slapped with a suit earlier this year by the head of ICE’s New York City office, James Hayes Jr., who claims he was demoted from a top job in Washington due to anti-male bias.

Hayes’ suit led ICE Chief of Staff Suzanne Barr to resign last week.

An ICE spokeswoman declined to comment on Walia’s case.