A previously deported illegal alien convicted of raping a child has been sentenced to less than two years in prison for re-entering the United States after the sanctuary city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, protected him from being deported.

Honduran illegal alien and convicted child rapist Juan Ramon-Vasquez was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for illegally re-entering the U.S. after being deported in May 2009.

After being deported in 2009, Ramon-Vasquez was found to be living back in the country in March 2014 in Philadelphia. At the time, the illegal alien child rapist was in Philadelphia Prison Department custody, but the local authorities refused to turn Ramon-Vasquez over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for deportation due to the city’s sanctuary city policy that shields criminal illegal aliens from arrest and deportation.

Once released from Philadelphia officials’ custody, Ramon-Vasquez went on to repeatedly rape a child and was convicted for the rapes, being sentenced to eight to 20 years in state prison. The illegal aliens’ federal prison sentence will now be added on to his state sentence for the child rapes.

If not for Philadelphia’s sanctuary city policy, prosecutors and ICE officials said the repeated rape of the illegal aliens’ child victim would have never occurred.

“The facts of this case illustrate all too well the direct threat to public safety caused by the City of Philadelphia’s sanctuary city policies,” U.S. Attorney McSwain said in a statement. “After the City let this criminal loose on the streets of Philadelphia, Ramon-Vasquez repeatedly raped an innocent child. If the ICE detainer had been honored by local law enforcement, this crime never would have happened, and the victim would have been spared horrendous physical and mental trauma.”

As Breitbart News reported, ICE agents arrested nearly 5,000 illegal alien convicted sex offenders last year, alone. Another nearly 4,000 illegal aliens arrested by ICE last year had been convicted of sexual assault.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.