A man who lured illegal immigrant women to the U.S. with the promise of romance, then raped and abused them once they got here, has been slapped with a 97-month prison sentence.

Jorge Alberto Ramos’ case is the sort of scenario immigration experts warn is lurking behind some of the illegal immigration at the border.

Ramos, who himself came to the U.S. as an illegal immigrant, would connect with the women through an intermediary in El Salvador, plying them with gifts and money and what they thought was romance. He paid to have them smuggled through Mexico into the U.S., and once here he dropped all pretense of romance and began monstrous acts of abuse.

“For all the money I paid, you have to do it, you have to pay for it,” he told one of his victims, according to her written statement she made to the court.

She said she was raped the first day she met Ramos in the U.S., forced to have both vaginal and anal sex. It continued for eight months, with Ramos adding emotional abuse on top of the rape.

“He repeatedly told me, ‘You are nothing, you are no one.’ He said that I left him he would call immigration so they would deport me,” she said. “He locked me in his house without any keys for months and he did not allow me to go outside without him. I was his sexual slave.”

She managed to escape after eight months, but Ramos then started calling her mother and threatening her with death unless she repaid the smuggling fees he’d paid.

Prosecutors said the other two women had similar experiences, including managing to escape.

When investigators closed in on Ramos they also found a trove of child pornography on his computer and another hard drive, with 85 images and more than 40 images. The images included children as young as 3 years old being raped.

The women were smuggled between 2013 and 2017.

Ramos had been an adjunct professor at a college in New York City at the time of his arrest.

Ramos’ lawyer described for the judge his own upbringing and trip to the U.S. In El Salvador his family was caught in the civil war, hearing rocket attacks on a nearby military base and believing some of his school friends were killed.

His grandmother had him smuggled into the U.S. at the age of 13 to be with his mother, who’d snuck in a year earlier. His trip involved being nailed inside a crate and driven to Mexico City, busing to the U.S. border then walking through the desert into Arizona.

Arriving as an unaccompanied alien child, he was put on a plane and went to find his mother in New York. Despite a crime-ridden neighborhood and not speaking English, Ramos graduated high school at 16, then went on to earn a doctorate in molecular biophysics, while teaching classes.

City College, one of his schools, “indicated” to court officers that “they would rehire Mr. Ramos in the future,” Jeremy Schneider, his lawyer, told the judge. That is unlikely, though, since he faces deportation after his sentence.

“Mr. Ramos is deeply remorseful and has accepted full responsibility for his crimes,” Mr. Schneider said.

He asked for a 48-month sentence.

Prosecutors had asked for 157 months, citing the horrific nature of the abuse.

Sentencing guidelines called for 78 to 97 months. Judge John G. Koeltl went with the high guideline figure.

Most illegal immigrants are believed to be coming to the U.S. for jobs or to reunite with family, and some are escaping persecution or crime. But experts say cases like Ramos are also part of the mix, with migrants being brought for forced labor or sex.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.