At least 10 bystanders on a Philadelphia train stood and did nothing while a Congolese illegal immigrant named Fiston Ngoy raped a woman last Wednesday night.

An off-duty employee of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority who witnessed the assault eventually called 911. Police arrived, but not until Ngoy’s victim had been violently assaulted for six minutes.

This was not Ngoy’s first offense, nor his first arrest for a sexual crime. He first entered the United States legally in 2012 on a student visa, but it was rescinded in 2015 when he stopped attending school. In 2017, he was convicted of misdemeanor sexual abuse in Washington, D.C., and sentenced to 120 days in jail.

After this sentence, Ngoy was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which began proceedings to have him deported. But he told an immigration judge he’d be persecuted if sent back to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the court granted him protection. The judge further ruled that Ngoy’s sexual abuse conviction was not a “serious crime” that should end his “withholding of removal” status.

So an illegal immigrant known to attack women was set free with a promise that he would check in regularly with ICE. It is unclear whether he did so, but he has been arrested twice more since 2018, once for disorderly conduct in May this year.

Ngoy’s rape of a young woman on a train while other passengers sat and watched coincides with the release of numbers from President Joe Biden’s Customs and Border Protection showing that more than 1.7 million illegal immigrants were detained at the Mexican border in fiscal year 2021 — an all-time record.

Hundreds of thousands of them were, like Ngoy, released into America to travel wherever they wanted with only a promise that they would contact CBP or show up in an immigration court just like the one that let Ngoy go free. In many cases, the Biden administration even arranged transport for migrants to their chosen destinations.

These immigrants can be expected to claim they’ll be persecuted and avoid deportation, although most are economic migrants who came simply to get a better job than they could elsewhere. Few if any will be deported.

On his first day in office, Biden began a 100-day deportation moratorium, and deportations have remained historically low ever since. Migrants know the president is going to let them stay, which is why record numbers are flooding our borders right now.

Biden has given special benefits to migrant criminals. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo last month directing DHS agents to be even more lenient on illegal immigrants who commit crimes in the U.S. He cited a long list of “mitigating factors” that agents must consider before seeking deportation for those who commit “serious criminal conduct.” The list includes length of time in the U.S. (Ngoy was here nine years), whether the migrant qualifies for humanitarian protection (Ngoy did), and the impact of removal on family members.

Unsurprisingly, public approval of Biden is lower for his handling of immigration than for any other of his policies. The public wants immigration laws enforced, yet the president is kowtowing to militant activists pushing for open borders and zero enforcement. The result has been moral and intellectual incoherence and scandalous bureaucratic passivity.

The cowardly passengers who did nothing to stop a rape in Philadelphia are well represented by a disgraceful administration that allows our country to be violated while it sits on its hands and dithers. The rest of the country is betrayed like the victim of Ngoy’s heinous crime.

Unsurprisingly, public approval of Biden is lower for his handling of immigration than for any other of his policies.