ICE deported a 46-year-old illegal alien from Mexico earlier this month after he finished a prison sentence in Tennessee for raping a child. The man had already been removed from the United States once before. He came back. That's the part people need to understand about this job: removal only sticks if somebody enforces it.

According to the Tennessee Star, the alien was released from a Tennessee Department of Correction facility after serving his sentence, and ICE took him into custody and put him on a removal flight back to Mexico.

Here's how this is supposed to work, for anyone who's never dealt with it. When an illegal alien finishes a criminal sentence, the ideal play is a detainer. ICE files it with the prison, the prison holds the individual for a short window past his release date, and ICE picks him up at the door. That leaves no window of opportunity and no chance to vanish into a community. When detainers are honored, this stuff is clean. When they're not, you get a rapist walking out the front gate with a head start.

In this case the system functioned. ICE got the man, processed him, and removed him. Good. That's one sex offender who will never victimize an American kid again unless he sneaks back in, and given his history, that's a real possibility worth watching.

Because this is his second removal. He was deported once, reentered illegally, which is itself a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. 1326, and then committed rape against a child on American soil. Every one of those crimes was preventable at the border. That's arithmetic, not a talking point. An alien who isn't here can't commit a crime in Tennessee. The open-borders crowd finds that sentence somehow controversial. I find it obvious.

Reentry after removal carries real federal time, too, and I'd have liked to see those charges filed before the deportation went through. A prosecuted reentry case puts a conviction on the books and a prison sentence ahead of the removal, which slows down the circular trip. But a removal is a removal, and the man is gone. I'll take the win without complaining too loudly about the route.

The pattern here is familiar to anybody who worked the border. A meaningful share of ICE's criminal docket is made up of people who were already removed at least once. They come back because for decades the cost of coming back was close to zero. Every previously removed criminal who gets deported a second time is a data point in favor of taking reentry seriously.

One deportation won't make the evening news. It should. A child rapist who reentered after removal is off American soil, and the agents who made that happen did their jobs the right way, paperwork and all. Detainer, custody, removal flight. Clean sequence, start to finish.

The scoreboard: one child rapist removed, second time around. Here's hoping we don't need a third.