An illegal immigrant was sentenced to 15 years in prison for shooting and seriously injuring an off-duty border patrol officer in a brazen Manhattan robbery last summer as the judge looked to make an example out of him.

Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, 22, was handed the sentence by US District Court Judge Loretta Preska Monday in a federal courtroom packed with Border Patrol agents.

Preska said a stiff sentence was needed to deter other migrants from breaking the law.

“There is an overwhelming need to send a message to people who come to the US to commit crimes,” she said, before doling out the max allowable sentence to Mora Nunez, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to a federal weapons charge.

The Dominican national still faces 25 years-to-life in a separate pending attempted murder case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Another Dominican migrant, 23-year-old Christhian Aybar-Berroa, was separately sentenced to spend 12 years and seven months in federal prison for his role as an accomplice who helped Mora Nunez escape the violent July 2025 robbery on a motorbike.

Both Mora Nunez and Aybar-Berroa are in the US illegally and will be deported after serving out their sentences for their guilty pleas to possessing ammunition as illegal aliens, according to the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office.

Mora Nunez had crossed the Arizona border in April 2023, prosecutors said.

He had stacked up a considerable criminal rap sheet in his time in the US, police sources told The Post, including arrests for allegedly assaulting a pregnant woman and threatening to kill another migrant with a machete.

In court on Monday, Mora Nunez choked back tears as he apologized for the violent attack while the wounded officer, Joshua Sinclair, watched from the gallery.

“I have been separated from my little girl who I love very much, I really wish to be with her and be a better role model,” he said, speaking in Spanish in written comments translated by an interpreter. 

“I wish I could go back in time and avoid everything that has happened,” he added.

Mora Nunez had shot Sinclair in the face after trying to rob the off-duty border cop, who had been sitting with a female companion on a rock along the Hudson River in Fort Washington Park just after midnight, according to police. Prosecutors said he’d stolen another woman’s cellphone minutes earlier.

After Mora Nunez shot Sinclair in the face, the officer quickly returned fire and struck his attacker twice before Mora Nunez fled on Aybar-Berroa’s moped, prosecutors said.

Judge Preska said Monday that while she admired the young father’s hope to better himself, she was not confident he had learned to respect the law, pointing to prosecutors’ claims that he had bragged about his charges to other inmates while locked up at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

“Nothing instills any confidence that he has learned to respect the law, and the sentence should reflect that,” the judge said.

Officer Sinclair has been unable to return to work and is still recovering and undergoing facial surgeries 14 months after the attack, according to prosecutors.

Mora Nunez and Aybar-Berroa, who is charged in state court as well, have pleaded not guilty in that case, and are due back in court in November.