How is it that there are 20-year-old illegal alien men in our public schools, walking the same halls as junior high girls?

Last week, Jonathan Coreas-Salamanca, 20, and Ivan Reyes Lopez, 19, were each arrested in two different Montgomery County, Maryland, high schools for raping two 11-year-old girls outside school.

WJLA reports that Coreas-Salamanca attends Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring. He is accused of having multiple sexual encounters with an 11-year-old after the victim’s father found salacious text messages on her phone. ICE has lodged a detainer on Coreas-Salamanca, who is an illegal alien from El Salvador.

There is no information available on Lopez’s immigration status. He is accused of luring a different 11-year-old girl to an apartment and raping her. But according to WJLA, he recently arrived from Honduras a few years ago and spoke in court through a Spanish interpreter. It is therefore very possible he also initially came here during the wave of Central American unaccompanied alien children and, along with thousands of others, was resettled in Maryland and perhaps was given some sort of legal status.

While criminal alien activity in general, and child sexual assaults in particular, are nothing new in this notorious sanctuary county, this incident raises other important questions. Why are illegal aliens placed in our public schools even as adults?

WJLA’s Kevin Lewis reached out to Montgomery County Public Schools for comment. He asked them how many 19- to 21-year-olds are in the school system, whether they are kept separate from the minors, and what the statute is that mandates their enrollment.

The school district was extremely defensive about the obvious questions the local parent body is likely also asking.

"There is no data suggesting that being a high school student at 19, 20, or 21 makes a person more or less likely to commit a crime," spokeswoman Gboyinde Onijala wrote in an email to the local ABC affiliate. "Any suggestion otherwise is wrong and trying to make a connection there to students enrolled in our district is wrong."

The problem in this case is that while, generally speaking, it’s uncommon for 20- or 21-year-olds to be in high school, the illegal alien UAC resettlement program has upended that natural balance. UACs are resettled all over the country, including in schools that weren’t traditionally known for having adult kids. They go wherever their sponsors live, who are usually also illegal aliens.

Aside from a few obvious resettlement jurisdictions, such as Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles, Montgomery County and its adjacent neighbor Prince George’s County have been inundated with more illegal alien teens than any other part of the country. This is a big part of why the D.C. suburbs have seen one of the worst resurgences of MS-13 and criminal alien gang activity since 2014.

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the two D.C. suburban counties have taken in 11,874 UACs combined from fiscal year 2014 through December 2019. But that number doesn’t include the countless thousands of teens who likely came in as part of “family units” and wound up settling in the same communities over the past few years.

As former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in May 2018, “We’re letting people in who are gang members.”

Maryland now has the highest concentration of Salvadorans in the country. Not surprisingly, it also has the most MS-13 prosecutions of any federal district.

“Many of these alien children, who have no parents, no family structure — we’re releasing them into communities where they’re vulnerable to recruitment by MS-13,” said Rosenstein, who previously served as U.S. attorney in Maryland. “And so some of these kids who come in without any gang ties develop gang ties as a result of the pressure that they face from people that they confront in the communities.”

Many of these “children” are already in their late teens when they arrive, and many have been known to lie about their age because they know that is their ticket into the country. Then they begin attending classes with ninth-graders or those even younger and remain there into their 20s. According to ORR, over 70 percent of the UACs are 15 or older, and roughly 70 percent in recent years have been male.

The problem of illegal aliens in their older teens or early 20s flooding school systems is also evident in Long Island, New York. In a letter to schools from New York’s attorney general and state commissioner of education, school officials were reminded of the “right of undocumented students” to enroll in schools and that officials “should not ask questions related to immigration status that may reveal a child’s immigration status, such as requesting a Social Security number.”

“We also have advised that, while school districts may need to collect certain data pursuant to state and/or federal laws, they should do so after a student has enrolled in school so as not to inadvertently give the impression that information related to immigration status will be used in making enrollment determinations,” wrote New York State Commissioner of Education Mary Ellen Elia and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in the 2017 letter.

None of the politicians have given any thought to what this does to our communities. Prince George’s County, which was once a thriving African-American middle class area, is now full of MS-13 and 18th Street gang wars in the schools. The same is true for Montgomery County schools. In December, several 18th Street Gang members were arrested for a gruesome murder in Montgomery County, after police failed to honor prior ICE detainers for previous arrests.

The UAC loophole remains the biggest open-borders loophole we have and poses the most significant threat to our communities. The Trump administration can reinterpret the statute administratively to properly reflect the fact that these teens are self-trafficked by their families, not victims of trafficking. The UAC program essentially amounts to the government constructing an MS-13 smuggling bridge to our country and making the American citizen pay for it.

American taxpayers should demand a new bill of rights stating a simple proposition: The American people should not have to pay the cost or endure the crimes of those who break our laws and come here illegally.