This year, US President and xenophobe-in-chief Donald Trump finagled "safe third country agreements" with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, allowing the United States to deport aspiring asylum seekers to the very region many of them are fleeing in the first place.
Even Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele - the possessor of the enlightened opinion that "President Trump is very nice and cool, and I'm nice and cool, too ... we both use Twitter a lot" - recently admitted that his country needs to be "safer" and that its asylum capacities are currently nonexistent.
Indeed, the fact that the homicide rates in the three allegedly "safe third countries" are consistently among the highest in the world should be an easy indicator that they are anything but safe. Femicides abound.
The US's own role in fuelling violence in Central America's Northern Triangle has been well known for decades - from its habit of backing right-wing dictators and death squads to its continuing support for homicidal state security forces. In the aftermath of the US-facilitated coup in Honduras in 2009, that nation became more unsafe than ever.
And across the region, the US-exported model of neoliberal oppression has constituted a form of violence in its own right - perpetuating extreme inequality and condemning the masses to often existence-imperilling economic misery.
But one of the most crucial aspects to consider when contemplating US complicity in the appalling unsafety of the Northern Triangle is the sheer volume of US weapons circulating in the region.
In March, Foreign Policy reported that Trump was "sending guns south as migrants flee north", with his administration "push[ing] to weaken oversight of gun exports".
And yet the cross-border mobility of US armaments is nothing new. Back in 2014, Harry Penate - the former attache to Central America for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives - spoke candidly about the significant role American guns were playing in the epidemic of violence in the region, which was already causing a northward exodus of refugees.
According to Penate's estimate at the time, half of the illegal weapons in murder-plagued El Salvador were from the US.
Flash forward to 2018, and the New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer cited reports that 49 percent of illegal and unregistered weapons recovered in El Salvador came from the US; in Honduras, it was 46 percent, and in Guatemala 29. While the causes of Central American violence were manifold, Blitzer noted, "American firepower facilitates it." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.