(CNN) When US President Donald Trump demands that Mexico "fix" its immigration problem, he should really look to the spiraling collapse of Central America.

The limitless flow of people towards the US-Mexico border begins with the tortured descent of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador into the abyss. The Northern Triangle, as the countries are known, is burdened with a myriad of issues, the top of which is the multi-billion dollar drug trade. And it is this very place that the Trump administration has announced it will cut aid to , rather than boosting it to fight these problems.

The official US figures for apprehensions on the US-Mexico border speak volumes about where the people Trump speaks so disparagingly of hail from. In the first four months of this year, there have been nearly as many -- or more, depending on the statistical category you look at -- single adults, families and unaccompanied children coming from the three Northern Triangle countries than in all of 2018.

By April, twice as many people had traveled in a family unit from Guatemala and Honduras to the US border then during all of last year. And the numbers from Mexico are dropping, changing the dynamic of the migration phenomenon in Central America.

For many in the region, getting out has understandably become a matter of survival. The nations of the Northern Triangle jostle for the ugly position as the world's murder capital, both because of the gang violence spawned by the drug trade and because of a lack of solid government. El Salvador's capital can at times feel like it is dealing with a full-scale armed insurgency with its territorial and community allegiances, and police skulking around areas where they know they can and cannot go.