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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Transporting 8 illegal aliens from Texas to Maryland in a way that seems suggestive of organization and planning. I think coyotes hiding people in the frames of vehicles to sneak them across the border is a reasonable use case of the term. Carpooling to the Home Depot parking lot, OTOH, is very much not. This case seems somewhere in the middle, probably a bit closer to the former.

Is there a better term you'd suggest instead?

To meet the definition of trafficking, the people being trafficked have to be being forced in some way. There's no evidence of that here; these people could be illegal aliens who paid to get across the border, workers on a traveling contsruction crew, gang members coming back from a gang meeting, or any number of other things without it being "trafficking".

I don’t think traffic implies forced. Coyotes traffic people across the border because the people want to get across the border.

Trafficking does imply forced. Coyotes are involved in human smuggling, but not necessarily human trafficking.

Human trafficking, also known as trafficking in persons, is a crime that involves compelling or coercing a person to provide labor or services, or to engage in commercial sex acts. The coercion can be subtle or overt, physical or psychological. Exploitation of a minor for commercial sex is human trafficking, regardless of whether any form of force, fraud, or coercion was used.

Debt peonage counts, so if the coyotes are taking people across and requiring them to work off the cost of their passage, that's "human trafficking". But if they just pay to get across, it is not.

Human smuggling seems to be the better terminology. I'll use that one to describe this instead.