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I suppose I'm just not enough of a lawcuck to understand why this is being blown up into such an ordeal. The guy is an El Salvadorean citizen, was not in the US legally, and could have been deported to any country (besides El Salvadore) and then, from there, immediately deported again to El Salvadore and this would have somehow been fine. But because some braindead or politically captured bureaucrat rubber stamped his paperwork where he claimed he'd be in danger if he returned to his own country they granted a targeted stay of deportation, which precipitated this entire clusterfuck.
The guy was married to a US citizen ("Jennifer Vasquez Sura", okay...) who had filed a restraining order against him. Not exactly Elite Human Capital. The wife had two children from a previous relationship who are "disabled". Garcia's own child is also "disabled". This context is supposed to engender some kind of sympathy, I suspect, but as someone who actually interacts with people of this socioeconomic strata I am more inclined to believe they were scamming government benefits, and the wife's current PR blitz is a consequence of her smelling blood in the water chasing a fat legal payout.
I will freely concede that it would be alarming if the Trump administration deployed this "strategy" to consign innocent American citizens to a third world gulag without legal recourse or due process, but I don't think Trump is "based" enough to do that. (No, the off-hand comment he made to Bukele about sending "homegrowns" does not count, as it was clearly about -- legally -- sending convicted criminals to serve out their sentences more cheaply than can be done domestically.) This attempt to force the executive to (presumably, temporarily) return one particular illegal comes across as political theater and legal chicanery. Frankly I'm hoping Trump makes a show of retrieving Garcia on Air Force One, landing in the US for a photo op, then clasping him in chains and loading him back on the plane, to dump him in Argentina or somewhere else -- from where he'll be repatriated straight into El Salvadore's "black site prison", hopefully for life.
There was some minor procedural error, therefore we must make an elaborate show of correcting it, at great expense, to achieve an outcome that will immediately collapse back to the current status quo. This is your brain on legalism.
Deporting him is one thing, but sending him straight to the gangster's prison for the worst people imaginable because he wore a chicago bulls hat is a bit much. They should at least ask Bukele to let him out.
Also, he got stopped doing what looked rather like human trafficking in 2022, but the Biden FBI told the locals to let him go.
"Human trafficking" in this case being a scare term meaning "He was an illegal alien driving around a van with other illegal aliens".
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.
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.
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