The Right Is Blatantly Misusing the Term “Human Trafficking”

White House spiritual advisor Paula White recently visited an immigration detention facility holding children. In the In news articles covering her visit, White repeatedly refers to the children at the facility—whom she says were unaccompanied minors—as the recipients of human trafficking.

White recently visited the Youth for Tomorrow facility in Bristow, Virginia, a foster facility that is taking care of several unaccompanied immigrant children who were trafficked into the U.S. from countries like and Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

After visiting the center, White told CBN News in an interview published Monday that what is being portrayed in the media about the situation is misleading…

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She said that each child is given an assessment when they arrive, which includes medical and debt evaluation.

White explained that she learned while visiting the center just how many unaccompanied children are in debt to human traffickers who brought them illegally into the U.S.

White said that at the center she visited, “all of the children” faced some sort of debt totaling between $3,000 to as much as $10,000 “because they have been smuggled.”

She also said there are cases in which parents had mortgaged their homes or put their land up to pay for their child’s trafficking.

White told CBN News National Security Correspondent Erik Rosales that her visit had “100 percent” strengthened her views on border security.

“While I recognize how well we are taking care of these children, I also recognize the situation,” she said. “We are talking about children that are being trafficked.”

For weeks, I’ve seen arguments over the separation of immigrant children from their parents hit a wall over claims that most of the children are victims of human trafficking, and that border security is protecting them by taking them from their traffickers. I had thought this claim was simply prima facie false. On reading White’s comments, however, the reality appears to be a concerted effort to play fast and loose with the term “human trafficking.”

If the children at the shelter White visited were truly unaccompanied minors, it is indeed likely that they were smuggled into the U.S. by someone who was not their parent. In countries like Honduras, widespread gang violence renders teens particularly vulnerable—the boys to recruitment, and the girls to rape or prostitution. Many parents have responded by sending their children north to family members in the U.S., paying “coyotes” to smuggle them there.

But is this human trafficking?

When most people hear the term “human trafficking,” they think of sex trafficking and other forms of slavery or forced labor. They likely won’t think of human smuggling, where someone is paid to smuggle a person into a country. And yet, that appears to be how White is using the term—to reference human smuggling, and not human trafficking.

I suspect that an obfuscation between human trafficking and human smuggling by commentators on the Right may be the origin of claims that “most” children who show up at the border are “victims of human trafficking.”

This is starting to become repetitive, but, to reiterate once again—when people hear the term “victims of human trafficking,” they’re going to assume it refers to kids being sold into lives of prostitution or slavery, not children whose parents are paying to send to join relatives in the U.S. to protect them from gang recruitment or violence.

Reading White’s comments made me curious. Was my definition of human trafficking off? Did human trafficking actually include all instances of human smuggling, and not just cases that involve sex slavery, forced labor, or other forms of exploitation? Curious, I looked up how the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime defines the term.

Article 3, paragraph (a) of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines Trafficking in Persons as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

In other words, no, the UN does not include human smuggling in its definition of human trafficking. Human trafficking by definition must involve exploitation, which is defined as prostitution, forced labor, or the removal of organs.

What about in the U.S.? Perhaps the term is defined differently by the U.S. government? To answer this question, I looked up how the Department of Homeland Security defines human trafficking.

Human trafficking is modern-day slavery and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.

The U.S. government does not include human smuggling in its definition of human trafficking either. Human trafficking must involve forcing or coercing a person into “some type of labor or commercial sex act.”

And it’s not just the Department of Homeland Security! Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has an entire article on their website differentiating between human trafficking and human smuggling.

Trafficking vs. Smuggling

Trafficking vs. Smuggling: What’s the Difference?

Human trafficking and human smuggling are distinct criminal activities, and the terms are not interchangeable. Human trafficking centers on exploitation and is generally defined as:

• Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or
• Recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.

Human smuggling centers on transportation and is generally defined as:

• Importation of people into the United States involving deliberate evasion of immigration laws. This offense includes bringing illegal aliens into the country, as well as the unlawful transportation and harboring of aliens already in the United States.

The terms are not interchangeable.

White is boldly misusing the term “human trafficking” when she applies it to children whose parents paid to have them smuggled into the U.S. to escape gang violence. These children are not being trafficked. They are being smuggled. This is not a matter of interpretation. There is no disagreement about definitions. Misusing this term is deceptive.

Are unaccompanied minors especially vulnerable to trafficking (including by coyotes who might choose to traffic them rather than doing the job they were paid to do)? Certainly. (Teens in foster care are similarly vulnerable to trafficking.) But that vulnerability to trafficking does not mean these unaccompanied minors have been or are being trafficked. Being smuggled into a country in order to escape violence or threat in one’s home country is not human trafficking.

You know what would help decrease unaccompanied minors’ actual vulnerability to trafficking? Opening up our immigration laws so that unaccompanied minors won’t have to live in fear or deportation. (Knowing that a visit to police might get you deported to a country where gangs have terrorized your family rather puts a damper on seeking help when trouble does occur.) You know what else would help? Opening up our immigration laws so that desperate parents don’t have to pay potentially unscrupulous individuals to smuggle their children away from danger.

Do you know what doesn’t help these kids? Tightening border security. And yet that, somehow, is where the Right has landed.

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