a good rule of thumb imo is that if someone is really fixated on 'trafficking' you can safely ignore whatever they have to say like nine times out of ten
obviously there's the fact that being obsessed with 'trafficking' is one of the hallmarks of being a QAnon Guy. but even aside from that, 'trafficking' is not a useful or meaningful category -- it lumps in 'sex slavery' with 'people ferrying migrants into countries illegally', and in doing so is a very big favourite of your traditional type of fascist (can use the evocative imagery of the former to pass brutal and punitive border laws, push for harsher deportations, etc) and your paranoid suburbanite stand-your-ground flavour (can scare themselves and others into a murderous fervor by attributing statistics for the latter to the former and then acts like they are daily at risk of experiencing the plot of Taken).
essentially it's just that it's a meaningless category that lumps in things that aren't related as one big scary bogeyman for the political convenience of a smorgasbord of reactionary positions -- & of course even when discussing, like, the most real thing that you could point at and call 'trafficking' (poor and vulnerable illegal migrants being forced into low or unpaid labour, often in dangerous conditions, often sex work) everyone who is committed to calling the problem 'trafficking' is making it clear that their problem with that situation is that the migrants are here at all, and 'anti-trafficking' policies always end up reflecting that, being essentially just immigration or sex work crackdowns that put the putative victims of 'trafficking' at much greater risk!
plus the entire conservative obsession with human trafficking comes from myths of white girls being kidnapped and forced into prostitution across state/national lines that date back to the early 20th-century and that gave rise to the mann act aka "the white-slave trafffic act of 1910," which was then used to prosecute men of color in particular for having consensual sex with white women. the myth of human trafficking exists to stoke reactionary and conservative anxieties and it always has.
the U.S. legal system now largely uses the term "human trafficking" to refer to the exploitation of migrant workers (divided up into "sex trafficking" and "labor trafficking," of which "labor trafficking" is actually more common even though "sex trafficking" wins the greatest political focus b/c of aforementioned white girls being forced into prostitution fears), even though the vast, vast majority of these cases don't involve anyone being forced against their will from one country into another.
as i understand it, the reason it continues to be framed as "human trafficking" in the U.S. even by liberals is basically to get bipartisan support for legislation that conservatives would otherwise be extremely against — e.g., routes to remain in the country for modern slavery survivors like the u/t visas. but this framing is grossly problematic because it perpetuates the myth of "illegal migrants" forcing people back and forth across the border against their will, stoking racist anti-immigration sentiment. and even among people working to support survivors of these exploitative labor conditions, the language of human trafficking exceptionalizes these instances of migrant workers being forced into low/unpaid labor as something uniquely perpetuated by evil "traffickers" rather than resulting from an imperialist economic system that provides little to no labor protections for work done by migrant workers.
also the overwhelming majority white girls getting forced into sex work aren't getting abducted by strangers: they're betrayed by their own family. plus there's a horrific number of states where there's no lower age limit for marriage as long as her father signs off on it.
conservative rhetoric is violently defensive of THEIR prerogative to abuse and exploit their wives and daughters. they're not meaningfully working to do anything to actually protect women, they just don't want Strangers to come take what's theirs.
