The 1808 ban on slave importation redirected rather than ended the slave trade

Evidence

The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves goes into effect, ending the legal trade in enslaved people from outside the United States. But the law does not end slavery, nor restrict the buying and selling of the more than one million enslaved people who are already in the country. As the domestic trade increases rapidly, more and more Black families are broken apart on the auction block. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 523

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the specific contested empirical claims the reader must keep distinct from the reframing thesis — this is a concrete policy-history fact within the 1619 timeline.
• QUESTION: The claim that importation ended but domestic trade expanded sharply — worth verifying the exact scale of domestic trade growth post-1808.