Liv Bridge
The President has come up with an idea to exile American criminals overseas if they are 'repeat offenders'.
Donald Trump has been extremely busy since he took over the White House on last week on January 20.
The 78-year-old immediately announced his plan for the 'golden Age of America', which started by undoing most of the work of his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Within days, Trump signed 26 executive orders, declared a 'national emergency' at the border over immigration, wrote that there are 'only two genders' into policy, halted the TikTok ban, scrapped diversity programs, withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as the Paris Climate Agreement, and went on to pardon some controversial figures including Ross Ulbricht, who walked free from prison after being convicted in 2015 for his operations in the dark web market site, Silk Road.
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And that's just a few of Trump's policies in the past week.
Clearly showing no signs of slowing down on his dramatic overhaul, the president has now suggested the US could pay foreign countries a 'small fee' to host American convicts.
During a House Republicans conference in Miami yesterday (January 27), the POTUS said the country could exile and ship out repeat criminal offenders, pitching it as a cost-saving measure.
Trump explained, as per NBC News: "If they’ve been arrested many, many times, they’re repeat offenders by many numbers, I want them out of our country.
"We’re going to get approval, hopefully, to get them the hell out of our country, along with others - let them be brought to a foreign land and maintained by others for a very small fee."
He claimed doing so would mean the federal government could avoid using US prisons for 'massive amounts of money' and private jails which 'charge us a fortune'.
The president said the idea is separate from a similar scheme to deport illegal immigrants who are said to have criminal records.
But penal transportation isn't new, with banishment being used as a form of punishment throughout history, from around the 5th century BCE in Ancient Greece before being accelerated by the British Empire in the 18th century.
England transported tens of thousands of convicts and political prisoners to the American colonies up until the 1776 American Revolution - though that didn't stop Britain from exiling their criminals all the way to Australia until 1868.
France also used the practice in the 19th to early-to-mid 20th centuries, sending their convicts to Guiana and New Caledonia, and the Soviet Union took a far more drastic approach with mass deportations instead, which ramped up during the Second World War.
Penal colonies still exist in Russia and the Philippines - and the US has the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, established by then president George W Bush to hold suspects of terrorism.
It remains unclear what gave Trump the vision to exile prisoners abroad, but he did state apparent concern that violent offenders are released back onto the streets, despite having 'been arrested 30 times' or more.
He also said he believed temporary exile to foreign prisons would make a dent in crime in general in the US, saying: "Let them be brought out of our country and let them live there for a while. Let’s see how they like it."
Trump's take on a new type of penal colony comes as his administration attempts to tackle the federal budget - and has already hiked deportation efforts to this end.
Over the weekend, he also threatened Colombia with costly tariff sanctions after its president blocked US military planes carrying deported migrants.