1 day Ago By The Independent
President Donald Trump on Monday told Republican members of the House of Representatives that he would be putting forward a plan to subject recidivist criminals to a punishment never before used in the United States and last used in the United Kingdom nearly two centuries ago: Forced exile. Trump, who spoke to House Republicans during a dinner for them at his Doral, Florida golf resort, was musing about his administration’s plan to implement mass deportations of anyone in the United States illegally, telling members that his administration was “tracking down the illegal alien criminals” and “detaining them and we are throwing them the hell out of our country” with “no apologies” when he pivoted to discussing the alleged relative viciousness of foreign criminals versus native-born American lawbreakers. “I used to say these are more violent than our criminals.
In fact, the best part about them is they make our criminals look quite nice, actually, by comparison,” said Trump, who added that the country also has “many violent people” in it who “did not necessarily come here illegally, but have been arrested 30 times, 35 times. 41, 42 times.” Such persons, Trump added, had been arrested for crimes such as “murder and other heinous charges such as pushing people into subways” or striking people with baseball bats, or “punching old ladies in the face, knocking them unconscious and stealing their purse.
” “I don’t want these violent repeat offenders in our country anymore than I want illegal aliens from other countries who misbehave,” he said. “They’re repeat offenders by many numbers. I want them out of our country.
I also will will be seeking permission to do so. 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, as opposed to be maintained in our jails for massive amounts of money, including the private prison companies that charge us a fortune. Let them be brought out of our country and let them live there for a while.
Let’s see how they like it,” he said. Trump then repeated a false assertion that foreign countries have deliberately emptied prisons and “sent” criminals to the United States for the purposes of lowering their own crime rates, and suggested American crime rates would fall by implementing his proposal to exile native-born criminals. The president is correct that “approval” to throw American convicts out of the US would be needed in the form of legislation authorizing the practice.
But it’s unlikely that such a plan would ever be authorized by Congress or approved by the courts in light of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” In the UK, it was once commonplace to use “punishment by transportation” in order to move criminals out of the country. Beginning in the 1600s, many English criminals were transported to the colonies that would later become the United States.
After the American Revolutionary War foreclosed the possibility of exiling criminals to North America, the British government established a penal colony in New South Wales (now Australia). The practice ended in the second half of the 19th century..
