France Copies Trump, Builds ‘Supermax’ Prison Overseas

In a surprising move certain to please President Trump and his MAGA supporters, France plans to build a maximum-security prison for drug traffickers and radical Islamists in its overseas territory of French Guiana.

While American and foreign critics have bashed Trump’s effort to send deported illegal alien criminals to foreign countries such as El Salvador, to house them in maximum security prisons there, it seems this major European ally is doing something very similar. (RELATED: Supreme Court’s Ruling May Change Prison Forever)

Though unlike Trump’s deal where — for now — only illegal alien criminals deported from the U.S. are sent to a foreign prison, French Guiana belongs to France, and its much smaller prison in the Amazon jungle will house French criminals.

It still significantly echoes the Trump effort.

In the remote town of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a high-security wing, part of a $450 million prison complex expected to open by 2028, will house 45 high-level drug criminals and 15 terrorists. The prison will hold a total of 500 inmates.

French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin says the facility — built in response to a string of violent attacks on prisons across France — is designed to sever any contact these criminals may have with their networks on the outside. (RELATED: Homeland Security Stats Spark National Conversation)

The project marks a significant return to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni’s dark legacy. In the 1800s, under Napoleon III, prisoners were shipped to the region, including some bound for the infamous Devil’s Island penal colony.

The island is known for holding French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongly accused of being a spy.

Devil’s Island later gained literary fame through Henri Charrière’s memoir Papillon, which recounts his harrowing escape. The book was adapted into a 1973 Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and again in a 2017 remake.

In El Salvador, the CECOT (Center for the Confinement of Terrorism), is a massive maximum-security jail that opened in February 2023 with capacity for 40,000 inmates.

Human rights groups have condemned conditions in Salvadoran prisons, particularly CECOT, citing reports of abuses such as torture, inmate deaths, and large-scale trials.

Still, the prison, built by the Salvadoran government to imprison members of the country’s brutal criminal gangs, is part of the highly popular hardline security policy of President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.”

It is also a major component of Trump’s effort to portray a hardline image on illegal immigration and transnational crime.

In a related plan closer to home, Trump says he wants to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island in San Francisco Bay.

Popularly known as “the Rock” — the island detention facility has not been used as a prison for decades. It is now a historic landmark visited by more than a million tourists each year. (RELATED: How Radical Professors Are Rewriting American History)

Trump says he believes the prison could be used once again to house dangerous inmates, and to serve as a symbol of law and order in the U.S.

Despite the intimidation and cool factor, experts say that refurbishing the dilapidated remains of the once-formidable prison is “not realistic.”

Nevertheless, it’s good to see that Trump’s tough-on-crime penal colony ideas are being emulated by other major western nations.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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