The Florida Roundup - NASA’s new direction, Space Coast spies and weekly news briefing

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

This week on The Florida Roundup, we spoke about NASA’s new plans to build a lunar space base and more with Don Platt, the director of Spaceport Education Center at Florida Tech and Adrienne Dove, Planetary Scientist and Chair of Physics at University of Central Florida (00:00). Then, former astronaut Chris Hadfield joined us to talk about the Artemis II launch and mission (14:26). Plus, we spoke with journalist Adam Ciralsky about his reporting for Vanity Fair about Florida’s hotbed of espionage (22:34). And later, we hear from law-abiding migrants who were deported (37:34) and we look at the results from this week’s special elections (45:54).

Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation, working to restore and protect Florida's $1 trillion asset that helps to bring clean water to Floridians. Learn more at Everglades Foundation.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Brendan Byrne. Tom is out this week. Call it a course correction. NASA is getting an overhaul. The Space Agency this week announced its revised plans for the moon. This is the moment we reject the status quo, challenge what is broken, embrace what worked on July 20th, 1969, and reject what stands in the way of extraordinary outcomes.

NASA is leading the greatest adventure in human history, and it's only just begun. It's time to start believing again. That's NASA administrator Jared Isaacman introducing ignition, a new initiative detailing America's long away to return to the surface of the moon. One major change, a $20 billion lunar base. That's instead of constructing a space station to orbit near the moon. Another major announcement, developing a nuclear-powered spacecraft to deploy to Mars before the end of 2028. Meanwhile, NASA is making final preparations for its Artemis II mission.

That could launch next week as early as April 1st. It will be the agency's first crude lunar flyby in more than 50 years. All these changes are meant to accelerate plans to land humans on the moon and eventually establish a new lunar economy. In order to meet the aggressive timeline, the agency is fundamentally changing how it operates. shifting work away from contractors and rebuilding its own civilian workforce. So how realistic are these new goals? And why is NASA in such a rush to return to the moon decades after the Apollo landing? And what would you like to know about the future of space exploration?

We'll be joined by a retired astronaut in a short while to talk about how the Artemis 2 crew is preparing for the mission and what's like to go to space. But first, joining us now is Don Platt, the director of the space force, excuse, Space Port Education Center at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, and Addie Dove, who teaches planetary science at the University of Central Florida, where she is also the chair of the physics department. Thank you both for joining us. We've got a lot to unpack. We want you to join us too.

Call us at 305-995-1800 or email radio at the Florida Roundup.org. Dawn, I want to start with you. This is quite the departure from NASA's previous moon plans. Just how big of a shift is this? Well, it's pretty massive, actually. We're looking at a number of missions per year. We're having a bunch of new robotic missions to sort of pave the way for future human exploration, much more human operations on the surface of the moon.

So it's very different than the old Artemis program where we were talking about basically staging everything from a station in lunar orbit. Now we're going to do a lot more on the surface of the moon. You mentioned NASA's been thinking about it. You mentioned that this. has been going on for a while, right? We've been thinking about going to the moon, even beyond Artemis for decades before, since the end of Apollo, right? You know, Don, is this the plan that actually sticks this time? Well, everybody certainly hopes so after all these fault starts. You know, the key is really how well NASA can get back into the game here after years of sort of

having unfortunate cost overruns and budget shortfalls and schedule problems. And so it is totally a revamp of NASA. Jared Isaacman is hopefully the man to do that with his background in industry and entrepreneurship. And he's been to space, right? He understands better than most what it's like to deal with the space environment, certainly. Part of this plan calls for dozens of launches to the lunar surface bringing payloads there. Adi Dove, as a scientist yourself, that has got to be exciting to hear. What does what does the scientific community stand to gain from this new direction of artemus? Yeah, it certainly is exciting. If you looked at sort of the long-term charts that NASA had for the Artemis program and beyond, there was eventually a buildup of a base on the

surface and operational assets on the surface, but it was sort of over a much longer time period than it's currently slated for. And so it is really exciting. It's exciting to think about different places we might be able to put things on the moon, the different science we might be able to do there. It's a little bit, we're a little bit trepidious about it because it's like, now we get to, now we have to do all these things and build these instruments. And it's also, there's some, there's some aspect of it that is understanding the lunar surface and how it is right now before we actually go and start digging and, I don't know, putting gases and dirt everywhere and messing things up. So from a scientific perspective, there's a lot of excitement

about going there and sending more instruments and also really using it to characterize where we're going. I want to take just a broader look, Addy, and I know this question's been asked to you quite often, and I'm sure, Don, you've heard this too. But, you know, to you, why is it so important that we do return to the moon now, Adi? We've done it before. Why go back again? We've done it before. We did it very differently than the original Artemis plan and very differently than this current Artemis plan. I think that there's an answer that is we're a species that's destined to explore, right? And the moon is a really natural laboratory to understand how to do that. It's relatively close.

It's sort of inesbitable, but it also gives us opportunities to understand how to do that. And then also from a scientific perspective, it's a really interesting place to understand our place in the solar system, the broader picture of the solar system, the Earth's evolution. And so it's got some really exciting aspects to it there too. Gotcha. Don, when we hear that there are going to be dozens of launches to the lunar surface, scientists are excited. I've got to imagine that commercial companies are excited, too. What does Florida stand to gain for this? Could this be a boom to the,

or boom to the Florida space economy? Sure, yeah, absolutely. Most of these launches will probably occur from either Kennedy Space Center or the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. And so we're going to see a lot of launches taking place that will be going to the moon. Going to the moon is more interesting, I think,

for people than watching a Starlink launch. And so there be a lot of tourists coming to see these various launches, certainly the human ones, but even other lunar launches will definitely hold an appeal that is beyond just the normal everyday satellite launch. So that's all, I think, very beneficial for Florida Space Coast. It'll bring more of the companies here, maybe even beyond Blue Origin and SpaceX, which are sort of the dominant ones currently, in order for all of this activity to take place in a short time period. Don, you were involved in the construction of the International Space Station,

a Herculean task when it was done decades ago, I have got to imagine a moon base is as complicated, if not more complicated. Just give us a sense of what it's going to be like to actually build something on the surface of the moon that can hold people safely for an extended period of time. Sure, yeah. Well, of course, the space station was in low Earth orbit, and that's relatively easy to get to. And if you have a problem, you can always send up another vehicle, or you could even, you know, we send up parts and pieces fairly easily.

When we're talking multiple day trips out to the moon and only a certain time periods each month, that's a whole different species there, really, of animal that you're dealing with. And then also just getting it to the surface, we've never really produced a habitat that we could land on the surface of another planet. We've just had sort of, you know,

basically small campers that we were able to live in for a couple of days at a time previously. So it's very, very different than something that we can just put into orbit. It's complex and expensive, right? I mean, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman says this will take many years, roughly $20 billion to pull this off. Is it feasible, given the funding that NASA receives?

Well, that is the key. It's going to have to take a commitment from Congress, I believe, that maybe even goes beyond what NASA's current budget is, although we should say that Congress expressed a large interest in making sure that NASA had money to do some of their missions. even beyond what the Trump administration had originally projected for a NASA budget. They said, no, no, we want to keep money going to NASA. So there has been sort of a recent precedent for NASA to receive funding to do some of their more interesting and innovative activities. And Isaacman wants to bring the contractors into the civilian workforce.

That could be a big deal here in Florida because of the Kennedy Space Center as well. I mean, is this a good path forward? And does that help with some of the funding and resource issues? Yeah, I think so. And then there's also an initiative to bring in some of the experts from industry into NASA in order to provide the expertise that would be needed, especially from the point of view of so-called rapid commercial space activities. And those are all definitely going to be needed for this lunar program to be a success.

That's. Addie, the end goal is to have astronauts visit the Moon base for four-week missions. The Moon is not a very welcoming environment to humans or robots, right? Just give us a sense of what awaits them on the lunar surface if and when they do get there. Yeah, the Moon is a very inhospitable environment. It's in the vacuum of space. It's a very hot and cold environment, depending on if you're in the daytime or the nighttime. One of the things, if we look back at the Apollo missions, those were.

relatively short duration. By the end, they got longer, but those were always during the lunar daytime. The lunar day is about 14 days here on Earth, and then 14 day night, just because of how the sun and the moon, their relative positions. And so that's a really long time where you're being able to operate in the daytime environment, but then it gets really, really, really, really cold at night, and it gets really, really, really, really hot during the peak of the lunar day. This has been a challenge for recent missions when we're trying to figure out even robotic operations on the surface. And it's going to be something that we're going to have to understand. We have humans there too, and we're building these habitats, how to sort of take care of those thermal challenges.

There's also interesting radiation challenges. And then also just the dust environment and things like that that can cause very complex working conditions. The dust is very, very sharp, right? Yes. It's not like typical sand that you get here on Earth, right? Right, yeah. So the dust on the moon has been produced by rocks smashing into the moon over the eons and breaking up into little bits of rock on the sand and the beaches here in Florida, right? It's been rounded because it's moved by the waves and the wind, and that doesn't happen on the moon.

So it's pretty jagged, it's really fine, and it gets all over the place. If you go look at the spacesuits and a couple of things out at Kennedy, for instance, you can still see dust embedded in it. Dawn, the International Space Station is not in a very nice environment either. It has to deal with those thermal challenges and micrometeoride. micrometeorite impacts. What can NASA learn from what we've done in low Earth orbit with the International Space Station and then take that to a moon base?

One of the key elements is just the exposure to the vacuum environment of space, which, again, is not quite as severe in low Earth orbit as it is on the moon, but it's still a tremendously perfect vacuum compared to things that we can produce here on the Earth. There's also the radiation environment. Again, not quite as severe as on the moon,

but also something that we've been able to test equipment. We've tested the physiology of human beings in Earth orbit now for 25 years on the International Space Station. And so there are certainly some open questions still, like how well can the human body deal with one-six gravity compared to what we call microgravity on the space station? But we've learned quite a bit with just also in general human operations in space over the last 25 years on Space Station that we can apply now. to the moon. Yeah, I think having that long-term data set of humans and operations is really great.

And the moon's interesting, right, because it provides some benefits and that you have a solid surface underneath you. So when you're building habitats, that does protect you also from 180 degrees of micrometeorites and things like that. But it is, yeah, it's a different type of extreme environment. And finally, this is not just focused on the moon, right? Isaacman wants to send NASA to Mars with a nuclear thermo propulsion system. Don, how important. important is that and how feasible is that to happen by 2028? Yeah, well, it's very important, actually. One of the concerns that we have is having humans exposed to a microgravity environment,

a radiation environment for up to nine months for what it would take to get us from the Earth to Mars for future exploration on that planet. If we can use a nuclear rocket, we can get there in a much shorter time period. So that's very favorable from a physiology point of view for humans to be able to to really then be productive when they get to the moon or to Mars. But, yeah, obviously there's not been a lot of nuclear rockets built previously. There's been some money spent, but really it's only been sort of what you could call an Earth-based demo so far.

Addie, I'll give you the last word briefly. I think I already know the answer to this. But our scientists just as excited about going to Mars as they are going to the moon. Yes, different scientists maybe are excited about the different planets. but all of us are very excited about exploring both of those surfaces. Lots of excitement there. Addy Dove is the chair of physics and planetary science at the University of Central Florida. Don Platt is the director of the Spaceport Education Center at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Thank you both for joining us.

Thanks for having us. We've been talking about Artemis II and what is happening beyond that, but none of this can happen without a successful human flyby mission. One, that could launch as early as Wednesday. Right now, the crew of Artemis II is making the trip to Kennedy Space Center here, in Florida ahead of that mission. The three U.S. astronauts and one from Canada are set to arrive later today and will enter a quarantine on the space coast before their test flight on NASA's SLS rocket and Orion Space capsule. So what's it like those last few days before embarking on a mission to space? Well, veteran Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield knows that

feeling. He launched on three missions, two on the space shuttle and a long-duration stay at the International Space Station launching on a Russian Soyuz capsule. He just, joins us now ground control to Chris Hadfield. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Brendan. Nice to be talking with you. Pretty exciting day. It certainly is,

and it's got to be exciting for the crew of Artemis II, who is in route to their launch pad right now, and less than a week could be lifting off. As someone who has been through this, Chris, what might be going through their minds these last few days before launching? I think it's important to remember that they have been training for this

for years and years and years. And the training, a lot of it, is quite in realistic simulators at the Johnson Space Center in Texas and then at the Kennedy Space Center here in Florida. And so for the crew, if they had allowed themselves to count on a certain launch date in order to get comfortable with the idea, it would have driven them crazy. So instead, this is just another day. This is just, hey, we're getting closer. We might launch this time. We didn't launch last time. You kind of need to have gratification deferred.

your emotion is you just get whips out all over the place. So they're ready. They've been training so intensively for years. And if the vehicle's ready and the weather's good enough and all the systems work, then they'll be on their way to the moon in a week, as you say. But they're not as, you know, they're not fraught with it. It's just, hey, we get a bunch more chances to get ready. And when the rocket finally does behave, we're going to be the crew

that's going to take it to the moon and back. Aside from waiting for that launch to actually happen, you know, this is a test flight. This is the first time humans will be in the Orion spacecraft atop the SLS rocket. This is a far-from routine mission, Chris. How do they approach this going forward? Everything worth doing in life, Brendan, has risk. And if you're going to do things that are right on the edge of the human experience, sometimes they have extreme risk. flying a rocket that no one has ever flown before is extreme risk and danger.

And they're also, if the rocket works properly, then they're on board a spaceship that has never been flown by people before. And they're not just going around the earth, but assuming everything works properly, they're going to light the big engine on the back and get going significantly faster so that they can break away from the earth, reach escape velocity, go to the moon. And as soon as you fire that engine, you're committed. It takes three and a half, four days to get there, three and a half, four days to get back. So as soon as you fire that engine on that unproven spaceship, you can't turn around and come back. You're committed to at least another week, no matter what else goes wrong.

So there is huge risk that that crew of four is taking. And that's why the training has taken decades, and while we don't just choose random people off the street, These are four extremely accomplished human beings who are as ready as any four people could be, no matter what happens, in order to have greatest chance of success. It's a big risk. They're taken on behalf of us all to try and start becoming interplanetary. Chris, for you, when is a moment you are going to breathe a sigh of relief during this mission? More than one, but the two big ones are, number one, when they are successfully accelerated,

into Earth orbit by that great big rocket. That'll be a very tense nine minutes of a lot of things happening. You know, they basically go from lying on their back on a beach in Florida, like any tourist, to going 17 and a half thousand miles an hour above the atmosphere. And that all happens in nine minutes. I mean, what did you do in the last nine minutes? You know, it's a wild, crazy, dangerous action-filled nine minutes. Well, hey, Chris, we're going to have to actually take a real.

We're going to take a minute real quick to just take a quick break, and I'm going to have you back on after the break to talk more about that risk. We're speaking with retired Canadian Space Agency astronaut, Chris Hadfield, ahead of a potential launch of four people on a trip around the moon next week. Stay on the line. Chris, we will be right back. We'll hear more from Hadfield, plus spies on the space coast. That's ahead on the Florida Roundup. Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation,

working to restore and protect Florida's one trillion dollar asset that helps to bring clean water to Floridians. Learn more at Everglades Foundation.org. I'm Brendan Byrne. Tom Hudson returns next week. We're continuing our conversation on the Artemis Program and the human moon mission that could launch as early as Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center. We've got veteran Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield still with us. Chris, most people know you as the astronaut who covered David Bowie's space audity from orbit,

It's a viral video that brought the wonder of space down here to Earth. I'm wondering, Chris, does Artemis II have the same opportunity to bring that awe and wonder that you brought us? If you are not awed by the absolutely newfound human ability to leave the Earth, travel to the moon, which you can all look up at in the night sky, and lay the groundwork for us starting to settle on another planet, that I think you're kind of missing one of the great adventures in life. And it's, you know, yeah, I'm a musician. You know, I've also written six books and then it was NASA's director in Russia and commanded an international space station.

All kinds of interesting things have happened. But this event, for us, you know, humanity's been around for half a million years. And this is the first time in the entire history of our species, in the history of life on Earth, that we have been able to do something like, like this. It's all happened within one lifetime, and now we're transitioning from exploration to settlement on the moon. It's just an amazing moment in Hesham. We're all alive right now to be part of it. Yes, it is. Chris, on this crew is a fellow Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hanson. It's his first flight to space, heck my first mission for sure for him. Have you spoken to him,

and if you haven't, what advice are you giving him ahead of this mission? Sure, I've known Jeremy since he was a teenager. and I helped collect him as an astronaut, and he supported me during my third spaceflight. He took care of my family. So I talked to Jeremy regularly. He's super competent and ready and excited. His kids are all university age. This is a huge event in their family.

They recognize the risk their dad is taking. His wife's a doctor. And so they'll be gathered together on the roof of the launch building, you know, hugging each other and watching that huge rocket light, an enormous event in their personal lives. And then, of course, in Jeremy Hansen's professional life, he was a military fighter pilot and physicist, and now Moon Explorer. So, yeah, it's an amazing moment right across the board, and obviously a great moment of pride for all four astronauts on board.

Certainly. Chris Hatfield is a veteran Canadian Space Agency astronaut and author, as he mentioned, His latest novel is Final Orbit. Chris, always a pleasure chatting with you, and we'll be looking up when this launches. So will I. Thanks. Nice to talk to you, Brent. Take care.

Bye. Thanks, Chris. Now, spies on the space coast, Adam Sorolsky is a journalist and film producer. But before that, he worked as a CIA attorney, so he's no stranger to the world of espionage. Such is the topic of his recent feature, Spylandia, how a stretch of Florida real estate has become a covert corridor for Chinese and Russian spies written for Vanity Fair. We decided to turn an excerpt from it into a radio drama featuring the Florida Roundup Players. Like many a good Florida tale, this one begins in a watering hole with all the trappings of a Carl Heison novel.

The date was May 14, 2023, and Joseph Assad had taken his wife, Michelle Rigby Asad, to the sandbar sports grill in Cocoa Beach, a kitchy beachfront dive to see. celebrate her 50th birthday. Scattered clouds in a gentle breeze offered pristine conditions for a hurricane, the rum and triple sex sort, and a late night rocket liftoff. A dozen miles north looming along the Atlantic was Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 40. As last call beckon at the sandbar, the crowd thinned out. Yet a few stragglers, drinks in hand, watched the horizon waiting for ignition.

When the Falcon 9 finally lit, it tore a bright scene in the line. This was SpaceX doing what it now does best, lofting a stack of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. That evening's mission was a milestone. SpaceX sent up a record-tying payload, 56 satellites at 17.4 metric tons, using its highly proprietary rocket designed to fly again, separating, arcing back, and returning for a controlled range.

for a controlled range. For the Assad's, rocket launches, routine to most locals, had never lost their luster. The pair relished the fiery spectacle and the intrigue. Often the mission cargo is highly classified. The Assad's had settled in Florida after a decade of working in the world's hotspots, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East as a tandem couple with the CIA. Assad was a counterterrorism case officer responsible for spotting, assessing, and recruiting spies. Rigby Assad was a counterintelligence interrogator.

After leaving the spy game, the Assad's founded a boutique security firm advising clients, sports teams, defense contractors, houses of worship on how to confront potential threats. They bought a waterfront speck house, a speedboat, and cycled through a collection of Aston Martins and McLaren's and eye-catching cops. It's a little James Bond and a little Florida man. Asa said me. The ex-spies blended in nicely among the engineers, techies, and tan retirees from law enforcement and government-adjacent jobs. Made adapted to life along the so-called space coast, a palm-dotted shoreline roughly 70 miles end-to-end from Titusville down through Cocoa Beach and on past the guarded gates of Patrick's Space Force Base, where NASA's old infrastructure still hums.

even as a privatized rocket era now sets the tempo. At the center of it all, with its estates and postcard vistas, is Merritt Island, population around 35,000, projecting an air of serene insularity. Florida's Tourism Bureau bills it as, quote, an ideal destination for space enthusiasts and outdoor adventurers, end quote. They neglect to mention another more invasive species drawn to the area, spies. That night the sand bar featured an 80s cover band

six salty guys with dadbods. As they pounded out Tommy Two Tones, 8675309, Jenny. Assad excused himself for a bathroom break. On route, he noticed an attractive woman whom he believed to be Chinese, striking up a conversation with one of the many space nerds crowding the bar.

Are you an engineer? Do you work at Space? He recalls her asking. On his way back to the table, he spotted the same woman posing the same questions to a different guy. What is this? A f***ing census? He muttered as he relayed the encounter to his wife. The space coast is like a small town where big city things happen. Rigby Assad later told me.

The guys who literally wear their corporate affiliation on their sleeve share an optimism bias. Why would anyone be interested in me or my company? but the reality is this is a target-rich environment. That comes from the reporting of Adam Sarlalski, writer, film director, and television producer, who joins us now. Adam, welcome to the show. And good morning. Good morning. Good afternoon here. But as we heard there, Adam, your piece reads like a spy novel.

But at places many Central Floridians know, including the sandbar, that is a place I have frequented after covering launches from the space. Coast. It's it's strange to think that this would be the setting for a story about real-life spies. Adam, what exactly were they looking for? I think they're looking for a couple of things. And here we're talking primarily the Chinese and Russians. They're looking for information and secrets that are opportunistic and some that are very specific and to give them an advantage or parity with advantages that the United States already possesses. And your story profiles a number of the people who are working to uncover what those people,

what they are doing and what they are after. To tell us about the people that are kind of on the defense here, searching for these spies. Yeah, it was interesting. I've spent a lot of time in the space coast. And over the years, I'd hear these stories. And at first they seem apocryphal, and then year after year, I'd hear one more and one more. And it seemed among the, let's say, the counterintelligence folks who live there and are assigned to local law enforcement and an organization called the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, which has the improbable kind of like it's a pronounced C-Fix. So C-and-fix.

their mission had transformed since its founding post 9-11, from one which was largely counterterrorism to one that started to be counterintelligence as they started finding primarily Chinese, but also some Russian spies milling about defense infrastructure, military posts. And this is, while my story focused really on the space coast, This is a Florida-wide problem.

And in your reporting, you uncover these operations where they are, you know, these people here that are trying to uncover these spies. They're finding Bluetooth signals that are way more than they should possibly be. There's drones flying, you know, even someone in a wetsuit that made it very close to an Artemis rocket. it, all of this evidence, and there's still some reluctance from the feds when these groups were reporting this activity. Why that reluctance? It's hard to explain the reluctance. I, having reported on national security and having worked in government, I think one of the biggest issues is just the sheer disparity in size. A lot of people think, for example, that the FBI,

is some organization with 100, 200,000 people. The reality is it's in the tens of thousands of FBI agents dispatched to what, 56 domestic field offices, close to 50 foreign offices as legal attaches. They don't have a lot of people. And so they're spread pretty thin. And when you have a problem like counter-espionage, espionage metastasizing in the space post of Florida, who's going to respond?

The locals are closer to the street. They're out and about. And so when they called for help, there was a feeling that they weren't getting the assistance that they were seeking. Tell me a bit about these spies. You mentioned there are some from China. There are some from Russia. they operate very differently.

Bring us into the world of how they are gathering intelligence and how these two different countries operate differently. Sure, it's a great question. The Russians are far more careful. They send professionals or they have long-term people, so-called illegals, if you've ever seen the show, the Americans. But the through line with the Russians is they're not eager to have their people wrapped up, interrogated, or declared persona non grata.

They try very hard. They're well trained. Their tradecraft is good. And so there are fewer of them and fewer probes and attempts, at least from my reporting. The Chinese, however, have a completely different B-O-V. One, yes, does the Ministry of State Security, do they send out professionals to Florida, to the space coast to collect? Yes, but in small numbers. I think very few Americans understand is that in China, it is not an option.

It is mandatory. There is a law on the books in China that if you are a Chinese national, you have an obligation to collect this kind of information and report it back to Chinese authorities. Even if you're Chinese national, you've moved to the U.S., you've started a new life, but you have family back in China, you're concerned about affecting their social status, where they are, you know, socioeconomically. and so you get a lot of amateurs.

So I don't want to say and paint with too broader brush, but it's not crazy to say that the Chinese are deploying or people are working for them who are, I would say, amateurs. And that presents a harder problem. Sure. And Adam, as I'm reading this piece, I was really surprised to read the bit about Disney, about spy.

To see Disney in a piece about spies and counterintelligence. Adam, what role does the mouse play in this whole story? Well, doesn't everyone want to go to Disneyland? Yeah, that's true, yes. Yeah, you're absolutely. In Disney World in this case, I feel like after, you know, Super Bowl. But the role that Disney plays being the primary tourist attraction in the area is it gives great cover for action.

So if you're a spy working in the Assella corridor, which is just Washington speak for the area that runs from Washington, D.C. up to Boston, which is chock full of diplomats posing, well, spies posing as diplomats, but also under various other types of cover, which could be commercial cover as business people, scientists, what have you. diplomats who are assigned to those areas have their freedom of movement fairly prescribed to roughly a 25-mile radius around their place of work, but they are able to apply for exemptions. And one of the primary places that they seek to go is Disney World, except what my reporting showed is that of the dozens and dozens of people who've applied asking state department and really the intelligence community permission to go visit Disney, almost none of them show up at Disney.

So that's their cover story then. In about the 30 seconds we have left, Adam, should we Floridians be concerned about this spy happenings here in our sense? state? I think so. Just this week, there was a couple at McDill Air Force Base who planted some sort of IED. And at first, there's a little reporting confusion. Maybe it's connected to the war in Iran, but one or both of them led to China. So there's McDill. There's a whole thing with common access cards, which are the passport, essentially, to get onto any military base in the world. These things are happening.

Yeah. They're happening here. They're happening there. Adam Sorolsky. The piece is Spilandia, how a stretch of Florida real estate has become a covert corridor for Chinese and Russian spies. It's in Vanity Fair. Thank you, Adam.

And thanks to the Florida Round of Players, Natu Tway, Tony Brown, Jessica Barnes, and Alyssa Ramos. Adam, thank you so much for joining us and bringing that. insight to us. I'm Brendan Byrne. You are listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. There's more to come. Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation, working to restore and protect Florida's one trillion dollar asset that helps to bring clean water to Floridians. Learn more at Everglades Foundation.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Brendan Byrne. Thanks for joining us this week. Florida has established itself as one of the busiest states for

immigration arrests during President Donald Trump's second term. Almost 21,000 people were arrested by immigration and customs enforcement, or ICE in Florida, between January 20th and October 15th of last year, according to government data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the deportation data project. That accounts for about 10% of such arrests in the country during that period, and it puts Florida second only to Texas. More law-abiding migrants are also being arrested. The first year of Trump's second administration saw a remarkable 2,450% increase in detentions of non-citizen migrants with no criminal record. Many have long and productive ties to U.S. communities and families. And many face deportation back to countries they haven't seen

in several decades, or since they were children. From our partner station W. LRN. in Miami, Tim Padgett shares two stories. He has sent me to bring good news to the fore. Liberty to the oppressed. Liberty to the oppressed. On the day of her deportation hearing last week, Olga Perez's family and supporters gathered at the Guatemalan Maya Center in Lakeworth Beach to pray for her release. In November, two days before Thanksgiving, Florida Highway Patrol officers took Perez from her family's landscaping service truck and handcuffed her in front of her children.

She was sent to a detention center in Arizona. why would they take a hardworking mother that pays taxes that helps the community? Elisa Perez is Olga's 21-year-old daughter. Elisa, like her three younger siblings, is a U.S.-born citizen. Their mother came to the U.S. 30 years ago as a teenager escaping anti-indigenous violence in Guatemala's highlands. Their father, an undocumented Guatemalan like Olga, was detained in September and is in migrant lockup in Georgia. I've missed Thanksgiving with both parents. I missed Christmas.

I miss New Year's. I miss my 21st birthday. You know, how much more do I have to miss? Elisa's mother Olga has no criminal history. She does have a taxpaying business. Olga is a revered translator and Lake Worth Beach community leader. She's raised her kids to be good students and citizens. She is not the criminal migrant profile. President Trump insists his sweeping deportation crusade is targeting. But her case is common now. Data show more than half the migrants deported in the past year under Trump. had no criminal convictions. 18-year-old Jessica Perez is Elisa's sister.

It just makes the United States look bad. In reality, they're just picking up mothers, fathers, even kids. Elisa, the oldest sibling, has put her college computer science studies on hold to keep the family's landscaping business going. But she told me that to her, the biggest injustice, is that their mother, Olga, faces deportation to a country, Guatemala, she hasn't seen in 30 years, and which had a 270% increase in murders last year, mostly gang-related.

The State Department put Olga's home province, Wei Wei Tenango, on its do-not-travel list. My mom did talk about like she would have no place to live, and she said maybe people are going to think that she's rich. They could probably try and rob her, kidnap her, because she lived in the United States for such a long time. They might think, oh, her four U.S. citizen children can pay her ransom, you know. Last week, for the fifth time, an immigration judge, postponed Olga's deportation hearing. If she is sent back, one thing Guatemalan deportees like her

were thought to have in their favor now was Guatemala's more progressive president, Bernardo Arevalo. Historically, migrants deported to Central America have gotten little, if any, reintegration assistance. In fact, they're often regarded with suspicion. Arevolo wants to change that. Eduardo Gamara is a Latin America expert at Florida International University. It is a very well-intentioned program. I mean, at least it generates a more welcoming environment. Gamara recently visited Guatemala to see if the Arevalo government's more welcoming deportee reintegration program is in fact working.

His verdict... It does generate some hope for those returning. But because the programs are so underfunded, it's going to be nothing more than hope. A big reason Gamada found is that Guatemala no longer gets funding from the U.S. agency for International Development or USAID, which the Trump administration shut down last year. Gamada worries that may only perpetuate the illegal immigration cycle. All of that is a big issue across Central America. And across Latin America generally.

An undocumented Mexican migrant named Armando came to Florida in 2003 when he was seven years old. Even though he hasn't set foot in Mexico since then, he was deported back there in October. Armando, who asked we not use his last name because he hopes to apply for a U.S. visa this year, also had no felony record. And he was a taxpaying worker in Florida's construction sector, which depends on undocumented migrants. It doesn't make any sense because how is that going to maintain the economy when you take all the workers out. Armando spoke to me from Mexico City, where he's living now and trying to find work and friends. He was on his way to a job in Palm Beach County last July when a Florida Highway Patrol officer,

pulled him over for having over tinted car windows. He was sent to the controversial Everglades Migrant Detention Center known as Alligator Alcatraz. Allegator Alcatraz, there's a lot of racism, a lot of hatred. We were treated like animals. They're like, we kill somebody. I was called the rapist. I was called the web bag.

It's hard because, you know, you're not that person, you know. After getting COVID there, Armando was sent to detention centers from Puerto Rico to Louisiana until he ended up in Tacoma, Washington, realizing he'd likely never be released under Trump administration policy, he agreed to self-deport. He said immigration officials told him he'd get a $1,000 stipend under the Homeland Security Department's Project Homecoming. But he said... It just lies. There's a lot of people that are self-deported because, you know, they were going to get the money.

None of us there in Washington got any money. Homeland Security told WLRN not all self-deportes are eligible for the stipend. But it could not comment on Armando's case. because he is not disclosing his full name. Armando was flown to the U.S. southern border and bust into Mexico. Officials there gave him $100 in pesos, and he was on his own. He tried reconnecting with relatives in his home state of Guantanuato, but was soon threatened by local drug cartel members.

You just hear shots at night, and you can't be outside after nine because that bad people will come, be like, hey, if you don't pay, we're going to kill you. And it's just that easy. I'm used to another world of, you know, security. So Armando made his way to the home of a family friend in Mexico City. Now, at the age of 30 and single, he's fighting loneliness and depression as an outsider. They don't seem to me as being fully Mexican. I stick out. And their Spanish is not the same Spanish.

And all the names of the streets, I still can't figure them out. You just stuck into your house and you can't really do anything. And I'm hardbroken because I'm starting from the bottom again. Because Armando was brought to the U.S. as a boy in 2003, he now regrets not signing up years ago for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or DACA that would have given him legal status. He didn't, he said, because his migrant worker family couldn't afford the $600 fee when his mother became ill. He said immigration officials in Tacoma also told him he could apply for a return visa to the U.S. this year. But now... I've been talking to some of the people that were with me in Washington.

One, he can come back legally for five years, even though he's self-deported and he didn't have anything criminal in the system. That five-year ban, Armando has since learned, is punishment for even self-deporting migrants who had been in the U.S. for, well, for as long as Armando had. He knows now the chances of legally returning to the U.S. anytime soon are slim. I'm Tim Paget in Miami. W.L.R.N.'s Wilkin Brutus contributed to this report. And I'm Brendan Byrne, and you are listening to The Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. Democrats in Florida finally have something to celebrate after flipping two Republican districts in Tuesday's special legislative elections. Democrat Emily Gregory of Jupiter won an open house seat in Palm Beach County. The district includes Mar-Lago, home of the president.

Tampa Bay Democrat Brian Nathan, a U.S. Navy veteran, won a state Senate seat in Hillsborough County, formerly held by Lieutenant Governor J. Collins. Florida Democratic Party chair, Nikki Freed says this week's wins sends a strong message. We are showing the world that Florida Democrats are ready to compete everywhere. And if we can win in Donald Trump's backyard, we can win anywhere. A third open seat in Polk County was held onto by Republicans. All the winners will be up for election again in November's midterms. Meanwhile, Governor Ron DeSantis is talking.

about what his next steps after his second and final term ends. He hasn't ruled out trying for another term for president. Here's DeSantis speaking recently on the podcast Hangout with Sean Hannity. We'll see. I mean, you know, I think that in 24, like in Iowa, the people that voted for Trump, if he wasn't running, I would have gotten like 90% of those. Trump beat DeSantis by about 30 percentage points in Iowa, the first GOP presidential primary state. DeSantis, dropped out just days before the 2024 New Hampshire primary. With more than two years until the election, we'll have to wait and see if the governor throws his hat into the ring again.

And finally, this week on the Florida Roundup, who knew your discarded trash could be recycled to sound like this? You're hearing the musical stylings of The Garbage Men. The Sarasota-based rock group plays with instruments fashioned from recycled materials, such as a one-string guitar made from a chequeerine. a core message of the group is sustainability. It's so much fun to find things and give them a second life.

So we do that and we've had people come up to us, not only kids, but adults too, and say, you guys inspired me to make my own instrument or to reuse this thing in this creative way. So perhaps inspiration will strike the next time you're separating the paper from the plastic. That's our program for today. The Florida Roundup is produced by WLRN Public Media in Miami and WUSF in Tampa. The show is produced by Bridget O'Brien and Denise Royal. W. LRN's vice president of radio is Peter Merritt.

The program's technical director is M.J. Smith. Engineering help from Doug Peterson, Harvey Brassard, and Ernesto J. Our theme music is provided by Miami jazz guitarist, Aaron Leibos, at Aaron Leibos.com. If you missed any of today's show, you can download it and pass programs on the NPR app. Thanks for calling in and listening. Support for Florida Roundup comes from the Everglades Foundation, working to restore and protect Florida's $1 trillion asset that helps to bring clean water to Floridians.

Learn more at Everglades Foundation.org.