NATO Friction, Florida Detention Center, Public Corruption

0:02A new take on an old problem. The issue in question is public corruption, and the response from the second Trump administration is worth a look. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. And I'm Alyssa Nadwarni, and this is Up First from NPR News.

0:20NPR has new reporting on how President Trump and his DOJ approach misdeeds by public officials. And we've got Justice Correspondent Ryan Lucas for you today on the podcast. Also, a controversial Florida detention center may be shutting its doors. And how NATO's member states are feeling about and reacting to the current moment. So stay with us. We have the news you need to start your weekend.

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1:37Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Details at CapitalOne.com. This message comes from Rosetta Stone. Spring travel coming up? Rosetta Stone has been the trusted leader in language learning for over 30 years. Ready to start learning a new language this spring? Visit rosettastone.com slash NPR today. First up today, a rocky moment for a key alliance. In the 10 weeks since the start of the war in Iran, the geopolitical costs are growing, along with the enormous economic fallout as the conflict inflames a fight between President Trump and NATO allies. Bringing relations to what many experts say is a low point in NATO's 77-year history.

2:20NPR's Scott Newman joins us now with the latest and how we got here. Good morning, Scott. Good morning, Alyssa. Okay, so remind us how this dispute between President Trump and NATO started. To start with, NATO criticized the White House for not consulting them before planning strikes on Iran. Then Trump himself rebuked NATO for not backing the U.S. war effort. Now, Spain has refused to let the U.S. use bases on its soil, while the U.K. and Germany say they won't join the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports. German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz went even further, suggesting that Iran had humiliated Washington in peace talks.

2:57And how has Trump responded? Well, he wasn't happy. Soon after all of this, the Pentagon said it was withdrawing 5 ,000 American troops from Germany, and a plan to supply the country with U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles might be shelved. Despite all that, the U.K. and Germany have continued to share intelligence and allow the U.S. to use bases on their territory for operations over the Persian Gulf. Okay, Scott, let's step back a bit. This isn't the first run-in between President Trump and the rest of NATO. Catch us up. Yeah, not at all. In Trump's first term, he repeatedly criticized NATO members for not pulling their own weight when it comes to defense spending.

3:35And he suggested that future U.S. help to allies could depend on them, quote, paying their bills. He also floated the idea of buying Greenland. Now, fast forward. By his second term, the Greenland talk had turned into threats of seizing it by force, despite Greenland belonging to NATO member Denmark. He also spoke openly about annexing another ally, Canada. Here's former NATO Ambassador Ivo Dalder. All capitals in Europe and in Canada realize that something fundamental has broken. Now, Trump is again threatening to withdraw from NATO while tensions grow over U.S. policy in the Strait of Hormuz.

4:13OK, so something fundamental has broken. What does all this mean for the future of the alliance? Well, no one I talk to thinks Trump will follow through on his threats to exit NATO altogether. In any case, that would require approval by Congress. But allies increasingly view the U.S. as an unreliable partner. And NATO is actively planning for a future where the U.S. takes a backseat and countries like Germany step up to take the lead. Is that just all talk or is there actually more to it? Well, Germany has, in fact, committed to a significant increase in its own troop levels with a view to taking a larger role in NATO.

4:51But a bigger problem is that Europe and Canada don't have the same capacity as the U.S. to conduct long range precision strikes. We're talking about big transport planes, bombers and cruise missiles, and their navies don't come close to the U.S. either. Balkan Devlin is a senior fellow at Canada's McDonnell Laurier Institute. He says it could take as long as 10 years for the rest of the alliance to acquire those capabilities. And that, says Devlin, would leave a potential vulnerability gap that Russia, which is now in its fifth year of an expansionist war in Ukraine, could exploit. The concern is that the Trump administration will not provide that time to do an ordinary transition to more European leadership.

5:35Devlin and others say the result of the loss of trust in the U.S. is ironically creating exactly the kind of NATO Trump seems to want. One led by Europe, not the U.S. That's NPR's Scott Newman. Thank you. Thanks, Alyssa.

5:59The immigration detention center in the Everglades called Alligator Alcatraz may be closing earlier than expected. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis confirmed reporting by The New York Times that Florida officials are in talks with the Trump administration over the future of the facility. Megan Bowman of member station WUSF in Tampa has been covering the detention center and is with us now. Hi, Megan. Hi. So remind us of the unique nature of this detention center. Right. So it opened last summer in July in the middle of the Everglades, this swampy marshland in South Florida that has a lot of alligators.

6:38That's how state officials came up with the name. It's at a small training airport, and DeSantis took control of the facility using emergency power so it could be built in eight days. Plus, everything had to be trucked in, like water, generators, even tents for housing. So now it's a tent city on the runway. All sewage and trash gets trucked out, and it's in the middle of nowhere, which was the idea behind it, that if people escaped, they'd run into alligators and other wildlife. And ever since it opened, there have been complaints about inhumane conditions of detainees and environmental concerns of the facility operating in a very sensitive ecosystem.

7:21OK, so I understand that the state of Florida is running the facility and then paying for all of it, at least for now. Well, kind of. Yes, since they built this facility from scratch and there was no existing infrastructure, it cost a lot of money and it continues to drain the state. But public records show the state prepared this cost breakdown when they applied for a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The understanding was the state would be reimbursed and that the center would run at least through June of 2027. So they show it cost Florida about$750 ,000 a day to operate. The New York Times reports that number is actually a little closer to a million dollars a day.

8:09So including a one-time cost to build it, the state's total yearly cost was nearly$1.4 billion. So far, it's been the state covering that expense, not the federal government. They did get a letter to get reimbursed by the feds, but no money has arrived yet. So what is Governor Ron DeSantis saying about that money and the future of the detention center? Well, the governor has always said that the state will get reimbursed. DeSantis says he talked to FEMA about it the other day and that it will happen soon. He's always said he was just helping DHS and ICE get enough detention beds temporarily for their immigration enforcement.

8:47Now, he says, if DHS can handle the detainees, he's happy to close Alligator Alcatraz. It was always designed to be a temporary facility. It has made a major impact. And if we shut the lights out on it tomorrow, we will be able to say it served its purpose because it was responsible for helping with almost 22 ,000 illegal aliens. Now, ICE data shows out of nearly 1 ,400 male detainees there now, 900 have no criminal record. So what's next for the detention center? We're going to see if things are really going to wind down early. I should note that nationwide ICE and DHS efforts to expand immigration detention has faced tough and often bipartisan backlash.

9:32But lawsuits over environmental concerns and the treatment of detainees are still working their way through its courts. There's also a public petition to close the facility. It has more than 53 ,000 signatures. That's Megan Bowman of member station WUSF in Tampa. Thanks for your reporting. Thank you.

10:00And finally, today on the podcast, a new approach to public corruption. Since his return to office, President Trump has pardoned more than a dozen former elected officials and their associates, convicted or charged with corruption offenses. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has new reporting on accountability in the second Trump administration, and he joins us now. Ryan, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me. So tell us about how you approach this idea of Trump's take on public corruption. Right. Public corruption is obviously a big topic. There are a lot of different aspects to it.

10:35So I decided to focus on two things. One of them is presidential pardons. I went through all of President Trump's pardons since he returned to office a little more than a year ago. And what I found is that he has pardoned at least 15 former elected officials and their co-conspirators who were either convicted of corruption or charged with corruption crimes. And the one that really stuck out to me was a former Las Vegas councilwoman, Michelle Fiore. She was convicted of pocketing$70 ,000 in donations meant to build memorials to police officers who were killed in the line of duty. And instead, she spent that money on herself for things like cosmetic surgery, rent, her daughter's wedding.

11:12Trump pardoned her weeks before she was going to be sentenced. She is a Republican. And in total, more than half of the pardons that I looked at were given to Republicans or Trump supporters. Is this sort of thing unusual with pardons? Look, the president's pardon power is a core power. It's rooted in the Constitution. But I talked to Dan Greenberg about Trump's pardons. Greenberg is a legal fellow at the Libertarian Cato Institute. And he said every president makes mistakes in the pardon process from time to time. He likened such mistakes to a hailstone out of a clear blue sky. But with Trump's pardons, he says this is more of a hailstorm.

11:47There's just a pile of pardons that I think appear to any reasonable person to be not just highly questionable, but just obviously disturbing. Now, I asked the White House about these pardons for corruption offenses. A White House spokeswoman defended Trump's pardons. She said some of them were for people who were victims of what she called President Biden's weaponized justice system. So pardons are just one piece of the puzzle. You also looked at changes at the Justice Department. What did you find there? Right. The other piece that I looked at is a special unit at the Justice Department called the Public Integrity Section.

12:25It was created after Watergate to investigate and prosecute public corruption and election crimes. And for 50 years, that is what it did. It brought cases against elected officials, corrupt police officers, but it has been gutted under this administration. The section had 35 to 40 attorneys when Trump returned to office last January. Now it has just two full-time attorneys. The section had 175 to 200 investigations and charged cases on its hands when Trump returned to office. That number has now dropped to around 20, so a huge decrease. I did reach out to the Justice Department for comment on this.

13:02It did not respond. What's the practical effect of gutting this corruption fighting unit? Well, it's interesting, but current and former officials I spoke with say it's really smaller states and rural areas that are going to be hit the hardest by this. And the reason for that is public corruption cases are resource and time intensive. Big city U.S. attorney offices have enough resources to do them on their own, but a lot of places don't. And it's those places that the public integrity section would often step in with resources and expertise to do cases and hold corrupt state and local officials to account.

13:37One example is a case against a small town Pennsylvania police officer who was convicted of bribery and other crimes, including using his position to obtain sex from two women in exchange for favors in prosecutions. And it's cases like these, people say, that are likely to slip through the cracks without the public integrity section. So putting these two things together, the pardons and the changes at DOJ that you just spelled out, what does it tell us about the administration's approach to public corruption? Well, legal experts, current and former officials that I spoke with say the message from the administration appears to be that it is indifferent at best to tackling the problem of public corruption.

14:21And looking down the road in the longer term, the concern is that if corruption is allowed to go unchecked, that has a corrosive effect. It eats away at government, at public trust in government. And you can end up with a sort of broken system where public officials routinely serve themselves first and the public second. That's NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Ryan, thank you so much. Thank you.

14:47And that is Up First for Saturday, May 9th, 2026. I'm Alyssa Nadwarni. And I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Michael Radcliffe produced today's podcast with help from Danny Hensel. Our editor was Ed McNulty, along with Jacob Finston, Melissa Gray, Maureen Powell, Susanna Capilouto, and Krishnadev Kalamora. Here in the studio is our director, Elena Tworek, and our technical director, David Greenberg. Who has engineering support from Jay Ciz, Simon Laszlo Jansen, and Nisha Hines. Shannon Rhodes is our senior supervising editor. Our executive producer is Evie Stone. Jim Kane is our deputy managing editor. Tomorrow on the Sunday Story, going it alone as a mom from the get-go.

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