There are moments when you watch the federal government in action and wonder whether you’re witnessing a carefully calibrated national security response or a group project where nobody read the assignment. This week in El Paso, it felt a lot like the latter.
Late Tuesday night, at 11:30 p.m. local time, the Federal Aviation Administration dropped a bombshell: all flights to and from El Paso International Airport were halted for ten days for what it described only as “special security reasons.” A Notice to Airmen, or NOTAM, declared the airspace within a ten-mile radius of the airport, up to nearly 18,000 feet, off-limits.
El Paso International handles roughly 100 flights a day. Had the order remained in place, it would have amounted to the largest shutdown of U.S. airspace since 9/11. That is not the kind of decision you slip out quietly before midnight and hope nobody notices.
If you’re going to shut down a major American airport for ten days and decline to explain why, you should expect alarm. You should expect speculation. You should expect people to assume the worst. That’s not paranoia; that’s what happens when you combine sweeping government action with zero transparency.
Then, less than nine hours later, at 8:54 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, the FAA abruptly reversed course. The temporary closure of airspace over El Paso had been lifted, the agency announced. There was no threat to commercial aviation. Flights would resume as normal.
No threat? That’s reassuring. But it also raises a small question: what exactly justified the biggest proposed airspace shutdown in a quarter-century?
Shortly after the FAA’s reversal, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took to X with an explanation. The FAA and the Department of War had acted swiftly, he said, to address a cartel drone incursion. The threat had been neutralized. There was no danger to commercial travel in the region. Restrictions were lifted. All was well.
Cartel drones are not a figment of anyone’s imagination. Mexican drug cartels have been operating unmanned aircraft along the border for years. In July, Steven Willoughby, a drone specialist at the Department of Homeland Security, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that more than 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters of the southern border in the last six months of 2024. Many flew above the 400-foot altitude limit or under cover of darkness.
So yes, cartel drones are real. They are a serious problem. They are used to scout Border Patrol movements and facilitate smuggling. If there had been a large-scale drone incursion over El Paso, that would have been a legitimate national security concern.
But a ten-day shutdown of a major airport’s airspace suggests something far more significant than a few hobby-grade quadcopters buzzing around at night. It implies either a sustained threat or a major operation. And if that were the case, the public would deserve more than a vague midnight notice and a breezy morning reversal.
To make matters worse, local and state officials apparently had no advance notice. El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson was furious. He pointed out that El Paso is the sixth largest city in Texas and the twenty-second largest in the United States. Hospitals, military operations, emergency services, and critical infrastructure all depend on coordinated and reliable airspace operations. Making sweeping decisions without notice or coordination, he argued, creates unnecessary danger and confusion.
Among the canceled flights that morning was one carrying surgical equipment from Dallas. That is not an abstract inconvenience. That is the sort of ripple effect that turns bureaucratic miscommunication into real-world consequences.
So what actually happened?
CBS News and other outlets soon reported that the closure was not about cartel drones at all, but about planned testing of new military technology near Fort Bliss, the Army base that abuts El Paso International Airport. The Pentagon had reportedly been planning to practice taking down drones using a high-energy laser.
Yes, a high-energy laser.
On paper, this sounds like something out of a defense contractor’s glossy brochure. The military has been developing laser-based systems to intercept and destroy drones, a technology that could be valuable given the proliferation of cheap unmanned aircraft in modern warfare and cross-border crime.
But if you are going to test an anti-drone laser, perhaps the first question to ask is: where should we do this? A remote desert range? One of the Air Force Test Center’s dozens of installations? A location not directly adjacent to a busy civilian airport?
Apparently not.
The New York Times offered a different, and arguably more alarming, account. According to four people briefed on the situation, FAA officials were forced to close El Paso’s airspace after the Defense Department decided to use new anti-drone technology without giving aviation officials ample time to assess the risks to commercial airlines. The military, operating out of Fort Bliss, reportedly mobilized the technology over the FAA’s objections.
Two of the people briefed said military officials deployed the laser earlier this week against what they believed was a cartel drone. It turned out to be a party balloon. The operation was allegedly carried out without proper coordination with the FAA.
Take a moment to absorb that. The United States military may have fired a high-energy laser at a party balloon near a major civilian airport. And this, somehow, cascaded into a proposed ten-day shutdown of El Paso’s airspace.
If that is even partially accurate, we have moved beyond “robust interagency debate” and into “who thought this was a good idea?”
Then came yet another wrinkle. The Washington Post reported that the laser system was temporarily transferred to the Department of Homeland Security to counter cartel drones. According to two U.S. officials, Customs and Border Protection personnel may have launched the laser at something innocuous, probably a Mylar balloon.
The Pentagon had reportedly scheduled a Feb. 20 meeting with FAA officials to discuss safety issues surrounding the weapon’s deployment. But Defense and DHS wanted to move forward more quickly. The FAA responded by imposing the flight restrictions. That planned meeting date reportedly influenced the ten-day duration of the NOTAM.
In other words, this may not have been a case of a terrifying, ongoing cartel drone offensive. It may have been a case of agencies tripping over one another while fast-tracking a new toy.
To recap, depending on which account you read, the El Paso airspace drama was caused by: a cartel drone incursion; planned laser testing; the Defense Department acting over FAA objections; Customs and Border Protection firing at a balloon; or some combination of the above.
What we know for certain is this: a major American airport was nearly shut down for ten days; local officials were blindsided; flights carrying critical equipment were canceled; and within hours the federal government pivoted from “special security reasons” to “no threat to commercial aviation.”
That is not how confidence is built.
There are two broad possibilities here, and neither is comforting.
First possibility: there was a serious cartel drone threat significant enough to justify a ten-day closure of airspace around a major U.S. city. If that is true, the public deserves a clear explanation of what happened, how it was resolved, and what steps are being taken to prevent a recurrence. Border security is not a minor issue, and neither is the safety of commercial aviation.
Second possibility: the closure was not primarily about an external threat, but about internal dysfunction — agencies failing to coordinate, rushing to deploy new technology, and then scrambling to manage the fallout. If that is true, then senior officials owe the public an honest account of what went wrong and how they plan to fix it.
What is not acceptable is a muddled narrative in which cabinet officials attribute a dramatic action to cartel drones if that was not, in fact, the driving cause. National security is serious business. So is public trust. If the explanation changes depending on the hour, people will reasonably begin to suspect that they are not getting the full story.
The Department of Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent threats to the homeland, including those that could endanger commercial aviation. The FAA’s core mission is to ensure the safety of the national airspace system. The Defense Department’s job is to defend the country, not to freelance with experimental systems in ways that disrupt civilian infrastructure.
All of these missions are legitimate. All of them can, at times, conflict. That is why coordination matters. That is why communication matters. That is why you do not spring a ten-day airspace closure on a city of nearly 700,000 people without so much as a courtesy call to the mayor.
El Paso sits at the nexus of border security, military operations, and civilian life. Fort Bliss is a major Army installation. The airport is a critical transportation hub. Hospitals rely on incoming flights. Businesses depend on travel. Military operations themselves depend on stable airspace management.
When federal agencies cannot align their actions in a place like that, the consequences are not theoretical.
In the end, flights resumed. The sky did not fall. But the episode leaves a lingering question: are the people in charge of our most sensitive systems communicating effectively, or are they operating in silos until something breaks?
It is possible that the answer will turn out to be more mundane than it currently appears. Perhaps this was a bureaucratic overcorrection to a misunderstood threat. Perhaps it was a one-off misfire in the rollout of new anti-drone capabilities.
But when you combine a midnight NOTAM, a ten-day shutdown order, a morning reversal, dueling explanations, and reports of lasers targeting party balloons, you do not get reassurance. You get whiplash.
At a minimum, everyone involved could use a refresher course in interagency coordination and public communication. If you are going to wield high-energy lasers near civilian airports, make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. If you are going to cite cartel drones as the reason for a massive airspace closure, be certain that is actually the reason.
