The FAA grounded every flight in and out of El Paso International Airport late Tuesday night, classifying the airspace as “National Defense Airspace” with deadly force authorization. The restriction was set to last 10 days. It lasted about eight hours. And the official explanations still don’t match.

Here is what we know so far:

The development: The FAA issued NOTAM FDC 6/2233 on February 10 at 11:30 PM MST, closing all airspace within a 10-nautical-mile radius of the El Paso VORTAC from the surface to 18,000 feet. The restriction covered commercial, cargo, general aviation, and even medical evacuation flights.
What actually caused it: According to CNN, CBS News, and the Associated Press, the Pentagon planned to test a high-energy counter-drone laser at Fort Bliss without completing coordination with the FAA. The FAA shut everything down in response.
The impact: 14 flights canceled, medical evacuations diverted 45 miles to Las Cruces, NM, and surgical equipment shipments from Dallas never arrived. El Paso’s mayor, airport, military at Fort Bliss, and local elected officials all say they received zero advance notice.
Current status: The El Paso restriction was lifted Wednesday morning. A separate 10-day TFR around Santa Teresa, New Mexico, about 15 miles northwest, remained active. The FAA has not explained why.

The Pentagon wanted to test a laser. The FAA said no. Both agencies lost.

The Pentagon has been testing high-energy laser systems for counter-drone use in remote areas of the country. But this time, the Department of Defense wanted to deploy the technology near Fort Bliss, a military base that directly abuts El Paso International Airport, to target cartel drones crossing the southern border.

The two agencies had a meeting scheduled for February 20 to review potential safety impacts and mitigation measures. The 10-day TFR would have expired February 21, one day after that meeting. The math is not subtle.

But the Pentagon wanted to move faster. According to CBS News, Pentagon officials argued that U.S. Code 130i requirements governing the protection of certain facilities from unmanned aircraft had already been met. The FAA disagreed.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford made the call Tuesday night to close the airspace, according to CBS sources. He did it without alerting the White House, the Pentagon, or the Department of Homeland Security. Bedford told officials the restrictions would stay in place until the safety coordination issues with the Defense Department could be resolved.

The result was a bureaucratic standoff that grounded a major American city’s airport for the first time since 9/11.

The laser shot down party balloons

Earlier this week, before the airspace closure, the military did use the counter-drone laser near the southern border. A source familiar with the events told CNN that the laser technology was used to shoot down four mylar party balloons. CBS News confirmed that at least one balloon was shot down by the system.

At least one actual cartel drone was successfully disabled, according to one official who spoke to CBS. But the number of real cartel drones hit versus party balloons remains unclear. Nobody in the Pentagon has provided a breakdown.

The Trump administration’s public messaging told a different story. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X: “The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion. The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region.”

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), whose district includes El Paso, directly disputed this account at a Wednesday morning press conference. “That is not what we in Congress have been told,” she said, referencing the briefing provided to the House Armed Services Committee. She said she believed the shutdown was not triggered by Mexican cartel drones, which she noted are “not unusual” for the El Paso area.

“I believe the FAA owes the community and the country an explanation as to why this happened so suddenly and abruptly and was lifted so suddenly and abruptly,” Escobar added. “The information coming from the federal government does not add up.”

The White House found out Wednesday morning and killed it

The restriction was discussed during a regular meeting in White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ office Wednesday morning, CBS sources said. Within minutes of the discussion, the FAA lifted the restrictions. The closure had lasted roughly eight hours.

Texas lawmakers had been pressing for answers since the early morning hours. The issue became, in CNN’s words, “a topic of intense focus inside the West Wing.”

No one has said whether anyone will be fired over the incident. One CBS source said it was “unclear whether anyone would be fired in connection to the miscommunications.”

Air traffic controllers learned about it 30 minutes before it happened

Audio captured by LiveATC.net revealed the moment air traffic controllers at El Paso International were told about the grounding. A controller told the crew of Southwest flight WN1249: “Just pass it on to Southwest and everybody else at 0630 for the next 10 days we’re stopped. All ground stop.”

The pilot, audibly surprised, asked for confirmation: “So the airport is totally closed?”

“Apparently. We just got informed about 30 minutes to an hour ago,” the controller replied.

Airlines learned about the closure when the NOTAM was posted. No advance coordination. No warning. The FAA’s own notice threatened that pilots who violated the restrictions could be “intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement/security personnel,” face civil penalties, lose their licenses, or be subject to criminal charges. The notice also warned that the U.S. government “may use deadly force” against any aircraft deemed an imminent security threat.

El Paso’s mayor called it an unacceptable failure

Mayor Renard Johnson did not hold back at his Wednesday morning press conference.

“I want to be very, very clear that this should have never happened,” he said. “You cannot restrict airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leadership. That failure to communicate is unacceptable.”

Johnson pointed out that medical evacuation flights were grounded and diverted to Las Cruces, about 45 miles away. A plane carrying surgical equipment from Dallas never arrived. He called the closure “a major and unnecessary disruption, one that has not occurred since 9/11” and reminded federal officials that El Paso is the sixth-largest city in Texas and the 22nd largest in the United States.

El Paso International typically sees about 55 departures per day across six carriers, primarily Southwest Airlines, American, and United. The airport handled nearly 3.5 million passengers between January and November of last year.

This is the second airspace closure over Pentagon counter-drone ops in three months

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), whose district covers more than 800 miles of the Texas border, confirmed that a similar airspace closure occurred in Hudspeth County in November 2025. That county is about 80 miles from El Paso. Gonzales said that restriction was also lifted quickly after coordination with federal partners.

Gonzales described cartel drone activity along the border as routine. “For any of us who show, live and work along the border, daily drone incursions by criminal organizations is everyday life for us. It’s a Wednesday for us,” he said.

The numbers back that up. In 2024, Air Force Gen. Greg Guillot, commander of NORTHCOM, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that drone incursions along the U.S.-Mexico border numbered “over a thousand” each month. A 2025 report found that in 2022 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection detected 10,000 drone incursions in the Rio Grande Valley area. Between 2012 and 2014, by comparison, authorities detected just 150 total.

Mexican cartels have deployed FPV drones and counter-UAS jammers, used drones to smuggle fentanyl in payloads up to 100 kg (220 lbs), and escalated drone warfare tactics that increasingly mirror military-grade operations. We have previously reported that Mexican cartels even sent operatives to Ukraine for FPV drone training.

The FAA-Pentagon coordination breakdown echoes the 2025 DC midair collision

This is not the first time the FAA and Pentagon have failed to share critical safety information. The January 2025 midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport killed 67 people. The NTSB investigation found that the FAA and the Army did not share safety data about an alarming number of close calls around the airport.

CBS News reported that the FAA’s decision to close El Paso airspace was driven in part by that heightened attention to military-civilian airspace conflicts following the DC crash.

The Pentagon has been using Biggs Army Airfield, which sits directly adjacent to El Paso International, for anti-cartel drone operations. U.S. government drones have been operating outside their normal flight paths, and airlines were aware of the ongoing impasse between the FAA and Pentagon because the military was not sharing operational information with aviation regulators.

CBS sources said similar communication failures had already led to close calls between military aircraft and commercial flights in the Caribbean. The pattern is clear: the agencies responsible for keeping the skies safe are not talking to each other.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), a former Army helicopter pilot who serves on both aviation and Armed Services committees, blamed the Trump administration directly.

“What I’m hearing now is that it was a CBP and DoD laser-based counter-drone test that was not coordinated prior to them conducting the test with the FAA,” she said. “They should have coordinated all of that before they endangered the flying public.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded during her morning press conference:

“There is no information on the use of drones on the border. If there is any information, then the FAA or any other US agency can ask the government of Mexico.” She noted that Mexican airspace was never closed.

The counter-drone problem is real, but this response made it worse

The Pentagon’s desire to test high-energy laser counter-drone systems near the border is understandable. Cartel drone incursions are a real and growing threat. The Defense Department has been racing to develop affordable counter-drone defenses as the scale of the problem outpaces existing solutions.

But testing a directed-energy weapon system next to a commercial airport serving 3.5 million passengers a year, without completing safety coordination with the agency responsible for civilian aviation, is a different kind of recklessness. And the FAA’s response of shutting down an entire city’s airspace for 10 days without telling anyone, including the White House, was its own kind of overreaction.

The result is that both agencies look incompetent, the administration’s “cartel drone incursion” narrative is contradicted by its own Congressional briefings, and the people of El Paso got caught in the middle. The counter-drone coordination problems that contributed to the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in over two decades have clearly not been fixed.

DroneXL’s Take

Two things can be true at once. Mexican cartel drones are a legitimate national security threat that demands new counter-drone technology. And the way the Pentagon and FAA handled this situation was a complete failure of interagency coordination that put lives at risk.

The fact that the military’s laser system shot down party balloons while the administration claimed it neutralized a cartel drone threat tells you everything about where counter-UAS technology stands right now. Identification is still the hard part. Shooting things down is the easy part. Getting those two capabilities to work together near civilian infrastructure requires exactly the kind of coordination that didn’t happen here.

I’ve been covering the cartel drone escalation for years now, and the trajectory is alarming. From 150 border crossings between 2012-2014 to over 1,000 monthly incursions in 2024. Cartels deploying FPV drones, counter-UAS jammers, and fentanyl payloads. The threat is real and it is growing.

But shutting down a major city’s airport because two federal agencies can’t agree on a meeting schedule is not a counter-drone strategy. It’s a warning sign. If the Pentagon and FAA can’t coordinate a laser test at Fort Bliss, how are they going to handle the kind of sustained, multi-drone cartel operations that NORTHCOM is already tracking?

The Santa Teresa TFR is still active as of this writing, and nobody has explained why. Expect Congressional hearings within weeks. And expect the Pentagon to get its February 20 meeting moved up considerably.

For drone pilots operating anywhere near the southern border: check NOTAMs before every flight. These restrictions are coming with zero advance notice, and the consequences include interception, detention, and potentially deadly force. This is the new normal until the agencies figure out how to talk to each other.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.