US Military Shoots Down CBP’s Own Drone Near Texas Border, Democrats Demand Independent Investigation

The Pentagon fired a high-energy laser at a drone near Fort Hancock, Texas on Thursday — and destroyed it. The problem: it was a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) drone. CBP had not told the military it was flying one. The Pentagon saw an unidentified aircraft, engaged it, and the FAA responded by shutting down airspace over the small border town, about 55 miles southeast of El Paso, below 18,000 feet.

Key facts at a glance:

• The Incident: The Pentagon used a directed-energy weapon to destroy a DHS/CBP drone near Fort Hancock, TX on Thursday, February 26, because CBP failed to notify the military it was operating in the area.
• Second Strike in Two Weeks: This follows the February 11 El Paso incident, where the same laser system shot down four Mylar party balloons near Fort Bliss and forced an eight-hour shutdown of El Paso International Airport, canceling 14 flights and diverting medical evacuations 45 miles away.
• Congressional Reaction: Senator Tammy Duckworth announced she will request a joint Inspector General investigation into both laser incidents from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Transportation. Representatives Rick Larsen, André Carson, and Bennie Thompson said their “heads are exploding.”
• The Source: Four officials briefed The New York Times on the incident details, which DroneXL covered in depth on February 27.

Pentagon and CBP Had No Shared Operational Picture

The Fort Hancock shootdown is the clearest evidence yet that the Pentagon and other federal agencies lack any reliable real-time coordination system for counter-drone operations along the southern border. The military engaged the CBP aircraft because CBP had not filed a flight notice. The FAA found out after the fact and issued a new flight restriction extending to late June. No agency had a shared operational picture in real time.

A Pentagon official told The New York Times that a preliminary internal report confirmed CBP had not notified the military it was launching a drone. The agencies released a joint statement Thursday night describing the engagement as occurring when “the Department of War employed counter-unmanned aircraft system authorities to mitigate a seemingly threatening unmanned aerial system operating within military airspace.” (The Department of War is the Trump administration’s renamed Department of Defense.) That language makes shooting down your own government’s drone sound like a planned procedure rather than a mistake. It wasn’t.

At a Senate confirmation hearing the same day, Pentagon nominee Mark Ditlevson — nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs — was pressed by lawmakers to explain why the Defense Department had allowed lasers to fire in El Paso airspace on February 11 over FAA objections. He told senators the statutory requirement is to “coordinate” with the FAA, not obtain approval. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island cut him off. “The coordination failed,” Reed said.

Democrats Point to a Bipartisan Bill the Administration Bypassed

Representatives Larsen, Carson, and Thompson — the top Democrats on panels overseeing aviation and homeland security — issued a joint statement pointing to pending legislation that would improve counter-drone coordination and operator training. They accused the administration of sidestepping a bipartisan process that would have addressed precisely these failures. The bill in question, the Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act, includes mandatory training requirements, clearer notification procedures, and improved interagency coordination standards.

This isn’t the first time Larsen and Thompson have raised this specific alarm. In April 2025, the same two representatives raised urgent questions after Secret Service counter-drone technology near Reagan National Airport triggered false collision avoidance alerts on commercial aircraft — again without FAA coordination. The pattern keeps repeating: a federal agency activates counter-drone technology without notifying the FAA, something breaks, and Congress asks what happened.

That Reagan National incident came on the heels of the January 29, 2025 midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people — a disaster the NTSB investigation attributed in part to FAA and Army failures to share critical safety data. Secret Service and Navy counter-drone tests had already triggered false collision warnings at Reagan National in March 2025. That was more than a year before Fort Hancock. The coordination failures were documented then too. Nothing changed.

The February 11 El Paso Balloon Incident Went Unlearned From

The El Paso incident is worth revisiting, because its lessons were apparently not absorbed. On the night of February 10, the FAA issued NOTAM FDC 6/2233 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 — commercial, cargo, general aviation, and medical evacuation included. The restriction was set to last 10 days. It lasted eight hours, lifted only after the White House found out Wednesday morning when the closure came up during a regular meeting in Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ office.

What the laser actually hit: four Mylar party balloons. The New York Times confirmed the detail. The administration’s public messaging — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted that “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” — described a cartel drone incursion that congressional briefings did not support. DroneXL revisited the full sequence of that incident in the February 22 weekly roundup. Two weeks later, the same laser system destroyed a CBP aircraft.

Worth noting: the FAA’s own behavior in El Paso was not without fault. It issued a 10-day citywide airspace closure without notifying the White House, the Pentagon, DHS, or local authorities. The coordination failure ran in both directions.

The cartel drone threat driving all of this is real. A DHS counter-drone official told Congress that hostile organizations flew roughly 27,000 drones within 500 meters of the border in the first half of 2024 alone. NORTHCOM commander Air Force Gen. Greg Guillot put border drone incursions at “over a thousand per month” in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. The threat justifies the deployment. It does not justify deploying weapons without knowing which aircraft in your airspace are yours.

Duckworth Calls for Joint Inspector General Investigation

Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the Senate aviation subcommittee and a former Army helicopter pilot, announced she will formally request a joint Inspector General investigation into both laser incidents, covering the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Transportation. An IG review of this scope typically takes months, and by the time findings are published, operational deployments along the border will have continued.

Duckworth had already flagged the coordination problem after El Paso, stating that the closure resulted from a “CBP and DoD laser-based counter-drone test that was not coordinated prior to them conducting the test with the FAA.” The Fort Hancock incident proves that statement was not just politically sharp — it was accurate.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve tracked the counter-drone coordination failure along the southern border since the El Paso shutdown story broke on February 11. Fort Hancock isn’t a new problem. It’s the same problem with a more embarrassing target. Shooting down party balloons is a sensor calibration failure. Shooting down a CBP drone is a process failure. There’s no working deconfliction system. The agencies involved are operating from separate pictures.

Defense Secretary Hegseth’s “drone dominance by 2027” directive is meaningless if the command infrastructure to safely exercise that dominance doesn’t exist. The weapon is being built and deployed faster than the protocols to use it without destroying your own fleet. The joint statement describing this as military personnel “mitigating a seemingly threatening unmanned aerial system” is the kind of language that reveals an organization unwilling to name what actually happened: friendly fire.

Congress has had bipartisan legislation in the pipeline to fix exactly this — mandatory training, improved operator coordination, clearer notification requirements. The administration bypassed it. That’s not an accident. That’s a choice.

Expect the Fort Hancock airspace restriction to be quietly lifted well before its late June expiration date, the same way the El Paso closure evaporated eight hours after the White House found out. Duckworth’s IG investigation will take months. By the time results land, there will almost certainly be a third incident. The only question is what gets destroyed next time.

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.