Minneapolis Drone Journalist Rob Levine Forces FAA To Pull No-Fly Zones That Followed Invisible ICE Vehicles Across America

In January 2026, as Minneapolis was still processing the death of 37-year-old Renee Good at the hands of a federal agent, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a flight restriction that created roving 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every Department of Homeland Security (DHS) vehicle in the United States, including unmarked ones, moving ones, and ones whose routes were never announced. For freelance photojournalist Rob Levine, who had spent nearly four decades documenting the Twin Cities from the air and who lived six blocks from where Good was killed, the math was immediate. He parked his DJI quadcopter fleet and stopped flying.

Three months later, after a lawsuit filed with days to spare before a legal deadline expired, the FAA backed down. How that happened, and what it left unresolved, matters for every drone pilot in the country.

The NOTAM That Grounded Journalists Nationwide

NOTAM FDC 6/4375, issued January 16, 2026, prohibited drone flight within 3,000 lateral feet and 1,000 vertical feet of federal facilities, and for the first time in FAA history, extended that prohibition to DHS ground vehicles. The restriction applied whether those vehicles were stationary or in motion, whether they were marked or unmarked, and whether their routes had been publicly disclosed. It was set to run for 21 months, expiring October 29, 2027. The FAA had previously only advised pilots to avoid “mobile assets” operated by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, things like naval warships or nuclear material convoys, where the assets were identifiable and the threat was obvious. This was different. A DHS vehicle could be any unmarked sedan on any street in any city in America, and under NOTAM FDC 6/4375, flying a drone anywhere near it (without knowing it was there) could result in criminal charges.

The FAA itself acknowledged the problem. When Levine sought guidance, the agency told him the restriction was “ambiguous” and “therefore, any flight carries the risk of inadvertent violation.” That acknowledgment didn’t change the policy. It confirmed that compliance was impossible.

Vic Moss, CEO and cofounder of the Drone Service Providers Alliance (DSPA), based in Lakewood, Colorado, described the situation accurately in a March 11 post: drone operators could be “ensnared inside a restricted zone with no way of knowing it.” The Remote ID system that the FAA spent years mandating (designed to make drone operators visible to authorities) had no corresponding mechanism to make unmarked government vehicles visible to drone operators. Drone pilots were broadcasting their location in real time. The DHS vehicles they weren’t allowed to approach were invisible. DroneXL reported in February on the full scope of DHS’s drone surveillance expansion, including the 935-square-mile Chicago airspace lockdown during Operation Midway Blitz, the largest civilian drone ban in U.S. history.

A Photojournalist’s Legal Fight Against a 60-Day Clock

Levine had been documenting Twin Cities residents protesting the increased presence of federal agents in their community. Good’s death had occurred six blocks from his home. A week later, Customs and Border Protection officers killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, after wrestling him to the ground. Levine wanted his drones back in the air. He spent weeks looking for a lawyer willing to challenge the restriction, racing a 60-day clock to file a petition challenging the FAA decision. Nobody offered to take the case.

He eventually reached the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that provides free legal services to journalists. The organization filed Levine v. FAA (26-1054) with the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on March 16, with days to spare before the petition deadline closed.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the News Media Coalition, an international organization representing more than 50 news organizations, had already sent a letter to the FAA’s Office of the Chief Counsel detailing First and Fifth Amendment concerns. The First Amendment argument was direct: the restriction made it harder to record law enforcement officers from the air. The Fifth Amendment argument addressed the policy’s ambiguity. That ambiguity is the core of the due process claim: a rule that operators can only violate retroactively, once a federal agent decides their drone poses a threat, offers no meaningful way to comply in advance.

The FAA Retreated, But Didn’t Surrender

On April 10, Levine and his lawyers filed an emergency motion asking the DC Circuit to temporarily suspend the restriction pending full review. Five days later, on April 15, the FAA replaced NOTAM FDC 6/4375 with a revised notice: NOTAM FDC 6/2824. The new notice dropped all flight prohibitions and all criminal penalties. It instead “advised” drone pilots to use caution near DHS and other federal agency vehicles, language meaningfully different from a prohibition but still carrying implicit threat.

The Reporters Committee called it a victory. Staff attorney Clary told Ars Technica: “First and foremost, our goal was to get the restriction thrown out so that Rob and other journalists could be up in the air again.” The lawsuit remains active. Clary was explicit about why: “We’re cognizant that the FAA is doing this because they don’t want to have to defend what they did here on the merits in front of the DC Circuit.”

The revised advisory still permits federal agents to seize, damage, or destroy drones “deemed to pose a credible safety or security threat to covered mobile assets.” Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, noted that the three laws the advisory cites require federal agencies to first conduct risk-based assessments identifying specific drone threats. Whether those assessments were performed before either notice was issued remains unclear. Without them, Cope told Ars Technica, the government is “just disincentivizing people from engaging in lawful, First Amendment protected activity.”

Moss at the DSPA put a cleaner version of the same argument plainly: if someone is harassing federal agents with a drone, existing law provides ways to handle that. Making the FAA responsible for a DHS security posture affecting every drone pilot in the country was never the right framework.

DroneXL’s Take

I was on the ground in New York City twice when the NYPD flew Skydio X10 drones directly over No Kings protest marchers: first on Fifth Avenue in June 2025, then again in October when TARU deployed as many as nine aircraft at 200 feet over crowds from Times Square to 14th Street. None of those drones had parachute recovery systems. One nearly came down on protesters when a helium balloon flew into its path. I watched TARU officers land the aircraft, swap batteries, and send them straight back up over the marchers below. The NYPD had logged over 20,000 drone flights in 2025 by that point, per an officer at the scene. DroneXL reported on that operation in October 2025, and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project later confirmed the NYPD used drone footage to identify and arrest protesters.

That context is necessary to understand what NOTAM FDC 6/4375 actually accomplished. The government expanded its own aerial surveillance of protesters while simultaneously grounding the journalists trying to document those same protests from above. Skydio drones flew over the demonstrations while civilian DJI operators faced criminal exposure for getting too close to an unmarked car they had no way of seeing. When the ACLU published its drone surveillance whitepaper in March 2026, it cited DroneXL’s protest coverage in the footnotes. The asymmetry had already been documented. NOTAM FDC 6/4375 turned it into explicit federal policy.

Rob Levine’s case forced a real, if partial, retreat. The prohibition became an advisory. The criminal penalties disappeared. He was back in the air. The lawsuit (Levine v. FAA 26-1054, still active in the DC Circuit) now serves a purpose beyond Levine’s own flights. The Reporters Committee has said plainly that the government retreated specifically to avoid defending its actions on the merits. That means the DC Circuit may never rule on whether roving no-fly zones around mobile federal operations are constitutional in the first place. The EFF’s unresolved question about whether the risk-based assessments required by the cited laws were ever conducted also remains open. The pattern DroneXL has documented since June 2025 (government drone expansion running alongside civilian drone restriction, on the same streets, over the same crowds) isn’t resolved by one photojournalist winning one legal fight. It just became one document shorter.

Source: Ars Technica

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