The Texas Senate Select Committee on Homeland and Border Security heard on August 12 that Mexican cartels are flying the same drones American police fly, and that 61 officers in the entire United States are certified to bring one down.
El Paso Police Sgt. Cory Balke told the committee his department has tracked 1,776 cross-border drone incursions. He asked lawmakers for more authority at the local level, and for the training and money to use it. One of those requests has already been answered, and not by Austin.
I have spent the past year tracking the federal counter-drone buildout for DroneXL, from the first FEMA grant tranche through the FBI certification school running out of seats in the middle of the World Cup. What Texas senators heard last week is that same bottleneck, described from the Rio Grande instead of from a House hearing room.
El Paso Police Have Tracked 1,776 Cross-Border Drone Incursions
Balke told the August 12 hearing his department has logged 1,776 drone crossings from Ciudad Juárez, a count limited to aircraft broadcasting Remote ID. Radar returns and sensor hits over the same period put the number closer to 14,000. Those two figures rest on very different kinds of evidence.
The 1,776 count covers aircraft carrying what Balke called digital license plates, the Remote ID signal that commercially manufactured drones broadcast by design. A radar return identifies nothing. It registers an object. How many of the roughly 14,000 were drones, and how many were birds or light aircraft, is the difference between a serious problem and an overwhelming one, and the testimony as reported does not settle it. Balke made the sharper point himself: anything crossing without a broadcast signal never enters the tracked column at all.
On capability he was blunt. Cartel operators across the river fly $30,000 aircraft that can identify a person at a mile (1.6 kilometers) and follow a moving vehicle, and the inventory runs from $500 consumer models up to $60,000 six-rotor agricultural machines able to haul 441 pounds (200 kilograms) of cargo in a single trip. “The threat is very high, and they are very capable,” Balke said of the operators in Juárez. Balke told senators that running a drone program is the natural foundation for a counter-drone program, and his own department is the working example: El Paso police fly a citywide drone-as-first-responder network built on 22 DJI Dock stations across nearly 40 miles (64 kilometers) of urban and border airspace, which DroneXL covered last August.
Congress Already Granted the Mitigation Authority Texas Is Asking About
The SAFER SKIES Act, signed in December 2025 as part of the fiscal 2026 defense authorization, extended counter-drone mitigation authority to state, local, tribal and territorial agencies. A Justice Department and Homeland Security interim final rule made that authority operational on July 1, exactly six weeks before the hearing.
The law amends 6 U.S.C. 124n, the statute that had reserved drone mitigation to a short list of federal agencies since 2018. Under the interim final rule, certified state and local officers can disrupt, seize, disable or destroy an aircraft that meets a credible threat standard, using only equipment on a federal authorized systems list. Unauthorized mitigation carries civil penalties reaching $100,000 per violation. DroneXL covered the act’s reach over stadiums and amusement parks in March.
A state legislature cannot hand its officers the power to jam or capture an aircraft. The prohibitions sit in the Communications Act and the federal aircraft sabotage statutes, and only Congress can lift them, as the Congressional Research Service lays out. The committee’s own interim charge concedes the arrangement: it directs members to determine which state agencies would best assist the federal government in drone mitigation, not which ones Texas can deputize by itself. Chair Phil King framed the hearing around whether “current state laws and enforcement authorities are sufficient.” On mitigation, state law was never the operative document.
The Certification Pipeline Still Runs Through One FBI Schoolhouse
Every officer cleared to take down a drone under the new rule trains at a single facility, the FBI’s National Counter-UAS Training Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. As of the July rule, roughly 46 agencies and 61 individual officers nationwide had finished mitigation certification. Sixty-one.
That total lines up almost exactly with the spring cohort. DroneXL reported in May that the bureau was training about 60 state and local officers ahead of the World Cup, and the July rule counted 61 certified. By June, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was telling House appropriators that the school had more applicants than seats while the tournament was still running. The certification is also individual rather than institutional: one trained officer does not authorize a department.
The two tiers are not equally hard to clear. Detection and warning certification is a free online course, and the departments expect around 1,500 agencies to take it. Mitigation is a two-week residential course at one campus in Alabama. The tier that lets an officer actually stop an aircraft is the one stuck at double digits, which is why a Lawfare analysis in June argued for pushing certification out to state peace officer training commissions instead of running everything through one federal pipeline. Money is not the binding constraint either. FEMA’s counter-drone grant program is already moving hundreds of millions of dollars, and Texas DPS has been expanding its own drone fleet for years.
The Ukraine Casualty Figure Cited in Austin Comes From Kyiv
Drone technology specialist Michael McGee told senators that drones caused more than 90% of Russian combat losses in March, roughly 34,000 troops. That figure originates with Ukraine’s own military, which counted 35,351 March casualties and credited 96% to unmanned systems, making it a combatant’s claim rather than an independent count.
The magnitude holds up better than the attribution. CSIS estimated in July that Russian casualties ran between 30,000 and 34,000 per month during 2026, which brackets the number McGee used. Ukraine’s defense ministry said every strike in the tally carries video confirmation, though the 96% drone share remains Kyiv’s own arithmetic. McGee’s underlying warning is better supported than his statistics: DroneXL documented cartels copying Ukrainian drone tactics back in November 2025, and the transfer of battlefield technique to the border is observable rather than theoretical.
His framing deserves more scrutiny than it got. McGee, a former fighter pilot who holds a doctorate, told the committee that August 12 was the equivalent of August 12, 2001, and that “our next 9/11 is coming” in 30 days. Thirty days from the hearing lands on September 11, 2026, the 25th anniversary. That is calendar rhetoric, delivered to a committee that was weighing appropriations. No threat assessment sits behind the date.
DroneXL’s Take
The cartel drone threat is real, and I want that on the record before I criticize the response. This is not New Jersey in December 2024. Balke’s operators exist, their hardware is documented, and DroneXL has tracked cartels adopting Ukrainian tactics for the better part of a year.
When Texas law enforcement says the people across the river are as capable as they are, I believe them.
The problem is that Texas convened a hearing to solve a problem Texas does not own. Congress already granted the mitigation authority in December. The Justice Department and DHS already built the operational framework in July. What is missing is throughput at one schoolhouse in Huntsville, and no bill filed in Austin can widen that door. My read is that the legislature’s honest options are narrow and unglamorous: fund seats at NCUTC, fund detection gear that clears the authorized systems list, fund the DFR programs that Balke correctly identified as the foundation, and lobby the federal delegation to decentralize certification.
What worries me is the other half of the committee’s charge. It directs members to identify necessary prohibitions and strengthen penalties, and that is the part a state legislature actually can do quickly. A hearing about $60,000 cartel aircraft carrying 441 pounds across the Rio Grande has a way of producing statutes that land on the Part 107 operator photographing a construction site in Houston. The cartel pilot in Ciudad Juárez has never once checked a Texas penal code provision before launching. Every new prohibition written this interim will be enforced almost exclusively against people who did.
Two dates are worth tracking. Public comment on the DOJ and DHS interim final rule closes September 6, which is where any serious push to move certification into state training commissions has to appear on the record. The committee’s recommendations then land before the legislature convenes in 2027. If those recommendations arrive heavy on new state penalties and light on funding for federal certification seats, Texas will have spent an interim legislating against the wrong pilot.
Sources: Bethany Blankley for The Center Square (syndicated copy), Texas Senate Select Committee on Homeland and Border Security, Border Report, Federal Register, Congressional Research Service.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
