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Passengers queue at El Paso International Airport after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration lifted its temporary closure on Wednesday. (Jose Luis Gonzalez\/Reuters)<\/p>\nThe U.S. Federal Aviation Administration called down a notice Wednesday halting all flights to and from El \u200bPaso International Airport in Texas several hours after it said they were being stopped \u200bfor “special security reasons.”<\/p>\n
The airport, \u200bwhich is next to the U.S. \u2060military’s Biggs Army Airfield \u2060and sits over \u200cthe border from the Mexican city of Juarez, originally said in a post on Instagram that all flights had been grounded from just before midnight on Feb. 11 for a 10-day period.<\/p>\n
Shortly before 9 a.m. ET Wednesday, the FAA said the airspace closure over El Paso had been lifted. <\/p>\n
“There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal,” the federal agency said in a post on social media.<\/p>\n
U.S. government and airline officials, speaking \u200bon condition of anonymity, said the FAA closed the airspace due to concerns that a laser-based counterdrone system being tested by the U.S. army could pose risks to air traffic. <\/p>\n
The FAA lifted its restrictions after the army agreed to \u200bmore safety tests before using the system, which is being tested at Fort Bliss, next to El Paso International Airport.<\/p>\n
Passengers queue at El Paso International Airport after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration lifted its temporary closure on Wednesday. (Jose Luis Gonzalez\/Reuters)<\/p>\n
The \u2060White House was surprised by \u2060the El Paso airspace closure, according to two sources speaking on condition of anonymity, \u200ctouching off a scramble among law enforcement agencies to figure out what happened. <\/p>\n
The FAA lifted the restrictions shortly after the situation was discussed in the office of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, the sources said. <\/p>\n
Aircraft stranded<\/p>\n
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who oversees the FAA, said the closure had been prompted by a drone incursion by a Mexican drug cartel. <\/p>\n
However, a drone sighting \u2060near an airport would typically lead to a brief pause on traffic, not an extended closure, and officials say drone incursions in the El Paso region are common. <\/p>\n
The move had stranded numerous aircraft from Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and American Airlines at the airport, which handles about four million passengers annually.<\/p>\n
El Paso Mayor \u200cRenard Johnson said the FAA did not reach out to the airport, the police chief or other local officials before shutting down the airspace.<\/p>\n
“I want to be very, very clear that this should have never happened,” he said at a news conference. <\/p>\n
The U.S. official in charge of airport security, Transportation Security Administration acting administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill, also told Congress that she had not been \u200bnotified.<\/p>\n
“That’s a problem,” said Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, who said there are daily drone incursions along the U.S.-Mexico border. <\/p>\n
Mexican president unaware of U.S. claims<\/p>\n
When asked about the temporary suspension, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Wednesday \u200cshe had no knowledge of drones being used \u200bon the border with \u200bUnited States.<\/p>\n
Sheinbaum said Mexican defence and navy secretaries will meet with U.S. Northern Command officials in Washington on Wednesday in a meeting attended by several other countries. <\/p>\n
Sheinbaum said the Mexican officials would “listen” in the meeting.<\/p>\n
“They are not taking any position other than the one we already know, which is the defence of sovereignty,” she said. <\/p>\n
El Paso, with a population of about 680,000 people, is the 23rd-largest city in the U.S. The airport \u200bthere handled 3.49 \u2060million passengers in the first 11 months of 2025, according to its website, including travellers flying with all the major U.S. airlines such as Southwest, Delta, United and American.<\/p>\n
The “FAA has not exactly acquitted itself credibly, objectively or professionally,\u201d said Bob Mann, an airline industry consultant. “The question should be, do we get \u2060an explanation?”<\/p>\n
Closing the airspace over an American city is extremely rare, but notably took place countrywide in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. <\/p>\n
“Medical evacuation flights were forced to divert to Las Cruces,” El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson said at a Wednesday morning news conference. “All aviation operations were grounded, including emergency flights. This was a major and unnecessary disruption, one that has not occurred since 9\/11.”<\/p>\n
In mid-January, the FAA warned airlines to exercise caution when flying over Mexico, Central America and parts of \u200bSouth America, citing the risks of potential military activities.<\/p>\n
Tensions between the U.S. \u2060and regional leaders have ramped up since the Trump administration \u2060mounted a large-scale military buildup in the southern Caribbean, attacked \u2060Venezuela \u2060and seized its president, \u200bNicol\u00e1s Maduro, in a military operation.<\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald Trump said in January that \u200bdrug cartels were \u2060running Mexico and suggested that the U.S. could strike land targets to combat them, one of a series of threats to deploy U.S. military force against cartels that date back to his 2024 presidential campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration called down a notice Wednesday halting all flights to and from El \u200bPaso…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-177775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}