What the Hell is the U.S. Government Doing in El Paso?

El Paso, Texas, is a city of around only 700,000 residents, and yet it has somehow become a nexus of blisteringly negative publicity, outrage and bizarre occurrences connected to the Trump administration within recent months. Situated on the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s a critically important hub for international trade and the second largest port of entry on the border, facilitating more than $100 billion in annual trade. It also happens to house one of ICE’s most notorious immigrant detention centers at Camp East Montana within the grounds of U.S. army base Fort Bliss, a place where multiple detainees have recently died, including one instance that has been ruled a homicide. So suffice to say, there was already plenty of negative attention on El Paso before the Federal Aviation Administration suddenly announced overnight that all the airspace surrounding the city (up to 18,000 feet of altitude) for 10 miles was suddenly being closed, shutting down El Paso International Airport and even medical flights and flights from Fort Bliss.

The FAA claimed that the entire area was being shut down for “10 days,” citing only “special security reasons” in the dead of night, with the announcement seemingly coming as a complete surprise to state and local officials, commercial airlines, and even the military at Fort Bliss. The government warning went on to state that the FAA could take administrative action against non-complying craft, or use “deadly force against the airborne aircraft, if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat.”

Which is all to say: What the fuck is going on in the vicinity of El Paso? The shutdown of the airspace has since been lifted, only hours after it was issued, and the story that the government is telling doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. The closest thing to an official line of explanation comes from Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who claimed on Twitter that U.S. airspace was breached by Mexican cartel drones, causing the Defense Department to take action to disable the drones. According to the New York Times, “two people briefed by Trump administration officials” about the closure said that the FAA’s sudden move to close the airspace had been prompted by the DoD employing “new counter-drone technology and concerns about the risks it could pose to other aircraft in the area.”

CBS News is now reporting, meanwhile, that the closure of the airspace by the FAA seemingly stems from a spat between the FAA and the Department of Defense, the latter of which was apparently gung-ho to test some of its new high-energy laser technology as an anti-drone measure. Earlier this week, in what sounds like a particularly absurd bit of blundering, “the anti-drone technology was launched near the southern border to shoot down what appeared to be foreign drones. The flying material turned out to be a party balloon, sources said. One balloon was shot down, several sources said.” So it’s possible that this all comes down to the DoD jumping the gun against some balloons, and the FAA fearing that their irresponsible deployment of new, experimental technology could be a threat to all other aviation in the area.

One person seemingly not buying the government’s line is the area’s Congressional representative, Democrat Veronica Escobar, who said that the drone-related reason for the closure of the airspace surrounding El Paso was “not the information that we in Congress have been told,” while adding that there was no past or current threat in the area. She said “the information coming from the administration does not add up,” and said that the mere presence of drones from Mexico or the operations of the DoD should have had no effect on normal aviation operations.

“There have been drone incursions from Mexico going back to as long as drones existed,” Escobar said at a news conference Wednesday. “So this is nothing new. The drone incursion from Mexico—obviously not something any of us want to see. But this is not unusual, and there was nothing extraordinary about any drone incursion into the U.S. that I’m aware of.”

Moreover, why would the FAA immediately announce that the area was going to be closed for an unprecedented-since-9/11 span of 10 full days, only to immediately abandon that line hours later? You don’t have to be a regular Jacob Weindling reader here at Splinter to immediately wonder about the provenance of these “drones,” and if they could have something to do with the UAP phenomenon involving mysterious drones near military institutions, bases and secret sites. What exactly made the FAA so jumpy in this instance?

El Paso mayor Renard Johnson, meanwhile, was unsurprisingly rather pissed off about the sudden development. Citing multiple medical evacuation flights that were forced to divert and reroute, Johnson said at a Wednesday news conference that “our community was scared, because someone decided to shut down our airspace. You just cannot do that.”

“I want to be very, very clear that this should’ve never happened,” Johnson went on to say. “You cannot restrict air space over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leadership. That failure to communicate is unacceptable.”

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the last few months covering the abuse and deaths of detained immigrants perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security via Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it’s particularly odd to see the city of El Paso crop up yet again, this time from what is presumably a different angle. The 5,000-bed, makeshift tent facility known as Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss has become one of the most infamous of all ICE detention sites, completely unable to stay out of the news cycle. Recently, a pair of tuberculosis cases were diagnosed among the detainees in the midst of poor sanitation and disease mitigation practices, and just yesterday I wrote about a detained native of Ireland, Seamus Culleton, who had spent five months at the facility while claiming that agents of ICE had forged his signature on documents.

We have received numerous credible reports of torture, killing, and inhumane treatment of detained individuals at the Camp East Montana migrant detention facility, located within Fort Bliss. #txlege

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— Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos (@anamariafortexas.com) Feb 10, 2026 at 1:47 PM

The previously mentioned member of Congress, Veronica Escobar, has made multiple unannounced visits to the site alongside oversight teams, and said in another piece (again, just yesterday) that “After 6 months of oversight visits to Camp East Montana, the $1.24 billion immigration detention facility in El Paso, it’s clear the company running it is defrauding taxpayers, preventing detainees from talking to lawyers, and DHS is assisting them by obstructing Congress.”

Is any of this related to the sudden shutdown of the El Paso airspace, the stated reasoning revolving around drones from Mexican cartels, or the operations of DHS? I have no idea, but the confluence of disturbing stories happening simultaneously in El Paso have seemingly made it a nexus of the second Trump administration’s cruelty and follies. So we’ll ask again: What the hell is going on in El Paso?