The Federal Aviation Administration has reopened airspace over El Paso, Texas, hours after saying it would stop all flights for 10 days for “special security reasons.”
“Mexican cartel drones breached US airspace,” a Trump administration official told Business Insider of the disruption. The official added that the Defense Department “took action to disable the drones” and that it has determined there’s no threat to commercial travel.
It’s unclear if the drones were carrying drugs and how, exactly, the US disabled them. Neither the White House nor the Defense Department immediately responded to a request for additional information.
“There is no threat to commercial aviation,” the FAA said on Wednesday morning. “All flights will resume as normal.”
Less than 11 hours earlier, it had issued temporary flight restrictions that prohibited all flights in and out of El Paso. It appeared to be the first time since the September 11 attacks that the airspace above a major US city was shut.
The restrictions covered a radius of 10 nautical miles around the airport below 18,000 feet, and another area just over the New Mexico border.
The FAA’s notice went into effect from 11:30 p.m. MT on Tuesday and was scheduled to last until the same time on February 20.
After several hours of uncertainty, it now looks like the majority of flights will take off — albeit well behind schedule.
Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, and Delta Airlines canceled 15 flights in and out of El Paso before the FAA’s update, according to data from Flightradar24. The data showed an average delay of over three hours for departing aircraft.
United Airlines previously issued a travel waiver to let passengers reschedule their trips at no extra cost, but this was removed from the airline’s website following the FAA’s update.
A spokesperson for Southwest, the largest operator at El Paso, earlier said it had “paused all operations” before resuming them after the FAA’s update.
A small cargo plane operated by Sierra West Airlines was due to land in El Paso around 1 a.m., but instead diverted to Las Cruces, New Mexico, according to data from Flightradar24.
The FAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment for additional information.
In a Facebook post earlier on Wednesday morning, El Paso city councilman Chris Canales said he had no reason to believe there was any imminent safety threat to the city. He said there appeared to have been no advance notice to local leadership or airport leadership.
El Paso sits on the border with Mexico and is home to Fort Bliss, a major Army post. It is home to an ICE Service Processing Center with the capacity to hold nearly 900 detainees. It’s also the site of a planned short-term, 5,000-person ICE detention facility that’s set to be completed in September 2027, according to a Defense Department contract announced in July.
The city is 200 miles from Marfa, a town known as an arts center.
Guy Gratton, a professor of aircraft test and evaluation at Cranfield University, said the flight restrictions extended “much higher than most security airspace closures” and didn’t appear to permit military or medical flights.
“That is very unusual indeed,” he said in a post on X.
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