The morning of Feb. 11, 2026 was an especially hectic one in El Paso.
Residents woke up to disruptive and unexpected news: The city’s airspace would be closed for the next 10 days, according to an order from the Federal Aviation Administration. Even helicopter traffic by hospitals and law enforcement would be restricted.
But after a few hours of panic, the FAA made another announcement out of the blue, calling off the airspace restrictions. Flights in and out of El Paso could proceed as normal.
Since then, investigative reporter Kate Kelly of the New York Times has spent time digging into what actually happened to cause the brief shutdown. She spoke to Texas Standard about what happened, and how the decision was quickly reversed. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: At the center of the airspace shutdown is a disagreement between two federal agencies: the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Tell us about the nature of their conflict.
Kate Kelly: Essentially, Customs and Border Protection was experimenting with this laser beam that can shoot down drones — drones that might be flying over the southern border, perhaps to surveil Americans or American border agents, or even to drop illegal drugs on the U.S. side of the border.
And so the DOD has recently acquired these laser weapons, but in this case, the CBP was using them on sort of a trial basis.
And the FAA had exchanged emails with the DOD over their concerns about whether these laser beams were safe. What if they accidentally shot at an aircraft? Would they damage the aircraft? Would they pose a risk to air passenger safety?
And the DOD said they were within their rights to use the laser beams without really addressing the safety issues. And so the two agencies were kind of at a stalemate.
And when the FAA found out that the laser beam had been used on Monday, Feb. 9, the FAA got real frustrated and said, you know what, we’re going to shut down the whole airspace around El Paso, including Santa Teresa, New Mexico, which was where the CBP had most recently used that laser.
And they went ahead and did it. I mean, they notified the agencies. They notified people at the White House, too. But they went and announced that closure with just two and a half hours of warning.
Well, I mean, I’d throw in one more voice — another agency. Department of Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, also sent out information that also talked about Mexican cartels that also created a lot of confusion and deep concern. Tell us about that.
That was kind of a weird one.
So the FAA announces… And I want to say it was 6:54 local time in El Paso on Wednesday morning, Feb. 11.
So after this overnight closure, about seven and a half hours later, the FFA announces via social media post that they’re reopening the aerospace, flights can resume. And maybe an hour later, Sean Duffy announces this business about the Mexican cartel drone being neutralized.
Now, I’ve never been able in my reporting — and I’ve been reporting on this since day one — to stand up what Sean Duffy said, but my sources tell me he was simply repeating what he had been told, which was that this object that was shot down was a Mexican cartel drone.
Well, you know, and probably a lot of your listeners know, it was actually a Mylar balloon. And I would guess, although I don’t know for sure, that the CBP agents who were operating this laser beam also knew at the time that it was a balloon because I have been to Albuquerque where they work on these weapons. And I can tell you the visual scope where they look at what they’re trying to shoot down are very, very good. The optics are very sophisticated. So you can really see what you’re shooting at.
Now, I guess in defense of those operators, the army has told the New York Times in a statement that these Mylar balloons are sometimes used as decoys by adversaries and sometimes are even used to carry drugs. So it’s not out of the scope that this balloon could have been an instrument of our adversaries or maybe of a cartel, but it was almost certainly not a drone and seems unlikely that it was confused as a drone.
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So let’s backtrack a little bit. At the center of the airspace shutdown, you had people who were caught totally off guard. They had no advance warning. Air traffic controllers and elected officials.
You quote Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat, who was trying to manage that situation in real time.
You know, some of the feedback I’ve gotten from our readers is interesting — that, you know, these public officials really deserve credit for the public service they did. I mean, they were working on this thing real time with no heads up.
So you got Congresswoman Escobar being woken up by a phone call from an air traffic controller in the El Paso tower at 11 o’clock at night Washington time. She’s asleep in her apartment in D.C. And she told me in the reporting of this story, she never turns her telephone ringer off.
So there she is and it’s going off on her bedside table and immediately gets up and starts working the phones, calling the El Paso mayor and other city officials and also federal contacts, military contacts, trying to figure out what the heck is going on because she has had no warning.
And similar thing for Mayor Renard Johnson in El Paso. He gets a call from the city manager giving him the news. He has also had no warning, no idea what’s going on. So he, too — and both of their respective staffs — I mean, they’re doing two things or three things really: fact-finding, trying to get to the bottom of this. Is there a military mobilization going on? Are we at war? And if not, what did cause this?
Number two, what do we need to do to kind of reassure the public that if there’s not a war going on, if there is not a situation, let them know that they’re OK. But number three, how do we sort of mitigate any potential negative consequences? Like how do make sure the hospitals get what they need?
I didn’t know this, but in El Paso, a lot of things that are needed for surgeries — like artificial limbs, for example — they’re typically flown in from other cities with sort of a 24-hour request and delivery period. They’re not necessarily on the shelf.
The mayor told me in an interview that east of El Paso, in some of the more rural areas, they depend on helicopter first responders to get to car accident sites. You know, you can’t always get there very quickly by road.
So those are some of things that they were troubleshooting for and were understandably concerned about.
So tell us something else very interesting that came out in your story. Who made the call to say, “let’s reopen the airspace. We don’t need 10 days.”
So apparently that was Susie Wiles, President Trump’s chief of staff. And the decision tree there, to be honest, I’m a little murky on.
Ms. Wiles did not return my request for comment. But we have heard all along that when this came to her attention early Wednesday morning, she immediately pressed for a reopening of the airspace.
Now, how that information came to her, I am not exactly sure. We do know from the email traffic, that we had a chance to review, that members of the National Security Council and others in the White House were briefed on the FAA’s plans hours before the closure occurred on the Tuesday the 10th, right?
So I don’t have the emails in front of me, but essentially it was sort of late afternoon, early evening on Tuesday the 10th that the FFA briefed people on their plans to close down the airspace, which included White House staff. So the notification was there.
When this got to Susie Wiles — if it got to her, if it got to the president himself, we don’t know — but certainly by Wednesday morning, she knew that this had gone on, that it was a problem, and she pushed for the reopenings, which did occur before 7 a.m. El Paso time, which would have been around 9 a.m. Washington time.
