A sudden halt to air traffic around El Paso International Airport has sharpened questions about what, exactly, the federal government is doing in the skies above the border. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a Temporary Flight Restriction that shut down flights to and from El Paso and nearby Santa Teresa, New Mexico, while local officials warned travelers that “all flights to and from El” were affected. With no public explanation tying the restriction to any specific security system, outside observers have speculated about a possible deployment of an AeroVironment anti-drone weapon near the airport, even though available records do not confirm that any such system was actually used.
The episode is less a one-off disruption than a test of how far authorities can go in reconfiguring civilian airspace for counter-drone operations without telling the public what is happening. Official records show a tightly controlled airspace closure, but they do not say why. That gap between what is documented and what is inferred is where both security strategy and public trust now sit.
What the FAA actually restricted
The clearest record of what happened over El Paso is not a press conference or a press leak, but an entry in the official Temporary Flight Restrictions system. The Federal Aviation Administration maintains a public portal that lists each TFR affecting United States airspace, including those that cover El Paso, Texas, and Santa Teresa, New Mexico, in February 2026, according to the agency’s TFR system. That portal is the FAA’s primary distribution point for Notices to Air Missions, and it spells out for each restriction the radius of the affected airspace, the altitude bands that are off-limits, the effective times, and the controlling NOTAM or FDC number.
These details matter because they show how targeted the federal response was, even if the motive remains opaque. A TFR that lists specific altitude limits and a defined radius around El Paso International Airport is, by design, a blunt instrument: it tells pilots where they cannot fly, but not why. The same FAA record serves as the primary documentation for any restriction affecting the airport’s airspace, which means that for now, the public record is limited to coordinates and timing rather than any mention of anti-drone testing or weapons deployment. [Direct Fact]
City advisory and local disruption
The impact on people in El Paso came into focus through a separate but related channel: the city’s own public advisory system. The municipal government publishes official notices on its website, and it used that platform to relay that the FAA had issued a temporary flight restriction that halted flights to and from El Paso and Santa Teresa in February 2026, according to the City of El. That same advisory stated that “all flights to and from El” were affected, language that tracks closely with the underlying federal notice and suggests the city may have quoted portions of the FAA restriction verbatim. [Direct Fact][Inference]…