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EL PASO, TX – The airspace over this border city’s international airport was briefly closed on Feb. 11 after the Pentagon disabled drones controlled by Mexican cartels that breached U.S. airspace, according to an administration official.

The military took action to disable the drones, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X, citing the acronym for the Department of War, the Trump administration’s new name for the Defense Department.

“The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region. The restrictions have been lifted and normal flights are resuming.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Feb. 11 that there was no information about drones on the border – if the United States had information, it could ask the Mexican government, she told reporters.

“The Mexican airspace did not close… We will learn what the reasons are for why the airspace closed,” she said.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said at a news conference the same morning that she learned of the closure not through the Trump administration but through a contact within the federal workforce. According to Escobar, the Federal Aviation Administration did not notify local officials in advance and made the decision independently.

“There’s no threat. There was not a threat, which is why the F.A.A. lifted this restriction so quickly,” Escobar said. “The information coming from the administration does not add up.”

Escobar said there is information she could not share publicly at this time but hoped to do so in the future. She also noted that if a drone incursion had occurred, she would have been informed.

“This is not the way the federal government should function,” Escobar said, adding that the full impact of the closure remains unclear. “We have to see what this is.”

Trump has threatened land strikes in Mexico

President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch military strikes on cartel-linked land targets in Mexico.

“We are going to now start hitting land with regard to the cartels,” he told Fox News last month.

“The cartels are running Mexico. It’s very, very sad to watch and see what’s happening to their country.”

U.S. military and local officials have reported multiple encounters with drones controlled by criminal organizations at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump has reportedly mulled the idea of direct strikes on cartels since his first term. Mark Esper, his then-defense secretary, recounted in his memoir that Trump asked him at least twice in 2020 whether the military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.”

In the past year, multiple news outlets have reported that Trump was reconsidering the idea. The New York Times reported in February of 2025 that the CIA had expanded secret drone flights over Mexico to search for fentanyl labs.

The Trump administration has launched 38 known strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that have killed at least 130 people, whom it claimed were trying to bring drugs to the United States. Those strikes have been widely decried as illegal and inhumane, and the administration has never provided evidence that the boats carried drugs. The family members of two men killed in the strikes sued the Trump administration last month.

Days before the military capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, Trump also publicly revealed a CIA-led drone strike on a Venezuelan port. The reason for that strike is not clear, but news outlets reported that U.S. officials believed the port was being used for drug trafficking.