Fwd: The Great Read: The Night the Government Closed the Skies Over El Paso
Molly Molloy
From: The New York Times <nytd...@nytimes.com>
Date: Mon, Apr 20, 2026 at 12:01 PM
Subject: The Great Read: The Night the Government Closed the Skies Over El Paso
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/us/politics/a-squabble-in-dc-yields-chaos-in-el-paso.html?nl=the-great-read®i_id=45490331&segment_id=218514The Night the Government Closed the Skies Over El Paso
A high-energy laser weapon and a power struggle between federal agencies brought a night of hassles to the city.
Photographs by Paul Ratje
Kate Kelly reported from Santa Teresa, N.M., El Paso, Texas and Washington. Tawnell D. Hobbs reported from Dallas. Reyes Mata III reported from El Paso.
- April 20, 2026Updated 10:33 a.m. ET
Around 9 p.m. on Feb. 10, an air traffic controller at El Paso International Airport saw an alert pop up on the tower’s computer screen. It was from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The controller beckoned the two colleagues who were sitting nearby. Together they stared at the F.A.A. advisory.
In two and a half hours, it said, a huge slice of the airspace they handled would close for “special security reasons.”
For 10 days.
The controllers could hardly process what they were seeing. The alert meant that no commercial aircraft could fly in or out of El Paso. Medical rescue helicopters couldn’t, either. Business in the city would be disrupted, vacations ruined, lives potentially lost.
“Pilots who do not adhere” to the closure “may be intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement,” read the advisory.
The United States government could use deadly force against an aircraft if it was determined to pose an imminent security threat. Starting at 11:30 that night, any aircraft that flew over El Paso and its surrounding area below a certain elevation risked being shot down.
The controllers, huddling in a tower a dozen stories above the airport’s three runways, studied a map the F.A.A. had included. It featured a huge red circle encompassing the southern border area where they were standing. An 11-mile diameter roughly from Sunland Park, N.M., to Horizon City, Texas, was now off limits below 18,000 feet. Almost any plane not simply passing far overhead on a long-haul flight was forbidden.
And the El Paso airport, demarcated by an airplane avatar, was the bull’s-eye.
The first major airspace shutdown since Sept. 11, 2001, had occurred.
Sitting in the spots they occupied every day — in front of their live radar scopes, where aircraft appeared as moving dots on a screen — and talking on their radio headsets to pilots, the controllers could only guess at what was happening, recalled one person who was there that night. Had there been a terrorist attack? Was the country battling a Mexican cartel?
As it turned out, the U.S. government was at war with itself.
The conflict didn’t last long, and federal officials quickly moved on. But for the people of El Paso, the episode showed what could happen to a community when federal agencies far away in the nation’s capital were at odds.
The F.A.A. alert helped explain what had already been a puzzling afternoon. Tower controllers typically spend their shifts keeping aircraft safely separated from one another at or near an airport. But that afternoon, the controllers had also fielded calls from airlines that were asking whether the city’s skies were still open.
Initially, they found the questions bizarre. But now they made at least some sense, according to someone who was present that evening but requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The controllers needed to know what was going on.
One senior controller called Representative Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat whose district includes El Paso, at her Washington apartment. It was 11 p.m. on the East Coast and the call woke her. She lay in her pajamas, just listening, then abruptly sat up after she heard the controller’s news.
Lacking any hard information, Ms. Escobar mentally ticked through the possibilities. Was the United States at war with Juárez, El Paso’s sister city across the border? The military had been attacking boats in the Caribbean, saying they were drug vessels; maybe now it was attacking Mexico. She also knew the U.S. Army and Customs and Border Protection had been experimenting with lasers meant to shoot down foreign drones.
“I was shocked,” Ms. Escobar said in an interview. “I was bewildered.”
She immediately started making her own calls to federal and city leaders. A U.S. Army official told her the Army and Customs and Border Protection had 10 days left in a trial run of the lasers. Maybe the two were related.
The controllers in El Paso spent the first hours notifying nearby aviators of the pending closure and steering those already flying toward the ground, where they would be safe.
One controller began calling medical evacuation services, warning that they would soon be locked out of city airspace, said the person who was present that night. At the same time, this person recalled, another controller was telling pilots they had little time to clear out before the flight restrictions took effect.
Some pilots expressed surprise to the controllers over their radios, according to air-traffic audio recordings reviewed by The New York Times.
“So is this the first time you’ve ever heard of anything like this?” one asked.
“Shutting us down? Yes,” the controller answered. “First time for us. We got caught off guard. We’re just scrambling right now.”
“I’ll bet,” the pilot chortled.
It seemed that no one in El Paso — with the possible exception of the airlines who had called about the rumors swirling that afternoon — had been given a heads-up about the shutdown.
El Paso’s mayor, Renard Johnson, learned about the closure from the city manager, who woke up Mr. Johnson shortly after he switched off the local news and drifted off to sleep. He, too, went on a frantic search for answers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/us/politics/a-squabble-in-dc-yields-chaos-in-el-paso.html?nl=the-great-read®i_id=45490331&segment_id=218514