MEXICO CITY — Members of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Cabinet woke up on Wednesday morning to news that U.S. aviation officials had shut down airspace over El Paso, the Texas city opposite the border metropolis of Ciudad Juárez.
Coming just weeks after the closure of airspace over Venezuela cleared the way for the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the move triggered alarm among Cabinet members tasked with maintaining national security and raised fear of a possible incursion by U.S. forces, according to people familiar with the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose high-level discussions.
Officials suspected the El Paso airspace was closed in preparation for a unilateral raid against a drug kingpin in Chihuahua state, just across the border in Mexico. U.S. officials described the closure as a matter of national security and said it would last 10 days.
Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s security minister, called high ranking officials in the U.S. early on Wednesday and was told that the closure was not related to a raid on Mexico, according to an official familiar with the conversations.
He informed security Cabinet officials at a daily morning briefing held by Sheinbaum, which included the ministers of defense and navy, of his call with U.S. officials.
Hours later, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration reopened the El Paso airspace. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X that “the threat had been neutralized.”
Officially, U.S. officials said a cartel-operated drone had violated U.S. airspace and that it was neutralized by a powerful anti-drone laser. A source in the U.S. government who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters said the object was not a drone but a Mylar party balloon.
Over the last year, President Trump has threatened to send U.S. special forces after Mexican drug cartel kingpins. Trump has said he’s repeatedly asked Sheinbaum to allow the U.S. military to operate in Mexico, an offer she has rejected as unacceptable and a violation of Mexican sovereignty.
For Mexican officials, this week’s closure was especially startling — and worrying — because it came just weeks after the U.S. special forces captured Maduro in Caracas on Jan. 3.
Mexican officials had watched with alarm as the U.S. ramped up pressure on Maduro in the weeks before his arrest, amassing warships off the Venezuelan coast before capturing him and his wife and bringing them to New York to face drug-trafficking charges in U.S. federal court.
This week, Mexican officials thought the U.S. was preparing such a strike in Mexico, people familiar with the conversations said.
“The concern was that there was a target they wanted on the Juárez side,” one person familiar with the talks said.
Sheinbaum, meanwhile, has steadily increased security cooperation with the U.S., in an effort to assuage Trump and stave off unilateral U.S. action inside Mexico. In an unprecedented move, the Sheinbaum administration circumvented Mexican extradition law and delivered nearly 100 imprisoned drug lords to U.S. authorities in the last year.
But those prisoner transfers have not eased tensions on the U.S.-Mexico border where cartel drones regularly fly into U.S. airspace, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Reports of airspace closure spread quickly in El Paso on Wednesday morning.
“I thought they were moving a high-value target in or out of the area,” said El Paso resident Narada Johnson.
“This unnecessary decision has caused chaos and confusion in the El Paso community,” said the city’s mayor, Renard Johnson, in a news conference after the restriction was lifted. “This should never have happened.”
The closure came after the Department of Homeland Security prepared to fire a powerful counter-drone laser. Use of the weapon was confirmed by The Times. The agency targeted what was thought to be a cartel-controlled “dark drone,” which does not emit a radio signal or broadcast its identification, according to one person familiar with the operation who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters.
In recent months, the U.S. government has ramped up counter-drone operations on the southern border. Criminal groups often use the drones to traffic fentanyl and surveil U.S. law enforcement operations, said Steven Willoughby, director of the counter-drone program at the Department of Homeland Security, at a congressional hearing last July.
Willoughby said that in 2023 law enforcement seized one such drone carrying 3.6 pounds of fentanyl. Willoughby said the Department of Homeland Security counted some 27,000 drones flying within 500 meters (almost 550 yards) of the U.S. border, just in the last half of 2024.
At her daily news conference Wednesday, Sheinbaum appeared to dismiss the presence of cartel-operated drones in the border region.
“There is no information related to the use of drones at the border,” Sheinbaum said.
However, cartel drone incursions topped the agenda of the most recent bilateral security meeting in Mexico City late last year, according to people familiar with the talks. At the meeting, U.S. officials stressed the need for greater coordination to stop drone incursions into U.S. airspace. The Mexican government said it would create a working group on the topic.
Independent journalist Alyda Muela contributed reporting from El Paso. This article was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom that covers stories from Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border.
