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Officials in Texas were left scrambling for answers on Wednesday after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a surprise order to shut down the airspace over El Paso for 10 days and then, as turmoil ensued in the city on the US-Mexico border, abruptly lifted it within hours.
Local leaders in the west Texas city said that they received no prior warning or explanation and the stunning announcement had put lives at risk.
The sudden federal order came through in the night hours and temporarily grounded commercial, cargo and general aviation traffic.
“This unnecessary decision has caused chaos and confusion in the El Paso community,” said the city’s mayor Renard Johnson. He criticized the FAA order that came through early on Wednesday as a major disruption on a scale that had not occurred there since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.
“This should have never happened. You cannot restrict airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leadership. That failure to communicate is unacceptable,” Johnson said.
The FAA had issued a “temporary flight restriction” notice on its website, citing “special security reasons”, saying it would apply to a 10-nautical-mile area and up to an 18,000ft altitude, and encompassing El Paso and its local military base, the massive Fort Bliss – which also currently houses the largest immigration detention camp in the US.
No further explanation was given, and residents in the city of about 700,000 were immediately rattled, speculating furiously about what was the spark or what might be about to occur.
The FAA restriction was originally ordered to be effective from 10 February at 11.30pm local time to 20 February at 11.30pm local time, according to El Paso international airport. But even as confused travelers were being turned away from the airport and commercial flights were unable to take off, the order was lifted at about 7am local time on Wednesday, after the FAA abruptly posted on social media there was “no threat to commercial aviation”.
By that time, airlines had already canceled 14 flights to and from El Paso and delayed at least 13 others, according to FlightAware, an online service that provides real-time flight tracking data.
It had also forced medical evacuation and emergency flights to divert to Las Cruces, New Mexico, about 45 miles north-west of El Paso, Mayor Johnson said during a press conference on Wednesday.
Johnson confirmed that amid the disruption, surgical equipment being shipped from Dallas, Texas and other parts of the country failed to arrive in El Paso and on to area hospitals for scheduled procedures.
“El Paso is not just a dot on a map. We are a major city,” he said. “Without hospital, military operations, emergency services and critical infrastructure that depend on coordinated and reliable airspace operations, decisions made without notice or coordination put lives at risk and create unnecessary danger and confusion.”
US congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents El Paso, also criticized the FAA for failing to notify local officials before closing the airport, a move she learned about through unofficial channels late on Tuesday night.
“That is not the way that the federal government should operate. Any impact of this magnitude needs to be communicated with clarity and with advanced notice,” she said.
Escobar contradicted US transport secretary Sean Duffy’s claim that the shutdown was a response to a Mexican cartel drone incursion involving the FAA and the Pentagon, noting that drone incursions from Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, are not unusual. And, if there had been one, she would have been informed.
She said the information provided to her and the House armed services committee painted a different picture than the one the Trump administration presented in public. She did not elaborate on the information, however.
“The FAA owes the community and the country an explanation as to why this happened so suddenly and abruptly, and was lifted so suddenly and abruptly. And based on the information I have right now … [it] is not what we in Congress have been told,” Escobar said.
El Paso’s deputy city manager of public safety and support services, Mario D’Agostino, said the city has not been informed of any actual US incursions by Mexican drug cartel drones.
“That’s just been reported. We haven’t been notified of anything. That’s just rumor that we’re hearing, chatter,” he said. “There’s been no official determination put out to us as to why it was closed down (the airport), so we won’t speculate.”
On Wednesday morning, as parents got their children ready for school and workers prepared to start their day under clear, sunny skies and mild February temperatures the atmosphere changed abruptly as news came through of the mysterious government order.
El Paso all too often finds itself in the national news in relation to immigration crises, especially in Donald Trump’s first and now second terms in the White House. It has been in the spotlight in recent months because of deportation flights operating out of Texas amid the US president’s anti-immigration crackdown and immigrants being brought from across the country by ICE to be detained in a huge, secure camp constructed last summer on a portion of the sprawling nearby Fort Bliss military base.
Critics have called for it to be shut down amid allegations of harsh conditions, which are denied by the Trump administration, and a series of detainee deaths.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, puzzlement at the US airspace shutdown order was apparent in El Paso’s sister city of Juárez, which sits just across the Rio Grande and the international border from the west Texas city. Huge volumes of motor and some foot traffic go back and forth each day between the two cities.
The mayor of Ciudad Juárez, Cruz Pérez Cuéllar, said that he had no information to confirm allegations from the US side that drug cartel drones from Mexico crossed into US territory.
He said that the Juárez municipal police had been patrolling the border since rumors of drone activity surfaced on Tuesday night, but they have found no signs of any of the small, unmanned aircraft.
“We don’t have any information to confirm that this happened,” said Pérez Cuéllar, adding that US authorities had not yet contacted his city with any official information.
