The Truth About The El Paso Airspace Fiasco

Gary Wright II — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:07:25 -0500

In January, Pentagon Pete Hegseth authorized the military to allow directed high-energy anti-drone systems to be transferred and used by the untrained goons at CBP to protect the border. It didn't take very long for their lack of communications and training to result in a disaster! And to make the situation worse, everyone involved has been telling the public outrageous lies about what actually happened in order to hide their total incompetence.

Let's start at the beginning: The US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) is responsible for homeland defense, security cooperation, and civil support within its area of responsibility (AOR), which includes the continental United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and surrounding waters. If anyone should be responsible for homeland defense against drones coming across our borders it should be NORTHCOM who is trained and fully-equipped to handle that mission.

It's unclear who made the initial request, but as we've seen there has been tons of military equipment transferred over to CBP and ICE who are not trained on how to operate this deadly equipment.

With Border Patrol agents getting their hands on directed energy weapons, they were eager to use them. But because of their lack of training, they misidentified a party balloon as a drone belonging to a Mexican cartel and they opened fire on it. They obliterated the harmless balloon, but they put all of the other aircraft in the area in danger. They could have just as easily misidentified a passenger plane and shot it down, so thankfully it was just a balloon!

There was supposed to be a meeting held between the FAA and the Pentagon about what I guess was going to be training for CBP where the weapon was supposed to be aimed at drones near Fort Bliss, but the weapon ended up being used before that meeting took place to coordinate their actions. NORTHCOM was left completely out of the loop, so every General and Admiral at NORTHCOM is extremely pissed off. The furious base commander of Fort Bliss even called the Pentagon and NORTHCOM about the incident.

The cover-up: the Trump administration officials told the media lies that there was a US airspace incursion by drones operated by Mexican cartel members, and that the Defense Department “took action to disable the drones.” The official added that the FAA and Pentagon determined there “is no threat to commercial travel.” All of that story was nothing but lies! The weapon wasn't fired by US troops or the Defense Department - it was being operated by DHS's CBP.

Because of the confusion and lack of communication between federal agencies, the Pentagon told the FAA that they could not guarantee the safety of commercial air traffic operating in the area, and so the FAA closed the airspace over El Paso, Texas. This part of the story was true, because with such a powerful weapon in the untrained hands of CBP operators, nobody could guarantee the safety of anybody! 🤬

We obviously need to #AbolishICE and return CBP back to the borders, but we also need to de-militarize them. We must start dismantling DHS and returning back to the agencies we had pre-9/11.

As far as the military, Pentagon Pete has purged our troops of their leadership and kicked anyone out of the military who isn't a Trump sycophant. There's no easy fix to this, and it will take several generations to repair the damage that was done. We can start by eliminating the ridiculous defense budget that Congress has been giving them each year without question. This year they received almost $1T and for next year Trump is requesting $1.5T which is insane. We can drastically cut that budget down to a fraction of what it is without compromising the strength of our military since the majority of those funds goes to the military industrial complex and not to our troops. Billions of dollars gets dumped into the pockets of defense contractors and put towards secret projects with zero accountability. We must end all of these non-winnable forever wars. It will take Congress actually doing their jobs with the budget appropriations process and by requiring the authorization of military use of force for foreign actions.

For that to ever happen, we need new leadership in Congress because the current members receive too much money from the military industrial complex lobbyists and defense contractors. We have to vote them out of office and have new leaders run for every office.

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The Truth About The El Paso Airspace Fiasco