"My immediate concern is, 'Is it my kids? Is it my mom? Has something happened?' It turned out to be something even more unexpected: an air-traffic controller from El Paso was calling to alert her that the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered the near-immediate closure of the region's entire airspace for ten days-a move effectively unprecedented in the country since 9/11."
"There were just a million questions swimming through my mind. Her first thought was that perhaps President Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, had decided to bomb cartel targets in the city of Juárez, across the border from El Paso-something that various Administration officials, including the President, had been threatening to do for months."
"If my community was about to be put in harm's way, we had very little time to act. But each conversation that night was more baffling than the last; no one seemed to know what was happening."
Congresswoman Veronica Escobar from Texas's Sixteenth District, which includes El Paso, was awakened by an air-traffic controller reporting an unprecedented FAA order to close the region's entire airspace for ten days. This closure, the most significant since 9/11, prompted immediate concern about potential military action against cartel targets in Juárez. Escobar contacted leadership and federal officials seeking clarification, but received conflicting and unclear information about the reasons for the airspace closure. The incident reflects broader concerns about the Administration's military-grade equipment deployment at the southern border amid ongoing Congressional debates over immigration-enforcement practices and funding.
#border-security #military-equipment #immigration-enforcement #congressional-funding #southern-border-operations
Read at The New Yorker
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