A sign at the El Paso International Airport (ELP) on December 25, 2025, in El Paso, Texas. | Kirby Lee/Getty Images

The El Paso International Airport will apparently not be closed for 10 days, despite an earlier announcement that set off an overnight panic. But the reasons why the closure was announced in the first place are still not quite clear, nor is whether this was a fluke or the prelude to a national security crisis.

What happened in El Paso?

On Tuesday night, the Federal Aviation Authority announced the closure of the airspace over El Paso, Texas, and a pause to all operations at the city’s airport starting at 11:30 pm.

According to the initial announcement, which took local and state authorities by surprise, the closure was to have lasted until February 20. But in a tweet on Wednesday morning, the FAA announced that the “temporary closure” had been lifted and that there was “no threat to commercial aviation.”

Early reports on what went wrong seemed to agree that drones were a part of the explanation, but exactly what role they played was a matter........

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