Late on the night of February 10, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an abrupt and unexplained order shutting down all airspace over El Paso, Texas, and a large swath of southern New Mexico for ten days. No commercial flights. No cargo. No general aviation. Not even medevac. The FAA classified the restricted zone as “National Defense Airspace” and warned that the United States government may use deadly force against any aircraft that fails to comply. Nothing like this has happened over a major American city since September 11, 2001.

Taken in isolation, the closure is alarming but ambiguous. Taken in context — alongside a sequence of executive orders, court rulings, military deployments, and legislative preparations stretching back over a year — it starts to look less like an anomaly and more like the operational phase of a plan that has been methodically assembled in plain sight.

The foundation was laid on Day One of the second Trump administration. Executive Order 14157, signed January 20, 2025, directed the Secretary of State to designate Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. By February 2025, six Mexican cartels — including Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation — carried the FTO label. That designation was not merely symbolic. It triggered material support statutes carrying penalties up to life in prison, activated financial sanctions with secondary enforcement against foreign banks, and — critically — opened new grounds for immigration detention and removal under the terrorism-related provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

But the real weapon embedded in EO 14157 was a directive to the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to “make operational preparations” for invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The AEA is a wartime statute. It authorizes the president, upon a declared or threatened invasion, to summarily detain and remove nationals of a hostile foreign power without individual hearings. It has been invoked exactly three times in American history — during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. Each time, it functioned as a mass-action instrument operating outside normal due process.

The administration has spent over a year constructing the predicate for a fourth invocation. A February 2025 executive order on tariffs declared that Mexican drug trafficking organizations maintain “an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico.” The legal theory, advanced most explicitly by the Center for Immigration Studies, holds that when criminal cartels become so entwined with a nation’s government that the state itself becomes a “mafia state,” the cartels’ cross-border operations can be treated as acts of that government — triggering the AEA’s invasion or predatory incursion provisions.

If the administration formally declares Mexico a narco-state whose cartel-allied government is conducting or threatening an invasion of the United States, the Alien Enemies Act would authorize the summary detention and deportation of Mexican nationals without the individualized proceedings that have historically constrained immigration enforcement.

For most of the first eighteen months of the second Trump term, federal district judges functioned as the primary check on executive immigration authority. Judges in Maryland, Washington State, Massachusetts, and California issued nationwide injunctions blocking everything from the birthright citizenship order to ICE enforcement tactics in Los Angeles. The administration characterized these judges as “rogue” actors exceeding their constitutional authority.

The Supreme Court systematically dismantled that check. In Trump v. CASA, Inc., decided June 27, 2025, the Court ruled 6–3 that federal district courts lack the historical equitable authority to issue universal injunctions — orders that block government policy not just for the parties before the court but for everyone nationwide. Justice Barrett’s majority opinion held that such injunctions have no founding-era pedigree and therefore fall outside the bounds of federal judicial power. The Thomas-Gorsuch concurrence went further, declaring that the practice of nationwide injunctions was now definitively ended.

Meanwhile, the Court invoked 8 U.S.C. §1252(f)(1) to strip lower courts of authority to grant classwide injunctive relief against the operation of key immigration enforcement provisions, including third-country removals. Under this provision, no court other than the Supreme Court itself may “enjoin or restrain the operation” of those statutes except on an individual, case-by-case basis.

The practical effect is devastating for those seeking judicial protection against mass enforcement actions. Class actions remain theoretically available, but certification takes time, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly granted emergency stays overriding lower court orders — as it did in Perdomo v. Noem (allowing ICE operations in Los Angeles), Svitlana Doe v. Noem (stripping status from an estimated 500,000 CHNV parolees), and National TPS Alliance (revoking Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Venezuelans).

The Pentagon has been repositioning assets toward the southern border for over a year. Surveillance flights that historically averaged one mission per month along the border surged to intensive daily operations in late January and early February 2026. Thousands of active-duty troops have deployed to the border region. Trump announced in January that American forces would “start now hitting land” in Mexico targeting cartels — following months of naval operations in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, and the Delta Forces capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in Caracas.

In Congress, H.J.Res.81 — an Authorization for Use of Military Force specifically targeting Mexican cartels — sits in committee, providing potential legislative cover for operations the executive may already be preparing to conduct unilaterally.

Now consider the geography of the El Paso airspace closure. The restricted zone encompasses not only El Paso International Airport but extends across southern New Mexico to the Organ Mountains, covering Fort Bliss, White Sands Missile Range, Holloman Air Force Base, and Fort Bliss-McGregor Range. This is among the most heavily militarized corridors on the southern border. Clearing the airspace for ten days — with deadly force authorization — creates an operational window for military staging, deportation flights, or cross-border action without civilian air traffic interference.

Each element, considered alone, has a plausible alternative explanation. Cartel designations could be diplomatic leverage. Court rulings on injunctions could be principled jurisprudence. Military deployments could be deterrence. Airspace closures could be an unannounced exercise.

But the sequencing tells a different story:

The Alien Enemies Act is the keystone. Once invoked under a formal declaration that Mexico’s cartel-allied government poses an invasion threat, it authorizes mass detention and removal of Mexican nationals without individual hearings — and no district court in the country retains the injunctive authority to stop it on a classwide basis. The Supreme Court has made clear it will defer to executive authority in immigration enforcement and will stay lower court orders that attempt to interfere.

Updated 9:30 AM CT  —  Hours after the closure was announced, the White House provided an explanation: Mexican cartel drones had breached United States airspace. “The Department of War took action to disable the drones,” an administration official stated. “The FAA and DOW have determined there is no threat to commercial travel.” The FAA subsequently lifted the restriction, and flights have resumed.

Separately, sources briefed by the FAA told CNN that the closure was driven by military operations from Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss — including unmanned aircraft operations and testing of laser countermeasure systems in airspace immediately adjacent to civilian flight paths. The Texas Tribune reported that the Defense Department had been operating drones against cartel operations from the base without sharing information with the FAA. “It has to do with the FAA’s inability to predict where unmanned aircraft systems might be flying,” an official told the Tribune. “They have been operating outside the normal flight paths.”

Whether the immediate trigger was cartel drones, counter-drone testing, or both, the official response confirms every structural element of the analysis above. The administration itself has now publicly stated that the United States military is conducting active operations against Mexican cartel assets at the border — using the rebranded “Department of War” nomenclature that signals a warfighting posture, not a peacetime defense posture. It has confirmed that cartel unmanned systems are penetrating American airspace, which constitutes exactly the kind of cross-border incursion that could serve as the predicate for an Alien Enemies Act invocation.

The ten-day closure was walked back to a few hours. The legal architecture, the judicial clearing, the military positioning, and the FTO designations remain exactly where they were at midnight. The administration now has a publicly acknowledged kinetic engagement with cartel assets at the border — on the record, in its own words. That is not a de-escalation. It is a predicate established in broad daylight.