The U.S. military used a laser to shoot down a drone near Fort Hancock, Texas, on Thursday, according to U.S. lawmakers who said they learned about the incident after officials notified them. Lawmakers described the drone as “apparently threatening” and said the aircraft belonged to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), citing the information they received from government officials. The episode took place about 80 kilometers (50 miles) southeast of El Paso.
The Airspace response, the lawmakers said, followed what they characterized as an error in how the drone was identified and categorized. In response, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) closed more airspace around Fort Hancock. The U.S. military is required to provide formal notification to the FAA when it takes action against unmanned aircraft within U.S. airspace, according to the report.
The lawmakers also said the laser incident created new concern because it was not the first time the FAA had responded to a laser use against drones in the same general region. They said it was the second such incident in two weeks, with the prior case also involving a laser fired by CBP near Fort Bliss that did not hit a target. That earlier episode led the FAA to suspend air traffic at the El Paso airport and in nearby areas, although this time the airspace closure was smaller and did not affect commercial flights.
Among those who said they were notified were Rep. Rick Larsen and two other senior Democrats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure and House Homeland Security committees. In a joint statement, they said, “La noticia no nos cabe en la cabeza”, adding that they were also critical of the Trump administration for “eludir” a bipartisan bill aimed at training drone operators and improving communication among the Pentagon, the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security, including CBP.
A separate joint statement from the FAA, CBP and the Pentagon described the incident as part of counter-drone mitigation efforts focused on risks in the border region. The agencies said the military “empleó sistemas antiaéreos no tripulados para mitigar un sistema aéreo no tripulado aparentemente amenazante que operaba dentro del espacio aéreo militar” (used unmanned air defense systems to mitigate an apparently threatening unmanned air system operating within military airspace). They said the incident occurred away from populated areas and commercial flights and characterized the broader effort as unprecedented collaboration among the Department of War, the FAA and CBP following instructions attributed to President Donald Trump.
The dispute centers on whether the response reflected effective coordination among agencies when unmanned aircraft are detected. The report said that in the earlier two-weeks-ago incident, CBP deployed the laser without coordinating with the FAA, and the FAA later closed the El Paso airspace to ensure commercial aviation safety. On Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he planned to brief members of Congress on the incident and, in an unrelated press conference, said it was not a mistake for the FAA to close El Paso airspace and that he did not think a communications problem caused the issue.
Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, called for an independent investigation. She said, “La incompetencia del gobierno de Trump sigue causando caos en nuestros cielos” and pointed to a prior investigation—into a midair collision between a passenger plane and an Army helicopter near Washington, D.C., in which 67 people died last year—that found the FAA and the Pentagon did not always work well together.
The report also tied the Fort Hancock incident to wider congressional and policy efforts to expand drone-shootdown authority. Two months ago, Congress agreed to give more security agencies—some state and local—authority to bring down out-of-control drones if they are properly trained, expanding beyond a narrower set of federal agencies previously able to do so. The administration has also provided federal funding to help states prepare to respond to drones and to support preparedness for major events, the report said.
At the same time, the report described an ongoing drone-related security environment along the U.S.-Mexico border. It said cartels use drones to traffic drugs across the border and to monitor Border Patrol agents, and it cited lawmakers’ earlier congressional testimony that, in the last six months of 2024, more than 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters (1,600 feet) of the southern border. It also cited Homeland Security’s estimate that there are more than 1.7 million registered drones flying in the United States.