Director for Defense Oversight

With this series of updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past updates here.

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Cartel drones, laser weapons, and the El Paso airspace closure: A chaotic February 11 incident, in which El Paso airspace was closed after CBP used a military laser to shoot down what it thought was a drone, highlighted challenges in communication, coordination, and transparency within the Trump administration. It also highlighted concerns about increased Mexican criminal organizations’ use of drones at the border.

DHS shutdown spotlights need for reform at border and migration agencies: DHS is officially shut down—though ICE and CBP are funded—as its 2026 budget expired amid Democratic legislators’ demands for human rights and accountability reforms. A series of reports and allegations point to a troubled organizational culture at DHS law enforcement agencies, while Secretary Kristi Noem’s continued tenure is in doubt.

Migrant detention expansion raises alarms: New details emerged about ICE’s $38 billion plan to remake its detention system as a series of giant warehouses around the country. The Fifth Circuit upheld the Trump administration’s effort to mandate detention for any migrant who crossed the border improperly, which would enable the detention of millions. Allegations and accounts of abuse and neglect in ICE detention continue to spill out, especially involving pregnant women, children, and families. Concerns focus on the troubled Dilley, Texas family detention center.

Border wall plans raise environmental and cultural concerns: CBP has already placed $12 billion in contracts for border barrier construction, about a quarter of what Congress appropriated for wall-building last year. This is enabled by 2005 legislation permitting waivers of environmental, cultural, and other laws, and construction is now getting underway in public parkland and indigenous communities.

Fewest child and family migrants since at least 2011, according to January CBP data: Border Patrol apprehended 6,070 people in January 2026, the third-lowest monthly total of the Trump administration. The number of child and family-unit migrants apprehended in January was the fewest of any month for which we have records. Data indicate a halt to a two-year trend of reduced fentanyl seizures, and no apparent impact on cocaine supplies from the Trump administration’s lethal boat strikes.

Cartel drones, laser weapons, and the El Paso airspace closure

What happened on February 11

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) briefly closed El Paso’s International Airport and nearby airspace on the morning of February 11, after the Defense Department and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) activated a new laser weapon against a suspected Mexican cartel drone that turned out to be a party balloon. The chaotic incident highlighted challenges in communication, coordination, and transparency within the Trump administration. It also highlighted concerns about increased detections of drones likely operated by Mexican criminal organizations in the U.S.-Mexico border region.

On the evening of February 10, the FAA abruptly shut down El Paso International Airport, stating that the airport and nearby airspace would be closed for 10 days for unspecified security reasons. The Trump administration did not offer a prompt official explanation. About eight hours later—a period during which local officials in El Paso voiced outrage—the FAA rescinded the order and reopened the airport and most nearby airspace.

Later, journalists’ inquiries revealed what actually happened.

Sometime in late January, the Defense Department had approved a request from CBP to use some of the department’s anti-drone laser technology.

In an email to the Pentagon on February 6, the FAA’s top lawyer warned that deploying a laser without any restriction on flights could create “a grave risk of fatalities or permanent injuries” to civilians in the air nearby. Defense and FAA officials were to meet on February 20 to discuss the potential use of laser weapons. However, Pentagon officials separately communicated their belief that they had already satisfied legal requirements to consult with the FAA.

Before dawn on February 9, members of a CBP tactical unit working with Defense Department personnel fired a 20-kilowatt directed-energy laser weapon, known as a LOCUST system. They deployed it from a site on or near the Fort Bliss army base, not far from El Paso’s airport, which is about five miles from the border with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The LOCUST system, developed in 2024, is designed to take down small drones. On this occasion, the suspected Mexican cartel drone target turned out to be a Mylar party balloon.

After learning of the incident, on February 10, FAA Administrator Brian Bedford ordered a 10-day shutdown of El Paso’s airspace due to potential harm to civilian aircraft.

“The FAA and DOW [‘Department of War’] acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy tweeted on the morning of February 11. (The FAA is part of the Department of Transportation.) This turned out to be inaccurate. So was an administration official’s statement to USA Today that Mexican cartel drones had breached U.S. airspace.

In Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported, officials who were not informed about the reason for closing El Paso’s airspace worried that it signaled a possible non-consensual cross-border attack on an organized crime target inside Mexican territory, something that President Donald Trump has threatened to do on a few occasions.

For now, there are no known plans to use the laser weapon again without coordination.

Mexican criminal groups’ use of drones

As they seek to move people and contraband across the border into the United States, Mexican criminal organizations have employed drones at the border for several years. Usually, they surveil U.S. authorities’ presence and movements. At times, criminal groups have used drones to transport small amounts of relatively lightweight drugs like fentanyl or methamphetamine. Usually, the drones involved are small, cheap models similar to those used by hobbyists and photographers in the United States.

“There have been drone incursions from Mexico going back to as long as drones existed,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents most of El Paso, told a news conference. Estimates of when organized crime drones first appeared at the border range from the early 2010s to 2017 or 2019.

“In the last six months of 2024, over 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters of the southern border,” testified Steven Willoughby, the acting director of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Management Office, in a July 2025 Senate hearing. “Commercial off-the-shelf drones can fly for more than 45 minutes, reach speeds over 100 miles per hour, and carry over 100 pounds of payload,” Willoughby added. A CBP official told Cronkite News that, between October 2024 and September 2025, the agency detected 34,682 drone flights within 500 meters of the U.S.-Mexico border, compared to 7,678 along the border with Canada.

Further south in Mexico, in states like Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán, criminal organizations use drones equipped with explosives to carry out attacks on rival organizations, government targets, and civilians whom they seek to displace. Cases of weaponized drones near the border are rare, although explosive-laden drones were used in an attack on a prosecutor’s office in Tijuana in October 2025.

Mexican criminal groups’ drones have been a growing concern for U.S. officials of both parties. Border drone incursions apparently “topped the agenda” at a U.S.-Mexico bilateral security meeting in late 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported. At those meetings, the Mexican government promised to “create a working group on the topic.” In New Mexico, the Democratic-majority state legislature is nearing approval of legislation that would give local law enforcement greater authority and capacity to defend against drones entering the airspace from Mexico.

Some analyses published after the February 11 incident point out that the United States’ drone defense efforts are lagging. The incident highlighted a central issue that remains unresolved: the danger of using counter-drone measures such as GPS jammers or lasers in densely populated areas with heavy civilian air traffic.

DHS shutdown spotlights need for reform at border and migration agencies

A partial shutdown and stalled negotiations on reforms

Legislation appropriating 2026 funds for DHS (discussed in WOLA’s February 6 Border Update) expired on February 13, and much of the sprawling department’s personnel are now either furloughed or not being paid. That is not the case for DHS’s border and migration enforcement components. The partial shutdown deprives CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of base funding, but they are otherwise sustained by a massive amount of separate funding from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that the Republican congressional majority passed in July 2025.

The shutdown will continue until the majority Republicans and minority Democrats in both houses of Congress can agree on Democrats’ demands for a set of rights-related reforms to ICE and CBP. The Democrats have some negotiating leverage because Senate rules (the “filibuster”) require 60 out of 100 members to agree to end debate and allow voting on most legislative measures.

In early February, Senate Democratic leadership published a list of 10 demands for reform as conditions for their support of the 2026 DHS appropriation. The list has ten items: requiring judicial warrants to enter residences, “no masks,” requiring ID, protecting sensitive locations, stopping racial profiling, upholding use of force standards, ensuring state and local coordination and oversight, building safeguards into the detention system, mandating “body cameras for accountability, not tracking,” and “no paramilitary police.”

The list does not include other much-proposed items like clawing back funds from last year’s “big bill,” limiting agents’ immunity, restoring victims’ ability to sue, reestablishing internal oversight bodies that the administration all but dismantled in 2025, or establishing a use-of-force review board for ICE, or even abolishing the agency and replacing it with something else.

Republicans shared a counterproposal on February 9, which Democrats immediately rejected. There has been little movement since, as Congress was out of session the week of February 16.

Republicans are refusing to budge on requiring ICE agents to have judicial, not administrative, warrants before entering residences, and on having DHS agents operate without masks to hide their identities. Republicans also rejected a Democratic proposal to fund the rest of DHS while negotiations continue on the base budget for ICE and CBP.

Organizational culture concerns at ICE and CBP

The stalemate has continued to shine a spotlight on concerns about the organizational culture at DHS law enforcement agencies and the potential threat to U.S. democracy posed by those agencies responding to a political agenda while escaping accountability for human rights abuses.

ICE and CBP personnel “are routinely going far beyond what the law allows them to do. Their aggressive tactics on the ground are backed up by unprecedented interpretations of their legal authorities,” read an analysis by the American Immigration Council of “How ICE Went Rogue.” A New York Times editorial warned:

After 250 years of republican rule, it can be hard for many Americans to imagine what happens to a country when its government goes rogue. The residents of Minnesota and other cities subject to the Trump immigration crackdown have recently experienced a version of it. People have been harassed, humiliated, assaulted and even killed by federal law enforcement. And people do not know where to turn for help, because government officials who are supposed to protect them are the ones doling out the abuse. When societies start down this road, they often continue.

After 250 years of republican rule, it can be hard for many Americans to imagine what happens to a country when its government goes rogue. The residents of Minnesota and other cities subject to the Trump immigration crackdown have recently experienced a version of it. People have been harassed, humiliated, assaulted and even killed by federal law enforcement. And people do not know where to turn for help, because government officials who are supposed to protect them are the ones doling out the abuse. When societies start down this road, they often continue.

These cultural and accountability concerns are manifesting in several ways. Some involve detention, discussed below in this update’s next section. Others involve the DHS surge in Minneapolis, covered in the “‘Mass deportation’ and human rights in the U.S. interior” collection of links below. Additional concerns include the following.

NBC News reviewed dozens of incidents over the past year in which ICE, CBP, and related agencies’ personnel misused “less-lethal” weapons like tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other projectiles. “The reporting reveals a cycle of escalation: Heavily armed immigration officers’ open-air raids motivated angry residents to meet officers head-on in the streets. Rather than trying to defuse a tense situation, officers abruptly used physical or chemical force. DHS seemed to apply these tactics with little discretion, whether protests were peaceful or violent, large or small.”

Internal emails that American Oversight obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that as early as March 2025, top ICE officials were aware of a fourfold increase in agents’ involvement in use-of-force incidents during the Trump administration’s first two months, compared to the same period in 2024.

The same email cited a similar quadrupling of assaults against ICE agents, a claim that Trump administration officials frequently repeat, while providing little evidence, to justify uses of force. White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan told CBS News that a rise in assaults, in his view, necessitated agents’ use of masks. “Look, I don’t like the masks either… but because threats against ICE officers are up over 1,500 percent, actual assaults and threats are up over 8,000 percent, these men and women have to protect themselves.” Journalist Radley Balko noted that, in fact, the increase is over a baseline of just 10 assaults claimed during the first six months of 2024. “There were 79 in 2025. Meanwhile, over the same period, the number of federal agents participating in deportations and removals has swelled from 6,000 to over 30,000.” Balko added that no immigration agent has been killed in the line of duty since 1949, while according to data compiled by the Cato Institute, 2025 “was actually the second-safest year ever for ICE officers and Border Patrol agents.”

The New York Times reported that DHS has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to tech companies like Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta demanding the names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and other information associated with social media accounts that track ICE operations or criticize the agency. The Washington Post had reported on February 3 about a U.S. retiree for whom DHS served an administrative subpoena to Google seeking the contents of his Google account, after he sent a letter to a DHS lawyer urging mercy for an asylum seeker.

Bloomberg noted that aggressive CBP and ICE tactics that have recently shocked people in the U.S. interior are not new to border communities. “CBP agents traditionally operate along the border and at ports of entry and are not trained for urban policing, according to experts and historians.”

Wired reported on an online forum where active and former ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents often argue about the past year’s “mass deportation” controversies. “Put yourself in the shoes of the guys in the street strung out on crazy op tempo, being threatened and antagonized all day, having inept leadership, low morale, and then having to fight every formerly low risk non-crim (or barely crim) because they are all hyped up on victim status and liberal energy. Plus hyper partisan radicalization on both sides,” one forum member wrote. “If you think the news is enraging you now, wait till this spring/summer when we need to fill the mega detention centers.”

The highly controversial DHS “Metro Surge” operation in Minneapolis is ending, and the number of federal personnel in the area—which peaked at about 3,000 in January—is drawing down, “Border Czar” Homan announced on February 12. “Let me be clear,” Homan nonetheless added. “Mass deportations will continue, and we’re not rolling back.”

The Border Patrol sector chief who had led the operation—and earlier aggressive surges in Los Angeles and Chicago—is no longer serving as an “at large” commander. Gregory Bovino has returned to El Centro, in southeast California, where he has served as sector chief almost continuously since 2020. “Bovino’s very good,” President Trump said, “but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy, and in some cases that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here.”iNewSource noted that Bovino is generally liked in the El Centro area—Calexico and the Imperial Valley—where Border Patrol is a key employer and maintains better relations with the community than it did during the past year’s interior “surges.”

Another highly visible DHS figure is also leaving: Tricia McLaughlin, the Department’s spokesperson and assistant secretary for public affairs, is stepping down. McLaughlin’s often combative statements frequently failed subsequent fact-checks; CNN’s Aaron Blake said her departure “is the latest sign of a reset in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy, which has fallen sharply out of favor with the American people.”

Meanwhile, though, DHS has hired 21-year-old Peyton Rollins to its social media team. Rollins comes from the Department of Labor, where he published several social media posts “that raised internal alarms over possible white-nationalist messaging,” according to the New York Times.

More inside-source reporting indicates that after the Minnesota debacle and amid growing discontent with her management style, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is fighting to keep her job. This comes from reporting filled with often juicy anecdotes in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and the Washington Examiner.

The articles describe White House officials as privately “angry” and “frustrated” with Noem and her chief advisor, onetime Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, “as Republican midterm strategists raise alarms about the political damage,” the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff wrote. “One person familiar with the discussions told us that Noem’s position is no longer secure, even though the president has not yet moved against her.” A common assessment holds that Noem’s and Lewandowski’s main internal rivals are White House “Border Czar” Homan (who is reportedly rarely in contact with Noem) and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.

“Since being sworn in, Secretary Noem has enriched herself, abused the power of her office, obstructed congressional oversight, and violated her oath to the Constitution,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. “Secretary Noem is a liar with no concern for the lives of Americans killed by the Department she runs. She must go.”

Rep. Thompson’s comments came at a February 10 hearing, one of two that week including Scott and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons as witnesses (the other, in the Senate Homeland Security Committee, took place on February 12). Democrats and a small number of Republicans voiced strong concerns about the agencies’ human rights records and accountability.

“It’s clearly evident that the public trust has been lost,” the Senate committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), said. “To restore trust in ICE and Border Patrol, they must admit their mistakes, be honest, and forthright with their rules of engagement, and pledge to reform.”

Neither official responded to questions about the January killings in Minneapolis of Renee........

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