Welcome to the News Hour. The commercial airspace over El Paso, Texas was temporarily

shut down early this morning. The FAA, citing unspecified security concerns, initially said

all flights would be halted for 10 days. But just a short time later, the FAA reversed course

and reopened the airspace, saying only that the closure was done out of an abundance of caution.

The explanations offered by the Trump administration have led to many questions and tough criticism

about how it was handled.

William Brangham has more on this chaotic, confusing turn of events.

That's right, Amna.

After the FAA announced the reopening, an official with the Trump administration blamed the issue on Mexican drug cartels, alleging they'd sent drones near the airport that had to be dealt with.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy stood by that assertion later today.

But multiple news organizations reported that the closure was in fact triggered by the Pentagon

trying out a new anti-dron defense system without giving aviation officials enough time to assess

its danger to commercial flights. On the ground in El Paso, though, the city's mayor, Renard Johnson,

decried the confusion

and lack of communication.

I want to be very, very clear that this should have never happened.

You cannot restrict airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leadership.

That failure to communicate is unacceptable.

So for more on the many questions around this, we are joined again by Juliet Kayam.

She's the faculty director of the Harvard Kennedy School's

Homeland Security Project and was an assistant DHS secretary during the Obama administration.

Juliet, welcome back. Let's go through this TikTok one more time. The FAA says we're going to

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