Quick question: What idiot thought it was a good idea to give Kristi Noem an anti-aircraft death ray?

We tend to use "ICE" as the default abbreviation, when discussing the violent thugs attempting ethnic cleansing in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere, and that's a mistake we're going to have to start correcting. Anyone who knows anything about the Department of Homeland Security knows that ICE was a relative latecomer to the "what if we hire white supremacists to do crimes and murder people outright" beat.

That's been a Border Patrol specialty since before sentient Donald Trump hemorrhoid Stephen Miller graduated high school. Border Patrol (ex?)-commander-at-large Gregory Bovino's assembled "tactical unit" agents, the ones who followed him around to act as his protection and keep him from being swept into storm drains, became infamous for the frequency with which they injured demonstrators and passersby—including, most notably, repeated recorded incidents of them shooting "less-than-lethal" ammunition directly into people's faces.

That is one of the best ways to turn less than lethal into lethal, and the only reason Bovino's team wasn't yanked off the beat the very first time it happened is because everybody in the administration is an irredeemably crooked shit-for-brains who have been trying very hard to get Americans killed so that Dear Leader will have an excuse to do worse and more violent things than he's already doing.

It goes without saying that Customs and Border Protection "BORTAC" unit are trained weapons experts; the team is primarily designed for counterterrorism and other ultraviolent operations. Think of it as Border Patrol's federal SWAT team. It should be trivial for them and any agents assigned to work alongside them to Read The Fucking Directions on less-than-lethal rounds to learn such key facts as "if you shoot someone in the face with this, they can be severely injured or may die on the spot" or "this stun grenade is not to be used against children under 18 months, you grievously malevolent human shitstain."

So you can bet that every bit of footage in which a federal agent, usually Border Patrol, sometimes ICE, sometimes FBI, has taken aim at someone's head and pulled the trigger was done with full awareness over the possibly life-threatening injuries the pastor or legal observer or other American being so targeted could come away with. And they didn't give a shit, because they thought targeting those people was, as we've seen from released private communications and from on-the-scene footage, funny.

So you're going to have to explain real hard, various Trump administration officials and common crooks, why anyone in any position of power thought it would be a good idea to give this collection of violence-obsessed bumblefucks access to a military death ray.

The sudden closure of El Paso's airspace Wednesday came sometime after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials used an anti-drone laser that was provided by the military to shoot down objects that were later identified as party balloons, four people familiar with the matter said.

The technology was used without coordinating with officials from the Federal Aviation Administration, the people said.

The testing of U.S. military-owned laser technology was taking place in the proximity of the airport. The FAA responded by issuing a “temporary flight restriction notice,” which was to shut down the airspace for 10 days. It prevented flights, including helicopters used for medical transport, below 18,000 feet. The airport is a major hub for the region, with more than 50 flights scheduled every day.

As near as we can tell from various news reports, what seems to have happened is this: CPB was given access to a military anti-drone laser for testing and training purposes, but wasn't actually supposed to be firing the thing off until the details of how to do it were worked out—and certainly weren't supposed to be doing it right next to the f--king El Paso International Airport.

But, of course, the agency is now populated by the aforementioned violence-happy bumblefucks. The team with the laser spotted a drifting helium-filled party balloon, believed it to be a dangerous drone from some new Mexican drug cartel calling itself "Happy Birthday" or "It's A Boy" or the like, and shot their military laser at it because: bumblefucks.

And then they appear to have done this again, and possibly more times after that. "In proximity" to the international airport, which may or may not mean on the grounds of the adjacent Biggs Army Airfield.

This freaked the Federal Aviation Administration out, since the FAA believed they still were in the "decide if this is a good idea" stage of the new CPB project and still had time to hash out exactly what flight restrictions would be necessary in areas where Some Idiot Gave Border Patrol A Death Beam. FAA officials panicked, immediately shutting down El Paso airspace and announcing it would stay closed until their previously planned "decide if this is a good idea" meeting with CPB was scheduled.

The F.A.A.’s initial closure announcement late Tuesday, which cited “special security reasons,” barred all aircraft from flying in the area around El Paso below 18,000 feet for 10 days — until one day after the Feb. 20 meeting had been scheduled to take place.

They did not alert the White House or the Pentagon ahead of time that they were shutting down the airspace, a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The move also blindsided El Paso officials.

“I want to be very, very clear that this should’ve never happened,” Mayor Renard Johnson of El Paso said in a news conference Wednesday morning. “You cannot restrict airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leadership.”

And that is where things begin to get murky, because the White House, Transportation Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Secretary of Defense Pete "It's Noon Somewhere" Hegseth, and other administration figures immediately scrambled to cover their asses. So now we can't trust any more detailed information from the administration, because everyone involved are known lairs and they're even more emphatic about the lying when it comes to a screw-up as big as this one. At first they claimed there really was some sort of big dangerous cartel drone incursion, but anonymous sources rejected that notion near-immediately. Now they're scrambling for a good backup excuse.

What does seem clear is that it was CBP agents that were doing the firing, and that military officials were on scene when it was happening. We don't know what interference the (extremely powerful!) laser pulses were causing that caused an emergency shutdown of the airspace. And we don't, in fact, even know if "dangerous cartel drones coming across the Mexican border" has ever been a threat anywhere on the border, because the people making that claim are the same liars who keep telling us that a Minneapolis nurse was a domestic terrorist and that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply when ICE thinks there's a nonwhite person inside your house.

Reading between the lines, we can imagine that FAA officials announced that El Paso airspace would be closed for at least 10 whole days specifically because they wanted the world to know what a grand fuck-up CBP officials had just pulled. It was meant to publicly convey something along the lines of "If you're going to lie to us about when and where you're firing off your new anti-drone death ray, then we can't fly anything in or near El Paso until you've got your shit sorted."

It had the intended effect, and the FAA appears to have gotten a renewed promise from those involved to not be bumblefucks for the next ten days. You and I don't know why FAA officials thought they could trust that new DHS and Pentagon promise any more than they could before; maybe there was a pinky swear this time around.

The bigger question, though, is this: What on earth would possess anyone in this administration to hand Customs and Border Protection agents an actual real-life military death ray when CPB tactical teams have proven themselves unable to use even pepper spray or rubber bullets without screwing it up. Which idiot, specifically, took a look at Homeland Security Influencer Kristi Noem, sneering behind her camouflaged tactical deployment lectern, and said "yes, this person can be trusted with antiaircraft weapons."

Was it Stephen Miller? It was Stephen Miller, wasn't it. This reeks of his special brand of escalation and his weird mayonnaisey murder fetish. Pete Hegseth doesn't have the focus to see an initiative like this through, and if Kristi Noem went anywhere in Washington and demanded a military death ray I can't imagine it'd go well unless she had a handwritten note from shadow president Miller telling the person she accosted to make it happen.

It's possible that numerous law enforcement agencies are going to need anti-drone weapons sooner or later. The world is Suck right now, and only getting worse, and we're not far off from American mass shooters getting some ideas in their heads that we don't even want to think about right now. But this DHS? Under this leadership? With "tactical" agents that have already proven themselves to be roid-raging incompetents with the situational judgment of drunken squirrels?

Those are the people the administration thinks should have weapons capable of shooting down aircraft?

And they still think that, even after that agency proved they were willing to fire, unannounced, on things they find flying through the sky that they didn't even bother to definitively identify?

Jeebus. Just when we thought this administration couldn't be any more feckless or incompetent, they give these clowns weapons capable of disrupting international air travel whenever one of their itchiest "tactical" agents sees a Happy Birthday balloon going by. I can't imagine this will be the last we hear about this new hell they're unleashing.