America stops all planes taking off for safety reasons... and there are no indications of a threat

On Friday, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a decision to stop the takeoff of all aircraft nationwide “for exceptional circumstances and safety reasons,” after it had previously reported serious problems with air traffic control communications.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullen announced that there are no indications yet of a threat to the United States behind the decision.

“There is no indication, so far, that this is a malicious attack against us, it is just a communication breakdown,” Mullen said, adding that officials “are not ruling out any possibility at this stage.”

The decision means that planes in the air can land, but planes on the ground will not be allowed to take off.

Shortly before the announcement, the administration halted air traffic in Chicago due to problems with air traffic control communications, according to what Reuters reported.

The administration added: “All departing aircraft must remain parked in place until further notice.” The administration explained that international flights will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Later, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that the Federal Aviation Administration's decision was due to a communications problem affecting all air traffic control centers, adding that FAA technicians were examining the problem.

This is the second nationwide decision to stop all departing flights since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The other decision was in January 2023, when the authority stopped all domestic flights departing for less than two hours.

Last year, Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding to modernize the agency's outdated communications system.

On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House asked Congress to allocate another $30.1 billion to deal with other problems.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum confirmed on Friday that there were no migrant convoys heading to the US border, after her US counterpart, Donald Trump, threatened to increase customs duties on the country if it did not prevent migrants from heading north.

Sheinbaum's government has intervened since September to obstruct the movements of groups of migrants arriving from Central America, but at least two other groups have tried to head north in recent days.

The leftist president said during her daily press conference: “There is currently no migrant convoy heading to the northern border,” noting that the local authorities succeeded in dissuading a group of people from continuing their journey, after they set off last week.

Trump said on Thursday that the tariffs imposed on Mexico would “immediately double” if the authorities failed to prevent migrant caravans from heading to the border.

Migrants in two convoys, the first comprising about a thousand people and the second about a hundred, expressed their hope that the defeat of the Republicans in the midterm elections would lead to an easing of restrictions imposed on crossing the US border, according to Agence France-Presse.

On Friday, the US Supreme Court agreed to consider President Donald Trump's executive order banning asylum requests at the southern border, one of the pillars of the Republican president's wide-ranging campaign to tighten immigration restrictions.

The Trump administration is seeking to overturn lower court rulings, which deemed the executive order banning asylum applications illegal.

Federal law gives people the right to seek asylum if they fear persecution in their home countries, regardless of how they entered the United States. At the same time, the law also gives the executive authority the power to decide whether or not to grant people asylum.

According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration argues that it has the authority to flatly reject asylum claims for immigrants covered by the executive order, and that it should not be obligated to accept requests that are scheduled to be rejected.

Federal government lawyers said years-long processing times for asylum applications had previously contributed to a large influx of migrants to the southern border, many of whom were allowed to enter the country and remain there while waiting for their claims to be processed.

On the other hand, immigration lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigrant Justice Center counter that border crossings had already begun to decline before Trump took office.

They say Trump's executive order represents an attempt to unilaterally undermine legal guarantees aimed at protecting people fleeing dangers in their countries of origin.