President Donald Trump’s administration urged a judge not to block his planned arch, saying it could help “mitigate” threats from the sky as an ongoing air traffic systems failure grounded flights nationwide.
In a brief filed Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, the Justice Department fought Arlington County’s bid to stop the 250-foot arch. It said the structure’s location and height offer an “opportunity to mitigate these evolving threats” posed by small drones.
The document was created at 5:15 p.m., according to a Raw Story review of its metadata. By then, the Federal Aviation Administration had been holding departures at every U.S. airport for more than an hour. That puts the document’s creation squarely inside a ground stop that lasted until about 8:15 p.m.
The drone argument rests on sworn declarations from War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Mullin’s says the arch would, “when properly equipped, provide an opportunity to substantially expand UAS detection,” meaning the ability to spot drones.
Trump first cast the arch as a “top grade Military Complex” for drones and snipers in a Sept. 20 Truth Social post, after originally pitching it as a monument to the nation’s 250th anniversary.
But the brief also says plans for those security uses “have not yet been finalized.” It calls Arlington’s concern that the arch could limit county police drones speculative.
“An injunction against the Arch would interfere with the government taking important steps to mitigate an ever-growing threat to the Nation’s capital,” the brief argued.
The government is asking the court to treat the same unfinished plans as too uncertain to harm Arlington but weighty enough to “plainly outweigh” the county’s interests.
Across the country, the ground stop left controllers with little to tell pilots and airports with nowhere to put planes.
The FAA issued it at 3:54 p.m. “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” More than 3,500 planes were in the air at the time, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said. Airlines went on to cancel more than 12,500 flights Friday and Saturday.
“We just know it’s indefinite and U.S.-wide,” a controller told a pilot at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport who had asked why flights were stopped, according to air traffic recordings cited by The Spokesman-Review.
By 6 p.m., Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington was at capacity, with no place left to park planes, a source told NBC News.
Arlington’s lawsuit warns that the arch could force changes to emergency flight plans at that same airport. The brief dismissed that concern, noting the county “has not seen the airlines’ flight plans.”
“It appears that this was mechanically driven. However, we’re still looking, so we’re not going to rule that out,” Mullin said at a White House briefing Friday night when asked whether a cyberattack caused the outage.
One of the two officials the brief relies on to show the arch could help protect the capital’s skies could not yet say for certain what had disrupted the nation’s air traffic system.
Duffy blamed aging routers that became overloaded with data, while Mullin said new security patches appeared to overwhelm the older system, CBS News reported. Both described an equipment failure.
In Washington, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has temporarily barred construction of the arch in a related case. Challengers have asked her to rule by Nov. 19, when her 14-day order expires, on whether to keep the project on hold.
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