For a little over a decade now, ordinary Americans have been able to spend a few hundred dollars to observe the world from above. The second Trump administration is working overtime to take that view away, with sweeping new restrictions on foreign-made drones, as well as new airspace regulations that prohibit drones from flying anywhere near even concealed and moving Department of Homeland Security (DHS) vehicles. A lack of coordination has produced farcical incidents, such as the recent El Paso airspace shutdown, but most of it is deliberate.

The administration hates Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) observers on the street; it fears the idea of operations being watched from above even more. Unlike with street observers, it has the legal power to try to stop it.

The U.S. government has created a constantly shifting yet also totally invisible exclusion zone for drones around ICE vehicles. On Jan. 16, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) published a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) titled FDC 6/4375, which prohibits all unmanned aerial vehicles from flying within a “stand-off distance of 3,000 feet laterally and 1,000 feet above” Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy (DOE), and DHS “facilities and mobile assets, including vessels and ground vehicle convoys and their associated escorts.”

This move represents a worrisome escalation.

While the government has issued overly broad flight restrictions over ICE operations and protests before, such as the massive 15-mile-wide prohibition on drone flights in the Chicago area slapped on by the FAA in October 2025, these prior no-go zones were fixed and had clearly defined end dates. Neither applies to the newly minted order.

In prior years, such as in January 2024 and October 2025, the FAA issued similarly worded notices defining mobile buffer zones around DOD and DOE facilities and moving vehicles. However, these protections did not extend to DHS (and thus ICE) activities. Further, instead of explicitly prohibiting nearby drone flights, these notices merely “strongly advised” pilots to avoid these buffer zones and listed somewhat less ominous-sounding and extensive potential civil and legal consequences than those stated in the Jan. 16 notice.

Three thousand feet laterally and 1,000 feet above standoff distance appears to derive directly from airspace restrictions intended to apply to drones flying over incredibly easy-to-see Coast Guard and Navy vessels in the ocean—a slightly different context from the dense and urbanized settings that ICE is surging its operations in right now, like in downtown Minneapolis.

How are drone pilots supposed to know when they’re inadvertently flying too close to ICE vehicles, which are harder to see than military ships, or DOE convoys transporting nuclear weapons? Vehicles driven by an agency that has become infamous for concealing its movements, including by using unmarked rental vehicles, switching or forgoing license plates, and placing Mexican flag stickers on its vehicles’ windows?

Under normal circumstances, the FAA usually publishes the exact locations of restricted flight areas publicly on an online portal in advance, ensuring that pilots are adequately warned. This new NOTAM, meanwhile, dispenses with the usual courtesies: Its text claims that issuing such advance warnings “may not be feasible for all covered assets and mobile asset operations”—and no expert I spoke to expects to see such routine advance warnings anytime soon.

According to the FAA NOTAM, potential consequences even at the lower end of the scale could include criminal charges, civil penalties, and the revocation of FAA pilot licenses. The new NOTAM requires that even drone pilots responding to disasters and search-and-rescue callouts first negotiate access with DHS authorities operating in the area before they take off, potentially slowing down lifesaving operations.

My own attempts to get clarification from DHS and FAA sources have been met with total silence so far, a noticeable change from the responsive FAA press officers that I’ve grown accustomed to speaking with over the last decade.

It’s also unclear exactly how this new NOTAM came to be, or who’s behind it: Multiple former FAA employees and aviation law specialists, both on background to me and in public posts, have observed that it reads like it was composed without either input from a skilled lawyer or ample consideration of how this whole thing is actually supposed to work. (This apparent sloppiness is especially worrisome in light of recent news about how President Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation, under which the FAA falls, intends to use AI to write federal transportation regulations.)

Disturbing as the new FAA NOTAM is, it’s just the latest salvo in the federal government’s intensifying battle against normal American drone pilots.

Another historic blow came on Dec. 22, 2025, when the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission announced that all new foreign-made drone models would heretofore be banned from being sold in the United States, on the basis of somewhat vaguely defined security concerns.

While existing foreign-made drones will be allowed to stay in the air, American drone pilots will now have to find domestically made substitutes (or choose from a very small number of companies granted exceptions) to replace their aircraft when they crash, wear out, or break.

While American drone pilots have spent years anticipating the eventual arrival of some kind of federal restriction on specifically Chinese-made drones, hurried along by a bipartisan political desire to look tough on China and ample lashings of U.S. drone-maker lobbying cash, no one expected that the Trump administration would restrict the import of all foreign-made drones entirely.

Although U.S. officials continue to claim that the ban is necessary for national security purposes, critics argued for years that cutting off Americans engaged in such innocuous tasks as researching endangered ferrets and shooting sweet snowboard videos might constitute overkill.

Banning Chinese drones isn’t like banning the sale of Chinese-made Huawei laptops or the download of social media apps like TikTok. Unlike laptops and dangerously addictive social media networks, American tech companies currently offer absolutely no comparable high-quality or affordable drone products for consumers to switch to.

According to a survey of over 8,000 U.S. drone operators carried out by the Pilot Institute, a drone pilot training company, an overwhelming majority of U.S. drone pilots use Chinese-made products: American-made drones are barely a blip in the statistical radar. When asked what these pilots would do if they were no longer able to purchase or import Chinese drones, more than 43.4 percent stated a ban would have an “extremely negative/potentially business-ending impact”; meanwhile, a mere 8.5 percent felt it would have “no impact at all.”

Making matters worse, American drone companies haven’t even attempted to sell their productsto the average drone user for quite a long time, after a string of high-profile failures to compete with Chinese-made products. Instead, U.S. drone manufacturers took advantage of a growing wave of bans on Chinese and foreign-made drone use by federal and state governments, which began in 2017 with the U.S. Army, expanded outward to certain federal agencies such as the Department of the Interior by 2020, and eventually spread to the state level in places like Florida by 2023.

These companies became laser-focused on producing expensive drones specialized for the needs of law enforcement, militaries, and government agencies, while skipping making cheaper products oriented toward the less security-minded activities of photographers, mapmakers, and other pilots.

Although the Trump administration cites national security concerns to justify snatching affordable drones away from American users for their own good, its own actions consistently undermine the argument.

Consider a recent DHS promo video posted on X to announce the agency’s push to invest in more drone-focused technology, which prominently featured agents using a Chinese-made DJI drone within the first three seconds of run time— which appears to be a direct violation of recently enacted laws that specifically barred federal agencies from operating Chinese drones after December 2025. (DHS has not responded to my inquiries about if this Chinese drone was being operated under an exemption).

Ironically, MAGA’s moves to crack down on affordable drones in the name of national security may have just the opposite effect.

I first began flying drones back in 2013, when DJI’s first easy-to-use consumer drones were just hitting the market. Before then, if you wanted a drone at all, you’d have to build one yourself, or commission a hobbyist to build one for you. After affordable and high-quality Chinese drones hit U.S. markets, far fewer people bothered with the finicky task of putting together their own home-brewed little flying robots.

These Trump bans on foreign-made drones may very well reignite the custom drone-building movement in the United States as people who can’t afford to buy expensive American drones turn to more affordable solutions.

That may become an issue. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the public internet has become totally awash in a new genre of DIY drone content. These are tips and tricks that differ considerably from the benign advice I recall friendly hobbyist drone-building dads posting on web forums and YouTube 10 years ago—namely, information on how to weaponize inexpensive, custom-built drones for war.

There’s another big problem with encouraging Americans to get back into building their own drones.

Before the ban, major Chinese drone producers like DJI adhered to American regulations that, as of September 2023, required all drones sold in the country weighing more than 250 grams (which is most of them) to emit something called a Remote ID signal. Government agencies and police are able to use these signals to identify small drones, and to quickly locate pilots on the ground who appear to be breaking the law.

As pretty much every drone pilot in the U.S. for the last decade has simply purchased a Chinese-made drone from the store, and firms began to comply in advance of the expected law years beforehand, every out-of-the-box drone was emitting these signals. And while it is possible to hack drones to turn these signals off, it seems like doing this was either too difficult for most miscreants or simply never occurred to them in the first place.

While home-built drones are legally required to emit these signals, in practice, many builders will simply never get around to installing the module that’s needed to do so.

Although MAGA’s efforts to restrict small drone access to the American people may reduce the overall number of drone pilots in the sky in the near future, it’s also possible that the drone pilots that remain will be considerably harder to track by law enforcement than they used to be.

MAGA’s onslaught of foreign-drone bans and impossible-to-comply-with restrictions on drone flights over government assets paint a troublingly coherent picture. They’re actions that arguably infringe upon the First Amendment rights of reporters and activists, who have recently been using drones to monitor the movement of often intensely violent ICE agents from a safer distance.

The federal government intends to take back the aerial view for itself—making it far harder for the public to purchase or to safely use the cheap drones that have permitted so much remarkable research, innovation, and investigative journalism over the last decade.

At the same time, as federal agencies like DHS and state and city police systems pump yet more cash into deploying American-made surveillance drones, these specially privileged aircraft will have precedence in the skies over drones flown by everybody else.

The formerly democratic promise of affordable and easy-to-use drone tech for everyone may evaporate.