Eastbound Interstate 10 through El Paso's west side will close completely for 51 hours this weekend — from 3 a.m. on Saturday, November 14, to 6 a.m. on Monday, November 16, 2026 — between Anthony and Transmountain Road while crews place a bridge deck for the I-10 Widening West project's second phase, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) said. For the truckers who run the southern transcontinental I-10 corridor through El Paso — including the many Punjabi drivers on the Los Angeles–Texas–Florida lanes — this is a plan-around-it closure, not a slowdown: every eastbound main lane shuts, and the signed detour runs on surface streets.
Source: Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), El Paso District closure list, week of Nov. 9, 2026
The weekend closure is the largest single shutdown in a stacked week of west-El Paso roadwork. TxDOT's closure list for the El Paso District, published for the week of November 9 and reported by KFOX14, pairs the 51-hour eastbound closure with an overnight full closure of westbound I-10 earlier in the week, a 50-hour closure of northbound Loop 375 on the same weekend, and a full Sunday closure of southbound US 54. Drivers crossing El Paso in either direction between Thursday night and Monday morning will meet at least one of them.
The detour: South Desert Boulevard through Anthony and Vinton
Eastbound drivers will be detoured onto South Desert Boulevard, through the Anthony and Vinton intersection, and back onto eastbound I-10 after Los Mochis, according to TxDOT's published routing as reported by KFOX14. That puts interstate traffic — including loaded semis — onto the frontage-road corridor for the length of the closure. TxDOT instructs drivers to follow the detour signs in place on all projects and notes that all work is dependent on weather conditions, so the 51-hour window can move if weather intervenes.
What else closes, and when
Before the weekend, westbound I-10 closes fully between Los Mochis and Anthony from 9 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, to 6 a.m. on Friday, while crews place concrete girders and work on a temporary Anthony exit; westbound drivers follow North Desert Boulevard through the Vinton and Anthony area and rejoin after Anthony. On the weekend itself, northbound Loop 375 — the Purple Heart Highway — closes between Montana Avenue and Spur 601 from 3 a.m. Saturday to 5 a.m. Monday for a traffic switch, and its southbound Montana exit ramp is also closed on Saturday, November 14, from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. for milling. On Sunday, November 15, US 54 southbound closes completely from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. for bridge-joint work, with traffic directed to Exit 20A (Paisano) and the turnaround from Gateway North to Gateway South at Paisano.
Part of a wider week of El Paso closures
The big weekend closures sit inside a district-wide work week. TxDOT's west-area list for November 9–13 includes full daytime closures of the I-10 eastbound exit ramp at Redd (9 a.m.–4 p.m.) for form work on bent caps, alternate lane closures on I-10 in both directions between Redd and Transmountain for median-column steel and formwork, nightly alternate lane closures at Schuster and Chelsea for districtwide bridge maintenance (November 10–13, 9 p.m.–6 a.m.), and the continuing 24/7 closure of the I-10 westbound exit ramp to Transmountain, with a secondary temporary exit ramp open. None of those is a full main-lane shutdown, but together they narrow the same west-side corridor the weekend detour depends on.
Interstate 10 is the southernmost cross-country freight corridor in the United States, running from Santa Monica, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, and El Paso is one of its busiest border-freight nodes, where interstate traffic mixes with port-of-entry truck flows from Ciudad Juárez. A full 51-hour eastbound closure at the Anthony–Transmountain segment — the gateway between New Mexico and El Paso — pushes every eastbound load onto Desert Boulevard frontage roads. Dispatchers running weekend schedules through West Texas should build the detour, and the risk of frontage-road queues, into delivery windows now, not on Saturday morning.
The project behind the closure: widening I-10 West
The closure belongs to the I-10 Widening West project, which widens the interstate from four lanes to six from south of Vinton to Mesa Street on El Paso's west side, in phases. The November 14–16 work is listed under Phase II: crews will be placing a bridge deck during the 51-hour window, the kind of operation that cannot be done under live traffic and is the reason the closure is total rather than lane-by-lane. The same project has used a series of 51-hour weekend closures this autumn for deck and girder work, each announced in TxDOT's weekly district closure lists.
What happens next
If the work stays on schedule, eastbound I-10 reopens at 6 a.m. on Monday, November 16, and Loop 375 northbound at 5 a.m. the same morning — in time for the Monday commute and the week's first freight wave, but with no slack if weather or construction problems extend the deck placement. TxDOT publishes its El Paso District closures weekly and directs drivers to follow posted detour signs; the district's listed contact for the west-area projects is 915-790-4341. Awaaz Punjab will update this report if TxDOT moves the closure window.