Government records and accounts from three current and former federal drug agents reveal that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to flow into New Mexico communities between 2023 and 2025 — even as the nation grappled with its deadliest drug crisis in history, according to a report by The Associated Press.
Rather than intercepting drug shipments, DEA agents repeatedly stood by and watched fentanyl deliveries take place, choosing not to make seizures while federal prosecutors worked to build larger cases against major drug trafficking organizations. The synthetic opioid was designated a “weapon of mass destruction” by the White House last year.
Agents and outside experts warned that the approach was a dangerous gamble with public safety that may have put communities in and around Albuquerque at risk — and may have run afoul of U.S. Justice Department rules designed to protect the public.
“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David Howell told the AP during a series of interviews in New Mexico. “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100% got people killed.”
While the DEA has long maintained that seizing every drug shipment is not realistic, the scale of fentanyl allowed onto the streets alarmed several seasoned agents who spoke with the AP.
Over the past decade, eliminating illicit fentanyl — produced primarily in Mexican laboratories — became the DEA’s top priority as overdose deaths climbed sharply. But the drug’s extreme potency, capable of killing the average adult with just a few grams, forced a rethinking of traditional tactics used against drugs like cocaine and heroin. Those older methods often involved letting drug deals proceed so agents could track narcotics through supply chains. Because fentanyl is so lethal, the Justice Department created specific guidelines urging agents to seize it whenever “practicable.”
Albuquerque, home to a neighborhood so overwhelmed by drug activity it has earned the nickname “War Zone,” sits at the center of New Mexico’s fentanyl crisis. While overdose deaths across the country dropped 14% last year, New Mexico saw a 21% increase, according to government data.
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022 through last year, acknowledged that authorities sometimes allowed drug shipments to go unconfiscated as part of broader efforts to gather intelligence and pursue major traffickers. He cited limited resources and his belief that targeting larger criminal organizations ultimately saves more lives than stopping individual transactions.
Last year, the DEA recorded the largest fentanyl seizure in its history, in Albuquerque.
“The bigger fish are worth catching,” Uballez said, “and that will save more lives.”
The DEA issued a statement defending its actions, saying “the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance.”
DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak wrote in an email that descriptions suggesting the agency “knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.” She said the investigations involved court-authorized wiretaps used for real-time surveillance and intelligence gathering against larger trafficking organizations.
In some instances, agents had detailed enough intelligence to determine precise pill counts from drug deliveries, according to reports reviewed by the AP.
In one case from June 2023, agents decoded coded cellphone conversations and closely watched a drug transaction at a mobile home park in Albuquerque, according to a 66-page report reviewed by the AP. Agents documented that traffickers delivered 74,000 pills during that deal — a number later confirmed by federal prosecutors in court filings.
Just days before that incident, another DEA report showed agents watched the same trafficking ring deliver a spare tire concealing a suspected fentanyl shipment, which also went unconfiscated.
“We did nothing, but sit back and watch,” said Howell, who filed an official whistleblower complaint in 2023 raising concerns that the tactic endangered public safety.
Federal authorities did not move against the traffickers until months later, and Howell — who took part in the surveillance — said investigators today cannot account for those unseized shipments.
“It’s outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case,” said Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, a whistleblower advocacy group that has asked the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to look into Howell’s allegations.
A former DEA supervisor, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation, said he and fellow agents in Albuquerque allowed “millions” of pills to go unconfiscated during a multi-state investigation last year. Howell’s whistleblower disclosures reported that agents on that case permitted at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills to be delivered.
That investigation ultimately led to the largest fentanyl seizure in DEA history — a takedown announced in May 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi that resulted in the capture of more than 3 million pills.
“The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on,” the former supervisor said, adding that the DEA could have shut down the organization six months sooner.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Albuquerque declined to answer specific questions about the unseized shipments but noted in a statement that the conduct Howell flagged occurred under the previous administration. “The current leadership of this office is focused on aggressively investigating and prosecuting fentanyl trafficking and disrupting the criminal organizations responsible for distributing these drugs,” wrote spokesperson Tessa DuBerry.
Uballez, the former U.S. attorney, questioned the reliability of pill count estimates derived from intercepted phone calls. “I don’t think I’d contest that drugs are ‘walked,’” he said, referring to the tactic of allowing contraband to move unseized to advance an investigation. “How much and how frequently — and with what certainty — is incredibly difficult to answer in retrospect.”
As fentanyl overdoses escalated into a national epidemic, the Justice Department developed internal protocols for confronting the deadliest drug to cross the Mexican border. Those protocols accompanied the DEA’s public “One Pill Can Kill” campaign, which sought to educate Americans about fentanyl’s extreme dangers.
The department’s two-page “Fentanyl Protocols,” adopted in 2017 and not previously made public, directed agents to “seize or otherwise prevent the distribution” of fentanyl “as soon as practicable,” stating that “protecting public safety is paramount” regardless of whether seizures might compromise investigations.
In 2024, the Justice Department revised those rules to give law enforcement greater flexibility, allowing investigators to “exercise discretion in determining whether to take action to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl” while weighing public safety risks against the potential benefits of keeping an investigation intact.
The DEA’s own agent manual describes taking drugs off the street as “the usual course of action” but acknowledges “there may be instances where the investigative objectives can be better achieved by not doing so.” The agency has historically used “controlled deliveries” — keeping drugs under constant surveillance and often swapping them with fake narcotics before moving in for a takedown.
Several current and former agents compared the decision to let fentanyl reach the streets to the notorious “Operation Fast and Furious,” a 2011 scandal in which straw buyers smuggled roughly 2,000 assault weapons into Mexico in an attempt to trace them to cartel leaders. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives faced sharp bipartisan criticism after two of those weapons turned up at the scene of a Border Patrol agent’s fatal shooting, leading the Justice Department to explicitly ban agents from allowing firearms to be trafficked.
Howell grew so troubled by the DEA’s failure to seize fentanyl that he began tracking overdose deaths that might have been connected to the very pills the agency allowed to reach dealers. Among those cases was a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue in Española, a New Mexico town struggling with deep poverty and addiction.
Howell, a 19-year DEA veteran who spent a decade in the Navy before joining the agency, brought his allegations to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. That agency, which is charged with protecting whistleblowers, initially found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” and requested a Justice Department investigation.
In early 2024, Howell told the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that DEA agents had observed — without seizing — separate deliveries of 150,000 and 50,000 fentanyl pills. He warned that DEA and federal prosecutors “are placing themselves in a precarious position where they will not be able to prove that the fentanyl they could have stopped did not result in the death of a person.”
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded in 2024 that the DEA and the U.S. attorney’s office had made reasonable decisions in allowing drugs to go unconfiscated and that their inaction posed no “specific danger to public health.” The Office of Special Counsel, which critics say seldom challenges agency findings, accepted that conclusion as reasonable.
Howell faced professional consequences after speaking out. The DEA assigned him to desk duty for more than a year and downgraded his performance evaluations, according to Howell and DEA records. Internal records also show that prosecutors blocked him from testifying in federal court, citing his “pattern of refusing to heed” directives to allow drugs to go unconfiscated during long-term investigations.
Pointing to the DEA’s own “One Pill Can Kill” public awareness campaign, current and former agents said they struggled to understand how watchdog officials concluded that the tactics posed no public danger — especially given that the drug is so hazardous it must be handled in specialized laboratory settings.
