Who Paid for the Case-Building
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach streets in New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 while agents monitored shipments but did not seize them, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press. The tactic was used as federal prosecutors sought to build bigger criminal cases against traffickers of a synthetic opioid that the White House last year designated a “weapon of mass destruction.” In other words, the machinery of federal enforcement treated public safety as a bargaining chip in a larger prosecutorial game, with communities in and around Albuquerque left to absorb the risk.
Agents and experts said the approach amounted to a gamble with public safety that potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque and may have violated Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public. DEA Special Agent David Howell said, “We poisoned our community to make cases. 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.” Howell said he filed an official whistleblower complaint in 2023 to bring attention to what he thought was a tactic that risked public safety. He later said, “We did nothing but sit back and watch.” Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, said, “It’s outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case.”
What the Bureau Says It Was Doing
The DEA said in a statement that “the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance.” DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak wrote, “Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.” She said the investigations involved court-authorized wiretaps “in which agents and prosecutors conducted real-time surveillance, intelligence gathering, and operational analysis targeting larger drug trafficking organizations.” That is the language of the apparatus: surveillance, intelligence gathering, operational analysis — all in service of a system that says it can measure the damage after the fact.
In some cases, the DEA had detailed intelligence about deliveries and was able to tally precise pill counts. In June 2023, agents deciphered coded cellphone chatter and surveilled a transaction at a mobile home park in Albuquerque, according to a 66-page report reviewed by AP. Agents wrote that traffickers delivered 74,000 pills as part of that deal, a figure federal prosecutors later confirmed in a court filing. Days earlier, another DEA report showed investigators watched the same distribution ring deliver a spare tire hiding another suspected fentanyl shipment that also went unseized.
The Cost at the Bottom
A former DEA supervisor, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he and his Albuquerque colleagues allowed “millions” of pills to go unseized during a multistate investigation last year. Howell reported in his whistleblower disclosures that agents on that case permitted the delivery of at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills. That investigation culminated in the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history, a takedown announced in May 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi that resulted in the seizure of more than 3 million pills. The former supervisor said, “The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on,” and said the DEA could have dismantled the organization six months earlier.
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022 through last year, said authorities at times allowed drug shipments to go unseized as part of a broader effort to gather intelligence and build cases against major drug traffickers. He said the approach reflected his office’s limited resources and his belief that prosecuting larger organizations can have a bigger impact than interdicting every suspected drug transaction. Uballez said estimated pill counts “based on intercepted phone calls are not reliable” and added, “I don’t think I’d contest that drugs are ‘walked.’ How much and how frequently — and with what certainty — is incredibly difficult to answer in retrospect.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Albuquerque said the “conduct” Howell brought to light happened during the prior administration. Tessa DuBerry, a spokesperson for the office, wrote, “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.”
Rules, Exceptions, and the Usual Course of Harm
The Justice Department developed internal “Fentanyl Protocols” in 2017, calling on agents to “seize or otherwise prevent the distribution” of fentanyl “as soon as practicable” and saying “protecting public safety is paramount,” irrespective of whether seizures compromise investigations. The department rewrote the rules in 2024 to give law enforcement more discretion, saying investigators “may exercise discretion in determining whether to take action to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl,” balancing public safety risks against “the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation.” The DEA’s agent manual describes taking drugs off the street as “the usual course of action,” but says “there may be instances where the investigative objectives can be better achieved by not doing so.”
Several current and former agents compared the tactic to “Operation Fast and Furious,” the 2011 gun-walking scandal in which straw buyers smuggled some 2,000 assault weapons into Mexico with the intent of tracing the firearms to cartel leaders. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives faced bipartisan criticism after two of those guns surfaced at the scene of a fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent, and the Justice Department explicitly forbade agents from allowing firearms to be trafficked. The comparison hangs over this case like a warning the bureaucracy already knows how to ignore.
Howell said he began flagging overdose deaths that might have been caused by pills the DEA permitted to flow to dealers. One case involved a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue last year in Española, New Mexico. Howell, who joined the DEA 19 years ago after a decade in the Navy, took his allegations to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which initially found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” and asked the Justice Department to investigate. In early 2024, Howell told the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that DEA agents had observed, yet not seized, separate deliveries of 150,000 and 50,000 fentanyl pills. He said the DEA and federal prosecutors were “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 found in 2024 that the DEA and the U.S. attorney’s office had made reasonable decisions in deciding to allow drugs to go unseized and that their inaction posed no “specific danger to public health.” The Office of Special Counsel deemed the report reasonable. Howell said the DEA relegated him to desk duty for more than a year and docked his performance evaluations, and internal records showed prosecutors barred him from testifying in federal court, citing his “pattern of refusing to heed” admonitions to allow drugs to go unseized during long-term investigations. Current and former agents said they could not understand the watchdog’s finding that the tactics had not put the public in danger, noting the drug is so dangerous it has to be handled in a specialized laboratory.