Federal drug enforcement agents allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach communities in New Mexico while monitoring shipments but declining to seize them, according to three current and former Drug Enforcement Administration agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press. The controversial tactic, employed between 2023 and 2025 as prosecutors sought to build larger criminal cases, has sparked allegations that the DEA gambled with public safety and potentially violated Justice Department rules designed to protect communities.
Whistleblower Sounds Alarm on Public Safety Risk
DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed an official whistleblower complaint three years ago, said the agency's approach amounted to a dangerous failure of its core mission. "We poisoned our community to make cases," Howell said. "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, a 19-year DEA veteran who previously served a decade in the Navy, said agents "did nothing but sit back and watch" as the synthetic opioid—designated a "weapon of mass destruction" by the White House about one year ago—flowed into Albuquerque and surrounding areas.
Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, called the tactic unconscionable. "It's outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case," Leavitt said.
Detailed Intelligence, Unseized Shipments
In some cases, the DEA had precise intelligence about deliveries and was able to tally exact pill counts. Three years ago, 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 documented that traffickers delivered 74,000 pills as part of that deal, a figure federal prosecutors later confirmed in court. 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.
A former DEA supervisor, speaking anonymously 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 about one year ago 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.
Agency Defends Tactics as Lawful
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."
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."
Policy Shift Gave Agents More Discretion
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 two years ago 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."
Echoes of Past Scandal
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.
Potential Victims Identified
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. About two years ago, 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."
Watchdog Clears Agency, Whistleblower Faces Retaliation
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility found two years ago 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.
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."
Howell initially took his allegations to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which found a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" and asked the Justice Department to investigate.
Why This Matters:
The revelation that federal agents allowed potentially millions of fentanyl pills to reach vulnerable communities raises fundamental questions about the balance between investigative ambition and the government's duty to protect public health. With fentanyl overdoses claiming tens of thousands of American lives annually, the decision to prioritize building larger criminal cases over immediate interdiction represents a policy choice with potentially fatal consequences for working-class communities already bearing the brunt of the opioid crisis. The 2024 rule change that gave agents greater discretion to allow drug trafficking to continue reflects a shift away from the explicit public safety protections established in 2017, creating a framework where prosecutorial strategy can override immediate harm reduction. The retaliation faced by the whistleblower who raised these concerns—including relegation to desk duty and damaged performance evaluations—suggests institutional resistance to accountability mechanisms designed to protect both communities and conscientious federal employees. As the current administration distances itself from these tactics, the lack of transparency about how many deaths may be connected to unseized shipments leaves affected families and communities without answers or accountability.