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 controversial tactic, employed as federal prosecutors sought to build larger criminal cases against traffickers, has raised serious questions about whether the pursuit of high-profile prosecutions compromised the agency's fundamental mission to protect communities from the synthetic opioid the White House designated a "weapon of mass destruction" about one year ago.
The Whistleblower's Account
DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed an official whistleblower complaint three years ago, offered a stark assessment of the agency's approach. "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, who joined the DEA 19 years ago after a decade in the Navy, later added, "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."
The DEA defended its investigative decisions in a statement, saying "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."
Documented Deliveries
In some cases, the DEA had detailed intelligence about deliveries and was able to tally precise pill counts. Three years ago 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.
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 about one year ago 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.
Prosecutorial Strategy and Resource Constraints
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."
Evolving Federal Guidelines
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 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.
Allegations of Deadly Consequences
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 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.
Why This Matters:
The revelations about DEA tactics in New Mexico raise fundamental questions about whether federal law enforcement agencies are properly balancing investigative goals against their core public safety mission. The documented flow of hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills into communities while agents watched represents a significant departure from traditional interdiction practices and suggests that prosecutorial ambitions may have eclipsed the immediate imperative to protect citizens from a lethal substance. The 2024 revision of Justice Department protocols, granting agents greater discretion to allow drug trafficking to continue, reflects a policy shift that demands rigorous congressional oversight to ensure accountability. The comparison to Operation Fast and Furious underscores how federal agencies have previously miscalculated the risks of allowing dangerous materials to circulate in hopes of securing larger prosecutions, with devastating consequences. The treatment of the whistleblower who raised these concerns, including reassignment and diminished performance evaluations, suggests potential institutional resistance to internal accountability mechanisms that should be strengthening, not weakening, operational integrity.