New Mexico’s governor on Wednesday called for a criminal investigation into the Drug Enforcement Administration after an Associated Press investigation found federal agents allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach the streets over a two-year period while pursuing larger drug-trafficking cases. The decision-making came from the top of the federal drug apparatus, while people in New Mexico communities were left to absorb the consequences of a strategy that treated public safety as collateral damage.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham asked the state’s attorney general to examine whether the agency’s actions violated New Mexico law. Her request followed an AP investigation that found DEA agents repeatedly allowed major fentanyl shipments to continue moving through New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 rather than seize them immediately, as agents sought to build cases against higher-ranking traffickers. Current and former DEA agents told AP the strategy amounted to a gamble with public safety in a state ravaged by the fentanyl epidemic and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public from a drug the White House last year designated as a “ weapon of mass destruction.”
Who Pays for the Strategy
“There are no words to describe how reckless and dangerous these decisions were,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “Make no mistake: the DEA knew people would die if these pills made it into New Mexico communities, and the agency let it happen anyway.”
That is the blunt accounting from the bottom, where the damage lands. The governor’s statement framed the issue not as a technical dispute over enforcement tactics, but as a question of whose lives are treated as expendable when federal agents decide to play a longer game with fentanyl shipments.
The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the governor’s statement. The agency has contended it would not be plausible to seize every drug shipment and previously told AP in a statement “the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance.” DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak wrote in an email, “Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.”
What the Bureaucracy Calls Reasonable
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from May 2022 until February 2025, told AP that drugs went unseized at times due to his office’s limited resources and his belief that prosecuting larger organizations has a bigger impact than intercepting every suspected drug transaction. That is the familiar logic of the enforcement state: scarce resources, bigger targets, and a hierarchy of harm that leaves communities waiting for protection that may never arrive.
It is not clear whether any fatal overdoses in the state can be directly attributed to the DEA strategy. While overdose deaths nationwide fell 14% last year, government data show New Mexico tallied a 21% spike. Those numbers sit beside the agency’s claims of reasonableness, and beside the people who had to live through the consequences.
“New Mexican lives are not the federal government’s cost of doing business,” the governor wrote in her statement. “I plan to hold the federal government accountable for this disaster and will explore every possible avenue of action against the federal government to right these wrongs.”
Whistleblowers, Watchdogs, and the Official Story
The AP investigation cited three current and former agents and government records, including an internal report of a 2023 delivery of 74,000 pills the DEA surveilled — but did not seize — at a mobile home park in Albuquerque. That internal record shows the machinery in motion: surveillance, knowledge, and then restraint, all in service of a larger case built above the heads of the people most exposed to the drugs.
DEA whistleblower David Howell, who filed a complaint drawing attention to the unseized fentanyl, spoke Wednesday with congressional staffers. Empower Oversight, a whistleblower advocacy group representing Howell, has asked the Senate Judiciary Committee and Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to investigate the agent’s allegations. The complaint route runs through the same institutions that authorized the system in the first place, even as it tries to force a reckoning from inside the apparatus.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Ohio Republican, called Howell’s revelations “a scandal of the highest order” and said in a post on X he plans to find out how many American lives were lost due to the DEA’s inaction. Victims groups also spoke out about DEA’s inaction, saying its approach in New Mexico contradicts the agency’s prominent “One Pill Can Kill” campaign that warns as little as a few milligrams of fentanyl can cause a fatal overdose.
Michael Glownia, who lost his daughter to fentanyl in 2023 and founded a nonprofit organization to support families suffering similar losses, said, “Knowing the Justice Department had guidelines to seize the opioids whenever practical — and the fact these were ignored — is truly heartbreaking.” His words land where the policy does: in families, in grief, and in the wreckage left behind when federal power decides its own priorities matter more than immediate harm.