Who Pays for the Case-Building
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press. While federal prosecutors chased bigger criminal cases against traffickers, agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills and did not seize them, a tactic that agents and experts said gambled with public safety and potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque. The White House last year designated fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction,” yet the apparatus still let it move.
DEA Special Agent David Howell put the logic in plain language: “We poisoned our community to make cases,” he said, adding, “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.” The DEA responded that “the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance.” DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak said, “Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts,” and 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.”
What the Bureau Saw and Did Not Stop
In some cases, the DEA had detailed intelligence about drug deliveries and was able to tally precise pill counts. Agents deciphered coded chatter over cellphones and closely surveilled a transaction at a mobile home park in Albuquerque in June 2023, according to a 66-page report reviewed by AP. Agents wrote in the report 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 similarly went unseized. Howell said, “We did nothing, but sit back and watch.”
Howell filed an official whistleblower complaint in 2023. He said authorities today cannot account for the unseized shipments. Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, said, “It’s outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case.” 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 multi-state 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 added that the DEA could have dismantled the organization six months earlier.
Rules for Them, Consequences for Everyone Else
The Justice Department developed internal “Fentanyl Protocols” in 2017 that called on agents to “seize or otherwise prevent the distribution” of fentanyl “as soon as practicable” and said that “protecting public safety is paramount,” irrespective of whether seizures compromise investigations. The rules were rewritten 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.”
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. Howell said he began flagging overdose deaths that might have been caused by pills the DEA permitted to flow to dealers, including the death of a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue last year in Española, New Mexico. Howell, who joined 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. The Office of Professional Responsibility found in 2024 that the DEA and 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 Justice Department’s 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. Albuquerque, which has a neighborhood known as “War Zone,” and other regions in New Mexico remain at the epicenter of the fentanyl epidemic. While overdose deaths nationwide fell 14% last year, government data show New Mexico tallied a 21% spike. Last year, DEA recorded the largest fentanyl bust in its history in Albuquerque.
At Sea, the Same Logic Turns Deadly
The U.S. military conducted another strike against a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, immediately killing two people and leaving six survivors amid an ongoing campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America. The latest attack, which now numbers more than 60, brings the number of people killed in boat strikes by the U.S. military to more than 210 since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls “narcoterrorists” in early September.
It is unclear if the survivors of this strike were rescued. In this case, and the strike on June 16 that left two survivors, U.S. Central Command said it notified the U.S. Coast Guard. The U.S. Coast Guard said it suspended its search for survivors for the June 16 strike a day later with “no signs of survivors or debris” but had no comment on the current strike. U.S. Southern Command said it targeted the alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes, but the military did not provide evidence that the vessel was ferrying drugs. A black and white video posted on X showed a boat speeding through the water before being struck by a visible projectile and then bursting into flames.
President Donald Trump has said the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with cartels in Latin America and has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States and fatal overdoses claiming American lives. His administration has offered little evidence to support its claims of killing “narcoterrorists.” Critics have questioned the overall legality and effectiveness of the strikes, noting that fentanyl behind many fatal U.S. drug overdoses is typically trafficked over land from Mexico, where it is produced with chemicals imported from China and India. On Thursday, U.S. lawmakers demanded that the Pentagon release “unedited video” of the first strike after reports emerged that the U.S. chose to conduct a follow-up strike on survivors of its initial attack. Two men on the boat initially survived that attack, which killed nine others, and were clinging to the wreckage when the vessel was struck again, killing them. The White House confirmed the follow-up strike, insisting it was done “in self-defense” to ensure the boat was destroyed and in accordance with the laws of armed conflict. Some legal scholars said a second strike killing survivors would have been illegal under any circumstance, armed conflict or not. The Pentagon’s watchdog said in May that it planned to look into whether the U.S. military followed an established targeting framework when carrying out the strikes, focusing on the six-phase Joint Targeting Cycle and not on the legality of the strikes.