DEA let fentanyl pills reach New Mexico streets to build bigger cases, AP finds

Albuquerque,UPDATED: Jun 22, 2026 20:49 IST

The US Drug Enforcement Administration allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 while federal prosecutors tried to build bigger cases against traffickers, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The tactic involved agents tracking fentanyl shipments but not seizing them in some cases, even as the US battled the deadliest drug epidemic in its history. Agents and experts told AP this was a gamble with public safety that may have gone against Justice Department rules urging fentanyl to be seized whenever practicable. The issue has drawn attention as New Mexico remained at the centre of the crisis, with overdose deaths in the state rising 21 per cent last year even as the national total fell 14 per cent. The White House last year described fentanyl as a 'weapon of mass destruction'.

DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed a whistleblower complaint in 2023, said the strategy had grave consequences. 'We poisoned our community to make cases,' he told AP. He added: '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.'

Alex Uballez, who served as US attorney in New Mexico from 2022 until last year, said authorities sometimes let shipments go unseized to gather intelligence and build cases against major trafficking organisations, reflecting limited resources and his belief that targeting larger networks could have a bigger effect than stopping every suspected deal. 'The bigger fish are worth catching,' Uballez said, 'and that will save more lives.' 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 added that suggestions the agency knowingly allowed fentanyl to reach communities were 'false and fundamentally mischaracterise the facts', and said the cases involved court-authorised wiretaps, real-time surveillance, intelligence gathering and operational analysis aimed at larger drug trafficking organisations.

In some investigations, agents had such detailed information that they could count the pills being delivered, according to records reviewed by AP. In June 2023, agents decoded phone conversations and closely watched a deal at a mobile home park in Albuquerque. In a 66-page report, they wrote that traffickers delivered 74,000 pills, a figure later confirmed by federal prosecutors in a court filing. Days earlier, another DEA report showed investigators watched the same ring deliver a spare tyre hiding another suspected fentanyl shipment that was also not seized. 'We did nothing but sit back and watch,' Howell said.

Howell said months passed before federal authorities moved against the traffickers and that the unseized shipments cannot now be accounted for. Tristan Leavitt, president of the whistleblower advocacy group Empower Oversight, said: 'It's outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case.' Albuquerque, including a neighbourhood known as 'War Zone', and other parts of New Mexico have been badly affected by fentanyl, which is largely manufactured in laboratories in Mexico and can kill with just a few milligrams.

A former DEA supervisor, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he and colleagues in Albuquerque allowed 'millions' of pills to go unseized during a multistate investigation last year. In whistleblower disclosures, Howell said agents in that case allowed at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills to be delivered. Howell and the former supervisor said the investigation ended with the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history, announced in May 2025 by then attorney general Pam Bondi, in which more than 3 million pills were seized. 'The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on,' the former supervisor said, adding that the DEA could have dismantled the organisation six months earlier.

The US attorney's office in Albuquerque did not answer AP's questions on the unseized shipments, but said the conduct highlighted by Howell took place under the previous administration. Tessa DuBerry, a spokesperson for the office, said the current leadership was focused on aggressively investigating and prosecuting fentanyl trafficking and disrupting the organisations behind it. Uballez said estimated pill counts based on intercepted phone calls were 'not reliable'. He 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.'

Justice Department guidance treated fentanyl as a special case as overdoses surged over the past decade. A 2017 document called the 'Fentanyl Protocols' directed agents to 'seize or otherwise prevent the distribution' of fentanyl 'as soon as practicable' and said 'protecting public safety is paramount', even if that affected investigations. The rules were rewritten in 2024 to give investigators more room to decide whether to act, saying they 'may exercise discretion in determining whether to take action to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl', while weighing public safety risks against the benefits of preserving an investigation. The DEA's manual says taking drugs off the street is 'the usual course of action', though there may be cases where investigative goals are better served by not doing so. Current and former agents said the agency has long used 'controlled deliveries', in which drugs are kept under constant watch and are often replaced with fake narcotics before a later takedown.

Several current and former agents told AP the decision to let fentanyl reach the street was similar to 'Operation Fast and Furious', the 2011 gun-walking scandal in which straw buyers moved about 2,000 assault weapons into Mexico so authorities could try to track them to cartel leaders. The operation drew bipartisan criticism after two of those guns were found at the scene of the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent, and the Justice Department later explicitly barred agents from allowing firearms to be trafficked.

The article centres on whether allowing fentanyl shipments to continue in order to build larger cases was justified, with whistleblowers saying the approach put lives at risk and officials saying it was a lawful strategy aimed at dismantling bigger trafficking organisations.

With PTI Inputs

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