DEA Special Agent David Howell told the Associated Press that the agency allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach the streets of Albuquerque between 2023 and 2025 while agents monitored shipments in hopes of building larger trafficking cases against Mexican drug organizations. The complaint, filed in 2023 with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, detailed instances in which agents had precise intelligence on pill counts and delivery locations but refrained from seizing the drugs.
“We poisoned our community to make cases,” Howell told the AP. “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.”
In June 2023, according to documents reviewed by the AP, DEA agents deciphered coded cellphone chatter and closely surveilled a transaction of 74,000 fentanyl pills at an Albuquerque mobile home park. Days earlier, another shipment had also gone without seizure. “We did nothing but sit back and watch,” Howell said.
The DEA has challenged the AP’s reporting. In a statement, the agency said that “public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.” It said the cases involved “complex, court-authorized Title III investigations” coordinated with U.S. attorneys’ offices and that the decisions made “were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances, and consistent with department guidance.”
The DEA subsequently asked the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to investigate Howell’s complaint.
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022 through 2025, told the AP that allowing drug shipments to proceed without seizure was part of a broader effort to gather intelligence and build cases against major traffickers. “The bigger fish are worth catching, and that will save more lives,” Uballez said.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Friday opened a formal investigation into the allegations. In a letter to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Torrez wrote: “If those allegations are accurate, the consequences for New Mexicans were not abstract. They were fatal. New Mexico already ranks among the states hardest hit by fentanyl overdose deaths, and the families who have lost children, siblings, and parents to this crisis deserve a full accounting of what the federal government knew, what it did, and what it failed to do.”
Torrez said he was “committed to pursuing every appropriate legal avenue to hold the responsible parties accountable,” though he noted that the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution “provides substantial protections for federal employees acting within the scope of their authority.”
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called the DEA’s actions “reckless and dangerous” and urged the attorney general’s office to prosecute anyone responsible, “regardless of whether they are a federal agent or not.” Grisham told the Albuquerque Journal that the result was “hundreds of New Mexican parents burying their kids. Hundreds of New Mexican kids growing up without stable parents. All while the federal government stood by.”
A Democrat facing a re-election contest, Grisham said she had repeatedly petitioned the Biden administration and federal officials for help with the fentanyl crisis. “While my administration was doing everything we could to stem the tide of fentanyl coming into our state, the federal government deliberately allowed it to flood in,” she said. “I plan to hold the federal government accountable for this disaster and will explore every possible avenue of action to right these wrongs.”
Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller said on X that the fentanyl epidemic has “torn through our streets” and called the allegations “disgusting.” At a news conference Thursday, Keller described the DEA’s decision as “immoral” and “a huge slap in the face to all of us as New Mexicans.”
Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen, whose jurisdiction includes Albuquerque, told the Albuquerque Journal that the DEA had been allowed “to feed poison to our community for a bigger case.” “I agree with getting the big fish and everything, but not when people are dying while we’re doing these investigations,” Allen said.
Overdose deaths in New Mexico increased 23% over the past year, the second consecutive year the state led the nation in overdose mortality, according to the New Mexico Department of Health. During the first half of 2025, three northeastern counties — Rio Arriba, Santa Fe, and Taos — saw drug-related emergency room visits increase by as much as 204%, state health data showed.
Howell said he paid a price for making the complaint: he was relegated to desk duty and received lower performance evaluations. Internal records also showed that prosecutors barred him from testifying in federal court, citing his “pattern of refusing to heed” admonitions to allow drugs to go without seizure during long-term investigations.