Starting under the Biden administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills into New Mexico because Justice Department prosecutors wanted to bring a bigger criminal case against traffickers, the Associated Press first reported.
The AP cited three current and former DEA agents as well as government records showing that, between 2023 and 2025, the DEA monitored fentanyl shipments but didn’t seize the highly lethal drugs.
“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David Howell told 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.”
The AP cited one DEA report that said traffickers delivered 74,000 pills as part of a deal.
“We did nothing but sit back and watch,” Howell said.
A spokesperson for the administration, Amanda Wozniak, told the AP, “Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.”
She added the investigation involved court-authorized wiretaps “in which agents and prosecutors conducted real-time surveillance, intelligence gathering, and operational analysis targeting larger drug trafficking organizations.”
Former U.S. Attorney Alex Uballez of New Mexico, who President Joe Biden nominated in 2022, oversaw and defended the program.
“The bigger fish are worth catching,” Uballez told the AP. He added, “that will save more lives.”
He said authorities would allow drug shipments to pass through in order to gather intelligence and build cases against major drug traffickers. The operation primarily affected the Albuquerque area.
According to the DEA, fentanyl is about 100 times more potent than morphine, but illicit fentanyl is often mixed with other illicit drugs to increase its potency. The combination of drugs can often be fatal. As little as two milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal, according to the DEA.
The operation is reminiscent of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program under President Barack Obama’s administration dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious,” that allowed illegal guns to flow from the United States into Mexico for the purpose of tracking them to build a case against drug cartels. However, the government lost track of some of the guns, one of which was used in the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
During the first Trump administration in 2017, the Justice Department began to issue new “Fentanyl Protocols” that called for law enforcement to seize or otherwise prevent the distribution of fentanyl “as soon as practicable.”
