Even as overdoses piled up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during the Biden era, the Drug Enforcement Administration watched fentanyl come in and did nothing, according to an agency whistleblower.
Hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills arrived in New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 while DEA agents watched and did nothing, according to the Associated Press.
“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David Howell said.
“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,” he added.
Howell said the issue was not that the DEA did not know fentanyl was flooding into New Mexico. It was that it did.
“We did nothing but sit back and watch,” he said.
Howell said that although some busts eventually took place, the DEA has no idea what happened to drugs it watched enter New Mexico.
Do you think the Biden administration or the Trump administration care more about American lives? A: Biden admin A: Trump admin
The DEA and federal prosecutors, he added, “are placing themselves in a precarious position where they will not be able to prove that the fentanyl they could have stopped did not result in the death of a person.”
Howell estimated DEA agents allowed at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills to be delivered when they could have intervened.
A 2025 bust under the leadership of former Attorney General Pam Bondi seized more than 3 million fentanyl pills. Despite that, overdose deaths rose 21 percent in New Mexico last year, even as rates fell nationwide.
“The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on,” a former DEA supervisor said.
The supervisor’s name was withheld, because he feared the kind of retribution visited upon Howell, who was chained to a desk and downgraded in his performance reviews after making his complaint.
Alex Uballez, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022 through last year, said drugs were allowed in to catch big dealers.
“The bigger fish are worth catching,” Uballez said, “and that will save more lives.”
The former policy of letting drugs come in is a relic of the past, the U.S. Attorney’s office said.
“The current leadership of this office is focused on aggressively investigating and prosecuting fentanyl trafficking and disrupting the criminal organizations responsible for distributing these drugs,” Tessa DuBerry, a representative of the office, said.
An attorney representing Howell said the DEA broke its own rules.
“DEA has a campaign that says one pill can kill, and so the DEA allowing this to happen was really significant. It was driven also by the US Attorney’s Office in New Mexico,” attorney Tristan Leavitt, president of whistleblower organization Empower Oversight, said, according to Just the News.
“Howell’s view was, if you have fentanyl in front of you, you need to interdict it,” Leavitt said. “That’s how we save lives.”
Leavitt compared what the DEA did with the Obama-era Fast and Furious scandal in which the federal government allowed guns to flow to Mexican drug cartels in hopes of making a major bust regarding weapons trafficking. It never did.
“After Fast and Furious, the Justice Department headquarters adopted a protocol that said if you have a wiretap and you know that firearms are going to be trafficked, you have to try and stop them,” he said. “Well, in 2019 they adopted a similar protocol for fentanyl.”
“So the Justice Department’s guidance was really ignored in Albuquerque, because the U.S. attorney decided to cowboy and do his own thing in hopes of making a bigger case,” he said.
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