Staggering amounts of fentanyl hit streets as the DEA watched and took
no action, records show
[June 22, 2026]
By JIM MUSTIAN and JOSHUA GOODMAN
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic
in American history, 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.
DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills — but did
not seize them — as federal prosecutors sought to bring bigger criminal
cases against traffickers of a synthetic opioid that the White House
last year designated a “ weapon of mass destruction.”
Agents and experts, however, said the tactic amounted to a gamble with
public safety that potentially imperiled communities in and around
Albuquerque and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended
to safeguard the public.
“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David
Howell told AP in a series of interviews in New Mexico. “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 has long contended it would not be plausible to seize every
shipment of every drug. But the strategy of allowing staggering amounts
of counterfeit painkillers to hit the streets shocked several veteran
agents who spoke with AP.
Ridding the streets of illicit fentanyl, manufactured mostly in Mexican
labs, became DEA’s top priority over the past decade as overdose deaths
surged. At the same time, its lethality — a few milligrams can kill the
average adult — upended time-tested tactics that had been used to combat
drugs like cocaine and heroin. Those methods have included allowing drug
transactions to be completed so agents might follow the narcotics
through the supply chain. Fentanyl, however, is so dangerous that the
U.S. Justice Department developed guidelines for agents in such
circumstances, encouraging them to seize the opioid whenever
“practicable.”
Albuquerque, which has a neighborhood so besieged by drugs it’s 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.
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022
through last year, said authorities at times allowed drug shipments to
go unseized as part of a broader effort to gather intelligence and build
cases against major drug traffickers. He said the approach reflected his
office’s limited resources and his belief that prosecuting larger
organizations can have a bigger impact than interdicting every suspected
drug transaction.
Last year, DEA recorded the largest fentanyl bust in its history in
Albuquerque.
“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.”
“Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to
reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the
facts,” DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak wrote in an email. She 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.”
Precise intelligence on drug deliveries
In some cases, the DEA had such detailed intelligence about drug
deliveries that agents were able to tally precise pill counts, according
to reports reviewed by AP.
Agents, for example, 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.
“We did nothing, but sit back and watch,” said Howell, who filed an
official whistleblower complaint in 2023 to bring attention to what he
thought was a tactic that risked public safety.
Months passed before federal authorities busted the traffickers, and
Howell, who participated in the surveillance, said authorities today
cannot account for the unseized shipments.
“It’s outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big
case,” said Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, a
whistleblower advocacy group that has asked the Senate Judiciary
Committee and Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to
investigate Howell’s claims.
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, the former supervisor and Howell told AP, 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 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 organization six months earlier.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Albuquerque did not answer questions about
the unseized fentanyl shipments but, in a statement to AP, said the
“conduct” Howell brought to light happened during the prior
administration.
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DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed a whistleblower complaint,
poses for a portrait outside the U.S. district courthouse in
Albuquerque, N.M., on Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya
Bryan)
“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 spokesperson for the office, wrote in an
email.
Uballez, the former U.S. attorney, said estimated pill counts “based
on intercepted phone calls are not reliable.”
“I don’t think I’d contest that drugs are ‘walked,’” he said,
referring to the law enforcement tactic of allowing contraband to go
unseized to further an investigation. “How much and how frequently —
and with what certainty — is incredibly difficult to answer in
retrospect.”
To seize or not to seize
As fentanyl overdoses became an epidemic over the last decade, the
U.S. Justice Department developed an internal playbook for
combatting the deadliest drug ever to cross the Mexican border. The
game plan coincided with a publicity campaign that warned Americans
that “One Pill Can Kill,” a DEA effort to highlight fentanyl’s
unique dangers.
Adopted in 2017, the department’s two-page “Fentanyl Protocols”
called on agents to “seize or otherwise prevent the distribution” of
fentanyl “as soon as practicable.” The rules, which have not
previously been made public, said that “protecting public safety is
paramount,” irrespective of whether seizures compromise
investigations.
The Justice Department rewrote the rules in 2024 to afford law
enforcement more discretion in such cases. The updated protocols say
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 rarely discusses the tactic of allowing drugs to go unseized.
Its agent manual describes taking drugs off the street as “the usual
course of action” but adds “there may be instances where the
investigative objectives can be better achieved by not doing so.”
The agency has long used “controlled deliveries” in which constant
surveillance of the drugs — and often replacing them with fake
narcotics — is followed by a takedown to recover them, according to
current and former agents.
In interviews, several current and former agents likened the
decision to permit fentanyl to hit the streets to the infamous
“Operation Fast and Furious,” a 2011 gun-walking scandal in which
straw buyers smuggled some 2,000 assault weapons into Mexico with
the intent of tracing the firearms to cartel leaders.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was savaged
with bipartisan criticism after two of those guns surfaced at the
scene of the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent, and the
Justice Department explicitly forbid agents from allowing firearms
to be trafficked.
Blowing the whistle
Howell became so unnerved by his agency’s failure to seize fentanyl
that he began flagging overdose deaths that might have been caused
by the very pills DEA permitted to flow to dealers. One of those
cases included a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting
burned fentanyl residue last year in Española, a New Mexico town
ravaged by grinding poverty and addiction.
Howell, who joined DEA 19 years ago after a decade in the Navy, took
his allegations to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. The agency,
tasked with protecting whistleblowers, 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.
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.”
The Justice Department’s 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, which critics say rarely pushes back
on agency findings, deemed the Justice Department’s report
reasonable.
Howell, meanwhile, paid a price after coming forward. The DEA
relegated him to desk duty for more than a year and docked his
performance evaluations, according to Howell and DEA records.
Internal records also show 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.
Pointing to DEA’s own “One Pill Can Kill” campaign, current and
former agents said they could not understand the watchdog’s finding
that the tactics had not put the public in danger. They noted the
drug is so dangerous it has to be handled in a specialized
laboratory.
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Goodman reported from Miami.
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