New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has asked Attorney General Raúl Torrez to investigate allegations by a former Drug Enforcement Agency agent that the DEA allowed tens of thousands of fentanyl pills to be trafficked into New Mexico in the name of tracing the drugs’ path to make more major arrests from 2023 to 2025, according to a statement the govorner released on Wednesday, June 24.
“If the justification for letting these pills flood our communities was that it would somehow make New Mexico safer down the road through bigger eventual busts, the results say otherwise,” the governor’s statement reads.
The allegations by the former agent, David Howell, were published on Monday by the Associated Press, who spoke with two other current and former agents about the practice and its potential ramifications. Lujan Grisham asked that Torrez’s office investigate whether any state laws were broken by federal agents who surveilled deliveries of pills through wiretaps, but in some cases didn’t seize the drugs until months later.
“There are no words to describe how reckless and dangerous these decisions were,” the governor wrote. “Make no mistake: the DEA knew people would die if these pills made it into New Mexico communities, and the agency let it happen anyway. The result: 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.”
According to the Associated Press, Howell reported in whistleblower disclosures that agents on one such case permitted the delivery of at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills, before the case would culminate in the largest seizure of fentanyl pills in DEA history in May 2025 of over 3 million pills.
In 2023, deaths per 100,000 population by drug overdose reached 46.3 in New Mexico and 32.4 in the United States, both in decline from the last year at 48.7 and 33.8, respectively, according to data from the New Mexico Department of Health and National Center for Heatlth Statistics.
In a statemen obtained by Source New Mexico on Thursday, New Mexico Department of Justice Chief of Staff Lauren Rodriguez said their office was “monitoring the situation” and “determining the appropriate next steps.”
“Fentanyl has devastated too many New Mexico families, and any allegation that dangerous drugs were knowingly allowed to reach our communities demands careful and serious attention,” Rodriguez wrote. “New Mexicans deserve transparency, accountability, and the assurance that every law enforcement agency charged with protecting public safety is acting with the urgency this crisis requires.”
DEA Administrator Terry Cole sent a letter to acting U.S. Inspector General Sean O’Neill on Thursday, requesting that his office conduct an independent review of the agency’s conduct surrounding the investigation of the contents of Howell’s official whistleblower report filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
“The allegations have generated significant public attention and have raised questions regarding the DEA’s operational decisions, supervisory oversight, and response to concerns raised during and after the investigation,” Cole wrote.
Cole wrote that while he “(remained) confident” that DEA personnel acted within the law and in accordance with DOJ policy, he believed a review by the inspector general’s office was “appropriate to objectively examine the agency’s actions and reinforce public confidence in the integrity of the oversight process.”
In a video posted to Instagram, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller called fentanyl addiction the “singular, number one problem facing our state,and that he would be working with congressional partners to “demand transparency and accountability.”
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“It feels like betrayal, when you find out our federal government might actually have been driving that problem and contributing to it in the first place,” Keller said. “One question is ‘why is this happening to Albuquerque?’ ‘Why were we collateral damage for some experiment the federal government was running?’”
Elliott Wood is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at editorinchief@dailylobo.com or @DailyLobo on X
