New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced a formal criminal investigation this week into allegations that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration knowingly let hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills flood into New Mexico communities between 2023 and 2025. The investigation follows reporting by the Associated Press and the Albuquerque Journal that DEA agents operating in Albuquerque monitored large fentanyl shipments under wiretap authority, confirmed their delivery, and stood down—all in pursuit of bigger fish up the cartel food chain. The pills walked. The people died.
The whistleblower at the center of this is David Howell, a 19-year DEA veteran who filed his complaint in mid-2023. Howell alleged that more than 300,000 fentanyl pills reached Albuquerque streets as of September 2024 alone, with agents under a special DOJ protocol directing them not to seize the drugs during active wiretap investigations. Court records confirm that multiple fentanyl transactions were monitored and allowed to complete. In one documented instance, agents watched 74,000 pills get delivered to a mobile home park in Albuquerque and did nothing. Not a pill seized. No arrests were made.
The DEA's public posture? It's "One Pill Can Kill" campaign — a public awareness initiative warning that even a few milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal. The agency was running television spots about how deadly fentanyl is while simultaneously watching truckloads of the stuff roll into American neighborhoods. Walter White at least had the self-awareness to know he was the bad guy. These agents apparently convinced themselves they were the heroes — cooking up the justification in the same lab where the bodies were stacking up.
This isn't the first time the federal government has run a "let it walk" operation, and people died. The Obama Justice Department's ATF ran Operation Fast and Furious — allowing straw purchasers to buy roughly 2,000 firearms and transport them to Mexican drug cartels, hoping to build bigger cases. On December 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in Peck Canyon, Arizona. Two AK-pattern rifles found at the scene were traced to Fast and Furious. AG Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress. Nobody went to prison. The playbook hasn't changed — only the contraband has.
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The numbers coming out of New Mexico are staggering. Drug overdose deaths dropped 14.4 percent nationally from January 2025 to January 2026 — while New Mexico saw a 23 percent increase, the largest spike in the country for the second consecutive year. Nonfatal fentanyl overdoses treated in New Mexico emergency rooms climbed to their highest levels since early 2023. The Albuquerque Mayor called it "a terrible, terrible example of law enforcement gone bad" that "likely cost us hundreds of actual lives." He's right. The Bernalillo County Sheriff put it plainly: you cannot allow a drug that the DEA itself says can kill 500,000 people per kilogram to walk down public streets as a tactical concession.
AG Torrez — a Democrat, for the record — was direct about the constitutional landscape. The Supremacy Clause provides meaningful protection to federal agents acting within the scope of their authority, which creates genuine legal barriers to state criminal prosecution. He's going to need a Touhy letter to pry documents out of the federal government and determine whether the conduct reflects a "broader pattern of reckless or unlawful behavior." Translation: this may go well beyond New Mexico. The question of whether Albuquerque was a test case or a template deserves a full accounting.
Now let's widen the lens. This operation ran from 2023 to 2025 — the heart of the Biden administration. The same administration that had a border czar who never visited the southern border. Kamala Harris was handed the border duties in March 2021 and proceeded to manage it from a distance, producing a root causes strategy that generated more reports than results. Meanwhile, CBP recorded more than 10 million illegal border crossings during the Biden-Harris term, not counting an estimated 2 million known gotaways who slipped past without any encounter at all. The border wasn't a crisis to them. It was a feature.
The fentanyl didn't travel by magic. It crossed a border the administration chose not to defend. And the human cost runs deeper than overdose statistics. Acting AG Todd Blanche disclosed that more than 475,000 unaccompanied alien children were trafficked to the U.S. border during the Biden administration, with more than 300,000 still unaccounted for at the end of 2024. DHS Secretary Mullin: "It was true neglect, at best, and criminal, at worst."
The Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed the Biden-Harris administration placed over 11,000 migrant children with unvetted sponsors and ignored more than 7,300 human trafficking reports. ORR whistleblower Tara Rodas: "The U.S. government is the middleman in a multi-billion-dollar child trafficking operation."
This week's House Appropriations hearing on June 25 crystallized the hypocrisy. U.S. Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT-3) cited 3,900 children separated under Trump. DHS Secretary Mullin interrupted: "450,000 kids were lost during the Biden administration — and you didn't say a word about it." DeLauro demanded order. Mullin called her a hypocrite. The exchange went viral. It deserved to. DeLauro has been sitting in Congress since 1991 and stayed silent for four years while the crisis unfolded.
Trump sealed the border within weeks of his inauguration. The monthly flow of unaccompanied children dropped from over 14,000 per month to fewer than 1,000. Illegal crossings collapsed. The cartels didn't negotiate that result. Political will and executive action did. It took one administration change to demonstrate that the prior four years were a choice, not an inevitability.
Torrez is right that this isn't a bureaucratic failure — it's a betrayal. The question is whether Albuquerque was an isolated case or a national template. That answer matters enormously. Accountability doesn't care about the Supremacy Clause protections. Reputations don't have qualified immunity. And history doesn't forget.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPenn, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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