A federal drug agent says his own agency "100% got people killed" by watching massive fentanyl shipments roll into New Mexico communities and choosing not to stop them. The strategy, he says, was to let the poison flow so prosecutors could build bigger cases.
An Associated Press investigation found that DEA agents under the Biden administration monitored but deliberately did not seize hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills between 2023 and 2025. The pills reached streets across New Mexico as part of a multi-state investigation. A former DEA supervisor put the total far higher, saying "millions" of pills were allowed to go unseized during the operation.
The scale of what agents permitted to pass is staggering. In one confirmed instance in June 2023, DEA agents tracked a shipment of 74,000 fentanyl pills and watched it arrive without intervening. That single delivery alone carried enough synthetic opioid to kill tens of thousands of people at standard lethal doses. And it was far from the only one.
DEA Special Agent David Howell, the whistleblower at the center of the investigation, has reported that at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills were permitted to hit the streets during the operation. His account paints a picture of an agency that prioritized case-building metrics over the lives of the people it was supposed to protect.
Howell did not hold back about the consequences. As the Washington Times reported, the agent offered a blunt assessment of what the strategy produced:
"We poisoned our community to make cases. 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."
That phrase, "willful blindness," cuts to the core of the legal and moral problem. Agents knew the drugs were deadly. They knew where the shipments were headed. They had the authority and the opportunity to seize them. They chose not to.
The former DEA supervisor who corroborated Howell's account confirmed the practice was real and widespread. The supervisor said "millions" of pills went unseized, a figure that dwarfs even Howell's already alarming estimate of 1.8 million.
The revelations go beyond individual agents making bad calls in the field. The Biden Justice Department itself changed the rules governing how agents handle fentanyl seizures, loosening safeguards that had been in place since 2017.
The original 2017 Fentanyl Protocols stated plainly that "protecting public safety is paramount." In 2024, the Biden DOJ rewrote those protocols to give agents more discretion on whether to seize fentanyl during investigations. The rewrite effectively gave legal cover to the exact practice Howell described: watching drugs flow and doing nothing.
That policy shift raises hard questions about who authorized the change and why. Loosening seizure rules during the worst drug poisoning crisis in American history is a choice that demands explanation. The fentanyl epidemic killed more than 70,000 Americans in recent years, and New Mexico has consistently ranked among the states with the highest overdose death rates.
This is not the first time the Biden-era Justice Department has faced scrutiny for questionable enforcement priorities. GOP senators have separately accused Biden's DOJ of burying evidence in other high-profile matters, feeding a broader pattern of institutional distrust.
The current U.S. Attorney's Office has distanced itself from the conduct. Tessa DuBerry, a spokesperson for the office, offered a carefully worded statement:
"The conduct Mr. Howell brought to light happened during the prior administration."
The statement confirms the timeline. The practice of allowing fentanyl shipments to pass uninterrupted occurred on Biden's watch, under Biden-appointed leadership at the DOJ and DEA. DuBerry's statement does not dispute the substance of Howell's claims. It simply assigns them to a prior era.
Investigators will need to determine exactly how many shipments were monitored and allowed through, how many pills ultimately reached end users, and whether any overdose deaths can be directly linked to the unseized drugs. Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether any internal accountability review is underway at the DEA.
The DEA's decision to let fentanyl flow stands in sharp contrast to the aggressive seizure operations that federal agents have conducted in other contexts. Just recently, federal agents seized 65 pounds of fentanyl and arrested 18 people in a single Los Angeles drug market takedown. Operations like that one treat every gram as a public safety emergency. The New Mexico approach treated the same substance as an investigative tool.
The gap between those two philosophies is not subtle. One treats fentanyl as a weapon that must be taken off the street immediately. The other treats it as bait, useful for building a prosecution file while real people ingest real poison.
Howell's use of the word "poisoned" is legally and factually precise. Fentanyl is not a recreational drug that carries risk. It is a synthetic opioid so potent that two milligrams, roughly the weight of a few grains of salt, can be lethal. A shipment of 74,000 pills is not an evidence opportunity. It is a mass-casualty event waiting to happen.
The broader question of how federal agencies handled enforcement priorities under the Biden administration extends beyond the DEA. The Trump administration has already moved to overhaul Biden-era rules at other federal law enforcement agencies, including the ATF, signaling a clear break from the prior approach.
Several critical questions remain unanswered. Authorities have not publicly confirmed how high the decision to allow unseized shipments went within the DEA chain of command. Investigators have not said whether the 2024 protocol rewrite was initiated by DOJ political appointees or career staff. No public results have been released about whether the larger cases the DEA was supposedly building ever produced convictions that justified the cost.
That last point matters most. The entire justification for letting fentanyl reach the streets was that it would lead to bigger, more consequential prosecutions. If those prosecutions never materialized, or produced only modest results, then the trade-off was not just reckless. It was pointless.
Federal drug enforcement operations targeting cartel supply chains have produced major results when executed with urgency. A sweeping federal bust of the Mexican Mafia across Southern California resulted in 43 indictments without requiring agents to let deadly drugs reach consumers first.
Howell's willingness to go on the record separates this from the usual anonymous-source Washington leak. He attached his name and his career to the claim that his agency let people die. That kind of disclosure carries weight, both as evidence and as a signal that at least some agents inside the DEA found the practice intolerable.
The current administration now faces a choice about how to respond. Investigators will need to determine whether the protocol changes and the unseized shipments violated any existing federal law or internal policy. They will also need to assess whether supervisors who authorized the practice bear individual responsibility.
No agency entrusted with protecting Americans from the deadliest drug crisis in the nation's history should have to explain why it chose to watch the killing happen. If the facts hold, this was not a judgment call gone wrong. It was a policy choice, made at the highest levels, that traded lives for case files.
