Lujan Grisham seeks criminal probe of DEA fentanyl handling
Lujan Grisham wants a criminal probe after claims the DEA let hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills reach New Mexico, even as Bernalillo County cases tied to fentanyl climbed to 71.1%.
Michelle Lujan Grisham has asked for a criminal investigation into the Drug Enforcement Administration after allegations that federal agents allowed staggering amounts of illicit fentanyl to reach Albuquerque and other New Mexico streets.
The request follows an Associated Press investigation published June 22 that said the DEA permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to enter New Mexico from 2023 through 2025. The report, based on interviews with three current and former DEA agents and government records, said agents repeatedly monitored shipments but did not seize them while prosecutors pursued larger cases against traffickers.
A DEA special agent, David Howell, told AP: “We poisoned our community to make cases.” The AP report said the practice was tied to broader case-building efforts, but some agents and experts believed it could run afoul of Justice Department guidance that says fentanyl should be seized whenever practicable.
The stakes are especially acute in Bernalillo County, where fentanyl has become a dominant factor in criminal cases and overdose work. The Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office said fentanyl was involved in 71.1% of criminal cases in 2023, up from 52.5% in 2022. That number underscores how deeply the drug has penetrated day-to-day enforcement in Albuquerque, including the city’s War Zone neighborhood, long treated as one of the hardest-hit corners of the fentanyl crisis.
The AP report also said New Mexico’s overdose deaths rose 21% last year even as overdose deaths nationwide fell 14%. It noted that the White House designated fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction last year, a sign of how the drug has been viewed at the highest levels of government as a threat to public safety.
Local law enforcement has kept seizing record quantities, but the scale of the trade keeps climbing. In October 2024, Albuquerque police, the DEA and the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office arrested four suspects and seized 715,000 fentanyl pills, seven kilograms of cocaine and 12 guns. In May 2025, the DEA said it carried out its largest fentanyl bust ever in Albuquerque.
Those numbers point to the same central question now facing Bernalillo County residents: whether federal decisions made the fentanyl crisis worse on local streets, or whether investigators were trying to build larger trafficking cases in a market already flooding Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Hobbs and the rest of New Mexico.
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