New Mexico leaders blast DEA over fentanyl pill strategy
New Mexico leaders said DEA tactics let hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills reach the streets, then asked whether that fed overdoses in Albuquerque and beyond.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen blasted federal drug agents for letting hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills reach New Mexico streets since 2023, with shipments sometimes watched but not seized as prosecutors tried to build bigger trafficking cases. Lujan Grisham called the DEA’s actions “reckless and dangerous.”
The criticism landed in a state where fentanyl has already driven one of the nation’s worst overdose crises. New Mexico overdose deaths rose 21% last year even as overdose deaths fell 14% nationwide, and Albuquerque’s War Zone neighborhood was singled out as one of the hardest-hit areas. Federal guidance says fentanyl should be seized whenever practicable, raising the stakes for how agents handled the shipments now under scrutiny.
Lujan Grisham asked Attorney General Raúl Torrez to investigate whether federal agents violated state law. She also said she would explore every possible avenue of action and hold the federal government accountable, while pointing to her earlier decision to deploy New Mexico National Guard personnel to Albuquerque and later to northern New Mexico to support local governments facing fentanyl-related public safety threats.
The debate is especially sensitive in the Albuquerque area, where state leaders have repeatedly cast the fentanyl crisis as a regional threat that stretches beyond city limits. That is the backdrop for the question now hanging over the DEA strategy: whether letting shipments move in hopes of landing larger cases helped investigators or simply allowed more pills onto New Mexico streets.
A separate DEA case showed the scale of the enforcement fight. On May 7, 2025, federal agents said they seized a record 2.7 million fentanyl pills in Albuquerque in a single bust, 3 million pills total across five states, along with 16 arrests, 49 firearms and nearly $5 million in assets. Former U.S. Attorney Alex Uballez said the decision to let some shipments go unseized reflected a case-building strategy shaped by limited resources.
Even so, it remains unclear whether any fatal overdose in New Mexico can be directly tied to the DEA tactic. What is clear is that the dispute has moved from a federal enforcement room into the state’s public-safety politics, with Torrez now being pressed to decide whether the line agents crossed was not just tactical, but unlawful.
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