New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has called for a criminal investigation into the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after an Associated Press investigation found that federal agents allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach the streets over a two-year period.
Concerns Over Public Safety
The governor’s request follows an AP investigation that found DEA agents repeatedly allowed major fentanyl shipments to continue moving through New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 rather than seizing them immediately, as agents sought to build cases against higher-ranking traffickers. Current and former DEA agents told AP that this strategy amounted to a gamble with public safety in a state ravaged by the fentanyl epidemic and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public from a drug the White House last year designated as a “weapon of mass destruction.”
“There are no words to describe how reckless and dangerous these decisions were,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “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.”
Response from the DEA
The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the governor’s statement. The agency has contended it would not be plausible to seize every drug shipment and previously told AP in a statement “the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance.”
A DEA spokesperson, Amanda Wozniak, wrote in an email, “Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.”
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from May 2022 until February 2025, told AP that drugs went unseized at times due to his office’s limited resources and his belief that prosecuting larger organizations has a bigger impact than intercepting every suspected drug transaction.
Call for Accountability
It is not clear whether any fatal overdoses in the state can be directly attributed to the DEA strategy. While overdose deaths nationwide fell 14% last year, government data show New Mexico tallied a 21% spike. “New Mexican lives are not the federal government’s cost of doing business,” the governor wrote in her statement. “I plan to hold the federal government accountable for this disaster and will explore every possible avenue of action against the federal government to right these wrongs.”
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
