Grisham issued the request on Wednesday after the Associated Press revealed the DEA’s tactics through its investigation. New Mexico’s governor claimed that the decision to purposely allow hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills from entering the state to be used by New Mexico residents contributed to harming many of the state’s residents. The DEA allowed the shipments to continue, refusing to seize them despite knowing about them while pursuing a larger criminal bust against drug traffickers.
“Agents and experts, however, said the tactic amounted to a gamble with public safety that potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public,” the Associated Press reported.
The DEA used these tactics during drug-trafficking investigations between 2023 and 2025, as the country was in the midst of a serious drug crisis, and fentanyl was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people throughout the country.
Grisham suggested the plan was negligent, dangerous, and potentially in violation of state law. She asked Raul Torrez, New Mexico’s attorney general, to investigate and evaluate whether the DEA’s actions were criminal.
“There are no words to describe how reckless and dangerous these decisions were,” 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.”
A DEA spokeswoman, Amanda Wozniak, pushed back against Grisham’s claims and told the Associated Press that Grisham has misrepresented the details of the agency’s actions and investigation.
“Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts,” Wozniak said in an email.
As part of its investigation, the Associated Press spoke to Alex Uballez, who was a U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022 to 2025. He said he believed that pursuing charges against larger drug trafficking organizations was a better drug-trafficking defense strategy than targeting small drug transactions regularly. He also said this was because his office was confined by limited resources.
David Howell is a DEA whistleblower who the Associated Press said filed a complaint to bring awareness to the DEA’s tactics and unseized fentanyl in New Mexico. He spoke to congressional staffers in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) said he would investigate the collateral damage from the DEA operation and determine how many lives were lost as a result. He blamed the Biden administration for much of the problem and called the process used by the DEA, as told to him by Howell, a “scandal of the highest order.”
“How many thousands of American lives were lost because the Biden DEA refused to act as deadly fentanyl poured over Biden’s open border?” Moreno said in a post on X. “I intend to find out.”
Meanwhile, Grisham said in her statement that she planned to hold the government accountable. She said the lives of people in her state were not collateral damage for the federal government to be used in drug investigations.
“New Mexican lives are not the federal government’s cost of doing business,” said Grisham. “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.”
