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New Mexico’s governor is demanding a criminal probe of the DEA, accusing agents of standing back while a flood of fentanyl pills hit the streets over two years.
Getting into it: Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham wants state Attorney General Raúl Torrez to dig into whether the DEA violated New Mexico law, a rare move against a federal agency. Her request came after an Associated Press investigation reported that from 2023 to 2025, DEA agents let big fentanyl loads pass through New Mexico untouched, holding off on busts so they could go after the people higher up the chain.
The Governor said, “There are no words to describe how reckless and dangerous these decisions were. 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.” She vowed to “explore every possible avenue of action against the federal government,” pointing out that New Mexico’s overdose deaths jumped 21% last year even as the national number dropped 14%.
The DEA pushed back, with a spokesperson calling claims that it knowingly let fentanyl reach communities “false.” The agency has also said seizing every shipment simply isn’t realistic, calling its decisions “lawful, reasonable under the circumstances.”
This all comes after a DEA whistleblower who flagged the unseized fentanyl met with congressional staffers, with Republican Senator Bernie Moreno calling the revelations “a scandal of the highest order.” On top of that, the AP’s reporting leaned on interviews with current and former agents plus government records, among them an internal account of one 2023 drop at an Albuquerque mobile home park where agents watched 74,000 pills get delivered and let them go.
