New Mexico’s Governor Wants Washington to Pay Up for a Fentanyl Crisis That Got Worse on Her Own Watch.

On Monday, June 29, 2026, at a news conference held inside the state medical examiner’s office in Albuquerque, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM)accused the federal Drug Enforcement Administration of fueling her state’s fentanyl crisis — and demanded that Washington pay for it. She called the conduct “the most derelict, despicable act in my long career” and said the state could seek hundreds of millions, and possibly “one or two or 3 billion” dollars, in civil damages.

The trigger was an Associated Press investigation, published a week earlier, reporting that DEA agents repeatedly monitored — but did not seize — fentanyl shipments moving through New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 while prosecutors built a bigger case. A DEA whistleblower says agents let at least 1.8 million pills “walk.” That is a real and serious allegation, now under criminal review by the state attorney general.

But there is a second fact set the governor did not lead with. While the nation’s overdose deaths fell roughly 14 percent in 2025, New Mexico’s rose — one of only a handful of states moving the wrong way. The fentanyl surge she now blames on the feds unfolded across her own two terms in office. This page lays out exactly what the DEA is accused of, what the governor is demanding, and the governance record that the demand sits on top of.

• $1.5 billion+ — what Lujan Grisham says New Mexico has poured into law enforcement, behavioral health, addiction treatment and public safety — and now wants Washington to repay · Source: Fox News; AP
• Up to $3 billion — the high end of the civil-damages range she floated: “hundreds of millions… if not more… one or two or 3 billion” · Source: KUNM (NPR)
• 1.8 million pills — the amount DEA whistleblower David Howell says agents allowed to “walk” into New Mexico while building a bigger case, 2023–2025 · Source: PBS NewsHour / AP
• +21% — New Mexico’s rise in overdose deaths in 2025 — while the national total fell about 14% to roughly 69,973 · Source: CDC / NCHS; AP
• Governor since 2019 — Lujan Grisham has run New Mexico for the entire span of the fentanyl surge she now attributes to a federal agency · Source: state record
• Criminal probe opened — NM Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D) is investigating the DEA conduct; the DEA has not publicly responded in detail. Nothing is adjudicated · Source: ABC News / AP

Flanked by state and local law enforcers, Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM)did not hedge. The DEA, she said, “stood silently by and watched thousands of fentanyl pills get distributed with no arrests.” She declared herself “so angry” and called the episode “an outrage.” And she put a price on it: “Someone must pay for the damage to this state, the public safety risks that will be shared by everyone here for a decade.”

The specific asks: reimbursement of the more than $1.5 billion New Mexico says it has spent responding to the epidemic; restoration of roughly $25 millionin federal behavioral-health and public-safety funding she says was cut; and federal legislation requiring agencies to notify state and local officials before running operations like the one the AP described. She vowed to take the fight “right to the White House and Congress.” On the dollar figure, she was candid that it was a guess: “I bet we could show damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars here, if not more,” she said, adding it “could get as high as one or two or 3 billion.”

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The underlying claim is genuinely damning, and it did not come from the governor — it came from inside the DEA. According to an Associated Press investigation built on government records and three current and former agents, the DEA in New Mexico repeatedly tracked fentanyl shipments without seizing them between 2023 and 2025, on the theory that letting product move would lead investigators up the chain to bigger traffickers. Whistleblower David Howell, in a complaint he says he filed in 2023, put it bluntly: “We did nothing but sit back and watch.”

In one episode the AP documented, agents surveilled a June 2023 transaction at an Albuquerque mobile-home park in which traffickers delivered 74,000 pills. Howell’s disclosures allege agents permitted the delivery of at least 1.8 millionfentanyl pills over the course of the operation. The case ultimately culminated in what officials called the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history — more than 3 million pills seized — announced in May 2025 by then–Attorney General Pam Bondi. Critics, including the whistleblower, argue the “bigger case” came at the cost of pills that reached the street and the people who died from them. The DEA has not publicly responded in detail; none of the allegations has been tested in court, and we treat them as allegations.

Here is the context the news-conference framing left out. The fentanyl surge Lujan Grisham now blames on a federal agency did not happen during a single administration she can cleanly disown — it happened across her own time in office. She has been governor since 2019. And on the single most important metric, New Mexico went the wrong direction at the exact moment the rest of the country improved: as U.S. overdose deaths fell about 14 percentin 2025 to roughly 69,973, New Mexico’s rose about 21 percent, one of only a handful of states to post an increase.

The deeper numbers are no kinder. New Mexico has repeatedly ranked among the worst states in the nation for drug problems and overdose deaths per capita; Rio Arriba County’s overdose death rate is among the highest of any county in the United States. State-level reporting put New Mexicans with an opioid-use disorder at roughly 83,000 in 2024, nearly double the 2020 figure, even as the violent-crime rate ran well above the national average. None of that excuses the DEA conduct the AP described. But a governor demanding that Washington reimburse her state for a drug crisis is also asking voters to forget that the crisis deepened on her own administration’s watch.

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The maneuver is worth naming plainly: a state official, facing a worsening problem on her own watch, locates a federal villain and attaches a billion-dollar invoice. The legal path is far from clear — sovereign immunity makes suing a federal agency for damages an uphill climb, and the governor herself conceded the dollar figure was a guess that ranged across an order of magnitude. The notification legislation she wants is a reasonable ask. The open-ended demand for “one or two or 3 billion” dollars reads more like a press posture than a filed claim.

To their credit, not everyone on the dais played it as a partisan card. House Speaker Javier Martínez (D–Albuquerque) waved off the instinct to pin the failure on one president: “I don’t care who it was — Biden, Trump, whoever — it is a systemic failure.” That is the more honest framing, and it cuts both ways: if the federal piece was a systemic failure spanning administrations, so was the state piece. New Mexico’s overdose numbers did not climb because of one DEA operation. They climbed over years, under a behavioral-health system the state itself has spent the better part of a decade trying to rebuild.

“I don't care who it was — Biden, Trump, whoever — it is a systemic failure.”

N.M. House Speaker Javier Martínez (D-Albuquerque), at the June 29 news conference

Two things are true at once. The DEA allegation is serious, sourced to a whistleblower and government records, and deserves the criminal review the state attorney general has opened — if agents really let 1.8 million fentanyl pills walk into New Mexico communities, that is a scandal regardless of who is governor. And: the governor turning that scandal into a billion-dollar reparations demand is also doing something politically convenient. She is the official who has run New Mexico for the entire fentanyl surge, in a state whose overdose deaths rose while the nation’s fell, and the federal-villain narrative conveniently relocates the accountability question to Washington. Readers can hold both: the feds may owe answers, and the governor owes a record. We will update this page as the attorney general’s investigation and any actual legal claim develop.

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Last updated June 30, 2026