A veteran Drug Enforcement Administration agent broke his silence on camera for the first time this week, telling CBS News that his own agency knowingly allowed massive quantities of fentanyl to reach American streets so investigators could build bigger cases against cartel traffickers — a tactic he says got people killed instead.

Special Agent David Howell, a 19-year DEA veteran based in Albuquerque who remains on the job, said he has been raising the alarm internally for three years with no result. "For three years, I've told my DEA managers that we're allowing dangerous amounts of fentanyl to hit the street," Howell told CBS News in his first television interview.

"We at the DEA have let drugs hit the street, yes. The difference was we were told not to with fentanyl," Howell said, describing a 2023 bust in which agents stopped a car, found a child inside, and recovered 6,000 to 7,000 fentanyl pills and a gun hidden beneath the child's seat — only to be criticized by federal prosecutors for making the seizure. "They were perfectly willing to allow that fentanyl to go to the house with the kid," he said.

A tactic called "walking"

The practice at the center of the allegations is known inside law enforcement as "walking" drugs — letting a shipment move under surveillance instead of seizing it immediately, in hopes of tracing it to higher-level suppliers. Howell and his attorneys say DEA and federal prosecutors in Albuquerque applied that approach to fentanyl between 2023 and 2025, despite internal protocols that are supposed to require seizure of the drug because of its lethality. An Albuquerque Journal investigation, done jointly with the Associated Press, first reported in June that hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills reached New Mexico communities under the tactic; Howell's attorney, Tristan Leavitt of the watchdog group Empower Oversight, has put the figure as high as a million or more pills allowed to "walk" unseized.

New Mexico has recorded the nation's largest percentage increase in overdose deaths over the past two years, according to CDC data cited in the original Journal investigation, and Bernalillo County commissioners have since declared a local emergency over the fentanyl crisis.

Lawsuits, a House probe, and pushback

The fallout has widened well beyond Howell. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has sued the federal government to force release of DEA records on the practice, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has said the state could pursue billions of dollars in damages, according to wire reports. The U.S. House Oversight Committee has opened its own inquiry and supplied CBS News with aerial surveillance images from the 2023 stop. At least two additional current or former DEA agents have since come forward with similar complaints.

The DEA and Department of Justice declined CBS News' request for an on-camera interview for this story. The agency has previously told the AP that "the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance," and a 2024 internal Justice Department review found that the Albuquerque agents and prosecutors had acted appropriately. More recently, the DEA said only that "if improvements are identified, DEA will implement them." The Justice Department said its Inspector General's review of the matter is ongoing and it could not comment further.

Howell says he was removed from testifying in court cases after pressing his objections — a retaliation claim the agency has not addressed on the record. For now, the Inspector General's review, the House probe and Torrez's records lawsuit are all still pending, and Howell's decision to go public on camera is likely to intensify pressure for a public accounting of how many fentanyl shipments were deliberately let go — and who ultimately received them.