New Mexico Attorney General Torrez says feds wrongly denied his request for fentanyl records

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Monday announced that the United States Department of Justice had denied his office’s requests for records relating to allegations that federal drug agents allowed large quantities of fentanyl to enter New Mexico communities without seizing them.

The New Mexico Department of Justice in early July demanded a wide array of records regarding the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s fentanyl investigations between 2022 and 2025. That’s the time period in which a whistleblower alleged in recent media reports that the DEA was regularly allowing shipments of fentanyl to go unseized as agents pursued prosecutions of high-level drug dealers. 

The NMDOJ’s formal demand for materials, known as a Touhy request, sought the DEA’s policies, investigative reports, communications between agents and prosecutors, court filings, whistleblower complaints and other records that could shed light on the operations. The five-page letter urged the DEA to provide the records by July 31 in recognition of the “urgency and gravity of this matter.”

However, on July 29, according to a letter the NMDOJ released Monday, the USDOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico denied Torrez’s request. The letter says the NMDOJ failed to identify a federal or state lawsuit related to the records, and inadequately explained the relevance of particular records to its investigation. 

The denial letter goes on to say that the USDOJ is willing to consider future requests and also that it takes the New Mexico fentanyl problem seriously.

Torrez, in a response letter Monday to the federal agencies, said no federal regulation exists that requires a lawsuit before federal agencies can fulfill requests like the one his office made for DEA records. 

Tessa Duberry, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico, did not immediately respond to Source NM’s emailed request for comment Monday about Torrez’s argument that no regulations prohibit the federal agencies from producing the records. 

New Mexico AG opens investigation into allegations that DEA let fentanyl flow into the state

Torrez’s response letter also elaborates on why each of the records he seeks are relevant to his investigation and issued a new deadline of Aug. 17 by which the DEA must provide them. If the NMDOJ does not hear back by then, Torrez’s office will consider suing the agencies over the records, he wrote. 

“The federal government cannot hide behind procedural excuses when New Mexicans deserve answers,” Torrez said in a statement. “Instead of engaging with the merits of our request, the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued a denial that misstates its own regulations and applies legal standards that simply do not exist.”