Published on Nov 07, 2025
The DEA is seizing far fewer fentanyl pills than it did a year ago, signaling the impact of the agency’s deployment of resources to help with National Guard surges in cities and immigration enforcement, a Capitol Forum analysis of department data indicates.
DEA agents are seizing fewer fentanyl-laced pills at a time when President Donald Trump is pressuring China to crack down on fentanyl exports to Mexico that end up on U.S. streets.
The lower numbers reflect the new priorities of Drug Enforcement Administration head Terrance “Terry” Cole, who was sworn in July 23. Cole is shaking up the department as it plays an important role in the Trump administration’s effort to bring down crime and enforce immigration laws.
Some question whether he’s jeopardizing the DEA’s primary mission of enforcing the nation’s drug laws, sources close to the situation said.
“The surges are a bad use of DEA resources,” said retired DEA agent Mike Chavarria who ran the Guadalajara, Mexico office in 2001 as part of his 33-year career with the department. “It’s not smart and effective. It’s not a long-term strategy to fight the drug wars.”
Those familiar with Cole’s actions as Virginia’s public safety secretary, during which fentanyl-related deaths fell, criticized his management style, saying he weakened law enforcement efforts by not giving more support to other senior officials. In Virginia, Cole was tasked with cracking down fentanyl—which is similar to the role he has now at DEA.
Trump has made a priority of curbing the supply of fentanyl in his second administration, stressing seizures at the country’s major land borders and pressuring China, Canada and Mexico with tariff increases to halt the flow of the opioid and other illegal drugs to the U.S. Although confiscations of fentanyl powder are up, according to DEA figures, the decrease in pill seizures is noteworthy. Traffickers are increasingly turning fentanyl into pills at pressing mills, many of which are in the U.S., so that they look like legitimate prescription drugs.
A spokesperson for DOJ, which DEA is part of, defended the administration’s record. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, this Department of Justice has done more to stop the flow of deadly drugs and violent criminals into our communities in 10 months than the Biden administration did in four years,” the spokesperson said. “Our mission is to prosecute criminals, get illegal drugs off our streets and protect all Americans from violent crime, which can be done while simultaneously assisting our partners with immigration enforcement efforts.”
The White House didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Cole didn’t respond to requests for an interview or comment.
At an October 23 roundtable on drug enforcement efforts, Bondi touted the administration’s approach. “The results of this last month have been historic,” she said, highlighting arrests of gang members and drug dealers and seizures of cocaine and 2.1 million fentanyl pills.
But government figures show that fentanyl pill seizures aren’t at historically high levels.
On average, the DEA confiscated 106,897 fentanyl-laced pills per day from August 8 through November 2—the last day DEA stats are available. That’s down 21% compared with the 135,616 daily number in 2025 before the surges, which started August 11. The average seized last year was a much higher 164,384 per day, according to publicly available DEA figures.
The number of confiscated pills has been decreasing since last year. But the recent drops have been the steepest: In the past 87 days, the DEA seized 35% fewer pills daily than in the year-earlier period.
Meanwhile, the average amount of fentanyl powder seized, which represents more of what’s caught near the Mexican border, has risen. That may be due to improved border security, sources close to the DEA said. After August 8, it has been 28 pounds per day, which is higher than the 25.7 pounds in 2025 before the surges of National Guard troops and agents from DEA and other federal agencies to several cities. Both those numbers are better than the 21.9 daily average in 2024 before Trump became president, according to DEA statistics.
DEA agents play a critical role in the surges because they have the authority to detain suspects if they see a crime, which the National Guard can’t do, sources said. Cole was the liaison between Trump and Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department in the days of the first surge, which was in the nation’s capital.
The DEA on October 31 touted its work on a surge in Memphis, saying on Facebook it partnered with local police to arrest 41 repeat violent felony offenders and was committed to making the city safe.
Cole has told DEA agents of all ranks to be ready for deployment anywhere for 30-day assignments to help with surges, a source said.
DEA agents typically perform sophisticated investigations into criminal drug organizations, but the deployments could disrupt these often long-term probes.
Chavarria said he wasn’t surprised by the falling fentanyl pill seizure numbers. He said he likes Cole, but he believes the DEA chief probably had little say on whether to use agents on surges since those orders would be coming from higher up.
“The agency is not doing its single mission,” said a former DEA special agent in charge who requested anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. “If you are pulling resources, more people will die of fentanyl overdoses.”
DEA agents are also playing a role in criminal immigration raids, like the one executed on October 21 on Canal Street in New York City.
When agents are pulled away from their regular cases, there are downstream effects, a law enforcement source said.
Attorney Steven Kessler, an expert in forfeiture law who also represents clients in white collar and complex civil litigation, said the strains are showing.
“[The prosecutor says], ‘Let me check with the agent, and I’ll get back to you.’ That getting back to me would, until last year, take a matter of hours or days. I now have cases where — one case, actually, I have a conference to go on tomorrow, it’s been a month. And the response from [opposing counsel], who I know and have known for many years, is, ‘Steve, I’m really sorry. It’s taking me a while to get a hold of him,’ and it’s not like [the agent is] on vacation.”
Cole is making other changes, like bringing back controversial Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Teams (FAST), which operate overseas with local law enforcement and have been described as commando-style squads, sources said. The DEA disbanded FAST in 2017 after a joint DOJ-State Department investigation found the DEA had given a misleading account about a 2012 operation that resulted in the deaths of people in Honduras.
“Terry was always a foreign agent so wants to re-stablish FAST,” a source said. Cole served with the agency in Afghanistan, Colombia and the Middle East, according to the DEA’s website.
The agency isn’t bringing back FAST in its original form and is exploring creating operational teams that would support federal defense agencies’ efforts, a source close to the DOJ said.
The DEA has said that since early August it has made 617 arrests after targeting the Sinaloa Cartel, which is said to be responsible for much of the fentanyl that reaches the U.S.
But the Boston Globe in an October 29 article said it found, by looking at court records, that the DEA falsely claimed that raids it conducted in New England resulted in the arrests of 171 high-level Sinaloa members. Instead, the agency had nabbed low-level dealers, shoplifters and people living in a homeless encampment, according to the paper.
Personnel moves. Cole’s DEA personnel moves have also brought criticism, particularly those made among the roughly 70 special agents in charge, who are among the agency’s highest-ranking officials.
Cole promoted Christopher Goumenis, whom he worked with previously, to be the SAC for Virginia, D.C. and Maryland, replacing Ibrar Mian.
“Ibrar was doing a good job,” said the former special agent in charge, who was critical of the move. “You’re supposed to respect the SACs.”
Miami SAC Deanne Reuter and Phoenix SAC Cheri Oz are also among the highly respected agents being moved, sources said.
Reuter and Oz didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mian declined to comment.
DOJ didn’t say if any are leaving because they’ve reached the 57-year-old DEA retirement age for those with 20 years of service and declined to comment on personnel matters.
High turnover past. Cole’s past includes high turnover in his department, said several sources familiar with his time as Virginia’s public safety secretary from May 2023 to July 2025.
The heads of the three most important agencies he monitored for Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin all resigned during Cole’s years in office, and none were ready to retire before he arrived, two sources familiar with the matter said. Two of the three were Republican appointees.
“It is very difficult dealing with Terry,” one of the sources said. “He was always trying to put them [the agency heads] in their places.”
While working for Youngkin, Cole clashed with Virginia Department of Corrections Director Harold Clarke, who resigned in September 2023, the sources said.
Cole also was tough with Virginia State Police Superintendent Gary Settle, who retired February 1 after nearly 40 years in law enforcement, the two sources said.
Dana Schrad, executive director at the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, said she knows Settle well and he wasn’t ready to retire.
She said Cole locked her out of discussions about the police.
Schrad wasn’t the only one to criticize Settle’s treatment: “Settle was death of a thousand cuts,” said an anonymous source who worked in one of the agencies under Cole.
In one episode, Cole insisted on choosing the police for the governor’s security detail when he was in Richmond instead of allowing Settle to decide, as would normally be done, according to the agency source.
Cole also blamed Settle for not recruiting and retaining more officers, despite the challenge of less-than-generous pay, the agency source said.
Youngkin in 2022 appointed Shawn Talmadge as the state’s coordinator for emergency management. He resigned in December 2024 after run-ins with Cole, said the two sources familiar with his tenure in Virginia.
Settle, Clarke and Talmadge declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Like now, Cole’s focus in Virginia was to tackle the fentanyl crisis. And during his tenure, the opioid’s grip on the state loosened.
Virginia recently published stats showing fentanyl-related deaths are down 58.8% from January 2022 through April 2025 using residence-based and death certificate data.
But his methods in the state have been criticized.
Cole led a 2024 mandate from Youngkin to reduce fentanyl use and related gang activity in 45 days called Operation Fentanyl awareness, Reduction Enforcement and Eradication (FREE).
Virginia has 323 localities, many with their own police departments. Some didn’t want to help Cole and the state police put together weekly stats on the amount of fentanyl seized and arrests, the agency source said.
“If you demand info from localities, it causes more and more friction,” said a state government source familiar with the matter. “Local police usually need cajoling.”
Schrad said city and county sheriffs don’t need to listen to a governor unless it’s an executive order and confirmed that Cole would have struggled to collect real-time data from all sheriffs, some of whom were managing cash-strapped departments.
So, Cole decided to partner with 12 other states for fentanyl data. That way he could report he was cracking down on fentanyl and have impressive stats that backed up his claims, the government source said.
“It seems odd they used multiple states,” the government source said. “But if you lack the data in state, you go out of state.”
Virginia never said publicly with which states it partnered.
Cole and his team input data that included the amount of seized fentanyl powder and pills, said the agency source.
“All they did was collect data,” the agency source said. “They made no operational changes. It was an awareness campaign.”
Yet the Virginia governor praised Operation FREE for breaking the state’s cycle of drug trafficking and gang activity.
“Governor Youngkin believes there is no one in his administration who did more to protect Virginians from the scourge of illegal drugs than Terry Cole,” Youngkin’s spokesman Peter Finocchio said. “His leadership as secretary of public safety and his incredible work on Operation FREE and the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force have been essential and lifesaving. We are proud of his leadership to combat the drug epidemic and ensure safe neighborhoods, both in his former role in Richmond and in his new one in Washington.”
