All across America, public safety is improving. Violent crime is falling, homicides are down, and communities that spent years grappling with lawlessness are beginning to see progress. This news is a welcome relief for every American.
But New Mexico cannot afford to mistake national success for local reality.
President Trump’s renewed focus on securing the border, dismantling drug cartels, and restoring law and order is helping drive this national reduction in crime. Yet, New Mexico continues to face some of the highest crime rates in the nation – a reminder that when local leaders make poor decisions, our communities pay the price.
The numbers are sobering. New Mexico has the second-highest violent crime rate in America and the highest property crime rate in the country. Nearly every category of crime remains well above the national average, and while crime has declined modestly in New Mexico, our progress has lagged the rest of the country. Nationally, crime continues to move in the right direction under President Trump. While crime fell nationwide by 8.4% from 2023 to 2024, New Mexico’s decline was just 4.3%, underscoring that our state continues to lag behind the national trend.
Recent revelations about federal drug enforcement may help explain why.
Investigative reporting revealed that during the Biden administration, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents allowed massive quantities of fentanyl to flow through New Mexico as part of an effort to build larger criminal cases against cartel workers. Agents monitored, but did not seize, shipments that amounted to 1.8 million fentanyl pills that made their way onto New Mexico streets between 2023 and 2025.
In one operation alone, a shipment of 74,000 counterfeit fentanyl pills entered Albuquerque without being stopped, despite Justice Department guidance encouraging the seizure of fentanyl whenever practicable because of its extraordinary lethality. Former federal officials have defended this strategy as necessary to dismantle larger trafficking organizations. But the consequences for New Mexico families cannot simply be brushed aside.
These revelations come at a time when New Mexico is already confronting an extraordinary public safety crisis – one that cannot be explained away by a single investigation or one enforcement strategy. It reflects years of policy decisions that have failed to protect New Mexico families from crime, drug trafficking, and the devastating consequences of fentanyl.
For a state already on the front lines of the fentanyl crisis, knowingly allowing millions of potentially deadly pills to circulate was a federal gamble with the lives of New Mexicans.
Every government decision carries consequences. When dangerous drugs are knowingly allowed onto our streets, the people who bear the risk are not politicians or bureaucrats in Washington. They are parents, children, first responders, and neighborhoods already struggling under the weight of addiction and violent crime.
New Mexicans want transparency and protection, regardless of which administration or agency made the mistake. But transparency alone is not enough. We also need a strategy that prevents these tragedies from happening again.
That is why President Trump’s emphasis on securing the southern border, aggressively targeting drug cartels, and treating criminal organizations as serious national security threats matters so much to New Mexico. Our state sits on the front lines of the fentanyl crisis. Every gap in border security and every failure to stop traffickers upstream eventually reaches our communities.
The choice facing New Mexico is not between compassion and enforcement. We need both. We should support law enforcement while demanding sound judgment from our federal agencies. We should hold criminals accountable while protecting innocent families from becoming collateral damage in flawed enforcement strategies.
Our state has endured too much loss to settle for being an outlier. New Mexicans deserve to live in communities where children can play safely, businesses can thrive, and families do not have to wonder whether another deadly shipment of fentanyl is making its way into their neighborhoods.
America’s crime numbers show that progress is possible. But New Mexico will not fully share in that success unless every level of government is committed to putting public safety first.
Vincent Torres serves as executive director for the America First Policy Institute’s New Mexico state chapter.
