# DEA The **Drug Enforcement Administration** is the [[Department of Justice]] component, created by Nixon in 1973, that enforces federal controlled-substances law — running the scheduling system that classifies drugs, policing the legal pharmaceutical supply chain, and operating some ninety foreign offices against trafficking organizations. Its administrator since **July 25, 2025** is **Terrance Cole**, a former DEA agent and Virginia secretary of public safety, confirmed after Trump's first choice withdrew. ## The second term The administration has made drugs a national-security and border question and the DEA the domestic face of it. The February 2025 designation of the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels and six other groups as [[Foreign Terrorist Organization]]s moved the fight onto the military's ledger — the 2025–26 strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific were carried out by the Pentagon, not the DEA — while the agency's own "Fentanyl Free America" program (October 2025) supplied the enforcement numbers: for 2025, 47 million fentanyl pills and 9,938 pounds of powder seized, nearly 1,300 arrests tied to the two cartels, Rafael Caro Quintero extradited in February, "El Mayo" Zambada's guilty plea in August. The DEA also reported that the share of seized pills carrying a lethal dose had fallen from 76% (FY2023) to 29% (FY2025), and that fentanyl deaths, near 80,000 in 2023, were above 50,000 in 2024 — a decline the administration claims and the CDC's data, which show the fall beginning in 2023, complicate. See [[Fentanyl Crisis]] and the [[Opioid Crisis Timeline]]. ## Why it matters here The DEA is where the immigration agenda and the drug war are joined: the [[Stephen Miller]] framing of the border as an "invasion" needs fentanyl as its casus belli, the terrorist designations turn traffickers into a foreign enemy the [[Alien Enemies Act]] can be invoked against, and the agency's statistics become the administration's proof that the enemy is losing. The scheduling power is the other lever — marijuana rescheduling stalled, kratom and nitazenes scheduled — and it belongs to the Attorney General, which after 2025 means the White House. See [[Department of Justice]] and the [[DOJ Component Tree]]. ## See Also - [[Department of Justice]] · [[DOJ Component Tree]] · [[FBI]] · [[Federal Agencies]] - [[Fentanyl Crisis]] · [[Opioid Crisis Timeline]] · [[Foreign Terrorist Organization]] · [[Stephen Miller]] · [[Alien Enemies Act]]