The Brief

The New Mexico Department of Justice has begun searching Jeffrey Epstein’s former 7,600-acre Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe — the first known physical search of the property in connection with criminal allegations against the late sex offender. The search, conducted with New Mexico State Police and the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office, follows recently unsealed federal documents that include a 2019 allegation that two foreign girls were buried in the hills surrounding the property on the orders of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Report

Investigators entered Zorro Ranch on Monday at the direction of Attorney General Raúl Torrez, less than three weeks after his office reopened a criminal investigation into activities at the sprawling property south of Santa Fe. The search — still ongoing late Monday — marks what multiple sources describe as the first thorough law enforcement examination of a site where survivors have testified they were sexually abused over a period spanning more than two decades.

NMDOJ spokesperson Lauren Rodriguez confirmed the scope of the operation. “We’re searching the ranch; that means the ranch and buildings on the ranch,” she said, declining to specify what investigators were looking for or what, if anything, they had found.

The search was triggered in part by the Department of Justice’s January release of more than 3.5 million pages of previously sealed Epstein files, mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law in November 2025. Among the documents was a 2019 anonymous email from a purported former ranch employee alleging that two “foreign girls” had died of strangulation during “rough, fetish sex” and were buried nearby “on the orders of Jeffrey and Madam G” — a reference to Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal sentence for sex trafficking. The sender offered video evidence in exchange for one Bitcoin. The allegation remains unverified, and the DOJ’s file release contains what Al Jazeera described as “numerous unsubstantiated — and in some cases implausible — tips.”

The current owners, the family of Texas real estate developer and Republican political candidate Don Huffines, granted consent for the search. The Huffines family purchased the property in 2023, renamed it Rancho de San Rafael, and announced plans to convert it into a Christian retreat centre. In January 2026, state and county officials ordered a halt to unpermitted construction work — raising concerns among lawmakers that renovation may have disturbed potential evidence. “It’s a worry that this could be compromised,” state Representative Andrea Romero told Newsweek.

The original state investigation, opened in 2019 under former Attorney General Hector Balderas, was closed at the request of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who were building their own case. Epstein died in federal custody that August. Balderas later described the cooperation as “a one-way relationship” — his office shared investigative records and urged federal seizure of the ranch to preserve evidence, but received nothing in return. No federal charges were brought. No search warrant for the property was ever issued. The FBI searched Epstein’s Caribbean island and Manhattan townhouse. Zorro Ranch was left untouched.

The search came one day after hundreds of protesters gathered outside the ranch gates on International Women’s Day, part of a nationwide mobilisation organised by the Women’s March. Among the speakers was Sky Roberts, brother of Virginia Giuffre, the prominent Epstein accuser who died by suicide in 2025.

A bipartisan legislative truth commission with subpoena powers and a $2.5 million budget has begun meeting separately, with an interim report due by July. Attorney General Torrez, writing in an op-ed last week, acknowledged the obstacles candidly: “Epstein has been dead for years. Zorro Ranch has changed ownership. Physical evidence may no longer exist.”

The Angle

The most revealing detail in this story is not the buried-bodies allegation — which may well prove to be exactly the kind of unverifiable tip that accumulates around cases of this gravity. It is the timeline of institutional inaction that preceded Monday’s search.

In 2019, New Mexico had an open investigation. Federal prosecutors asked the state to stop. The state complied. Epstein died. The federal case ended. No one searched the ranch. In 2020, New Mexico urged the FBI to seize the property. The FBI declined. The ranch was sold. Construction began. Seven years passed. And then, only after millions of pages of federal files were released under an act of Congress, did investigators walk onto a property that multiple survivors had identified, under oath, as a site of serial sexual abuse.

The question that matters is not whether bodies are found in the hills. It is why a property named repeatedly in federal court testimony was never subjected to a basic evidentiary search while any of it might have been recoverable — and why the institutional machinery designed to answer exactly these questions instead produced a seven-year gap between the allegation and the first person with a badge walking through the door. Attorney General Torrez is doing the right thing now. The fact that it took this long is not primarily a story about Epstein. It is a story about how thoroughly institutional deference can substitute for institutional action, and how difficult it becomes to distinguish the two from the outside until the window has almost closed.