New Mexico sued the US Department of Justice and acting attorney general Todd Blanche on Wednesday, saying the federal government would not turn over records tied to Jeffrey Epstein's activities at the Zorro ranch. The complaint was filed in the US district court for the district of Columbia after the state said a July 31 deadline passed without the information Raúl Torrez wanted.
Torrez said he was seeking material about the alleged historical abuse of girls and young women at the 10,000-acre ranch near Santa Fe, and that he had told Blanche in a July 14 letter he would pursue all available legal remedies without further notice if the deadline passed. The lawsuit asks for a declaration that Blanche and the Justice Department acted illegally in refusing to hand over evidence about events at Zorro, and for an order requiring compliance with the Epstein transparency law and Touhy regulations.
The filing lands in a case that Torrez revived in February after the Zorro property was mentioned thousands of times in recent releases of the Epstein files. Those files were released under a transparency act signed by Donald Trump in November, and Torrez has said the ranch kept drawing attention because it sits about 30 miles from Santa Fe and remains central to what investigators in New Mexico want to know.
That is also where the dispute turns on what, exactly, the Justice Department has already produced. The US attorney's office for the district of New Mexico said it substantively responded on 30 June by emailing 31 documents. Torrez said those papers were mostly old news clippings and heavily redacted pages of little use to state investigators, and that he had made repeated, documented, good-faith efforts to obtain the unredacted investigative records in the DoJ’s custody.
He also said there was no confirmed federal search at the Zorro ranch, even though other Epstein-linked properties in Palm Beach, New York and the private Caribbean island saw prominent federal activity. Epstein bought the ranch in 1993 from the estate of Bruce King, and the state says the investigation was first opened by Hector Balderas in February 2019 before it was later mothballed at the request of federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York.
The court fight now puts the burden on the Justice Department to explain why the records should remain closed, and on New Mexico to show that the unredacted material it wants is still being withheld. The key unanswered point is not whether the ranch mattered to the investigation; it is what the sealed files contain that would change what investigators can prove next.
