New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the U.S. Department of Justice, demanding the release of unredacted documents from the federal government's files on Jeffrey Epstein — the late financier and convicted sex offender whose sprawling property outside Santa Fe, known as Zorro Ranch, sits at the center of the state's own active criminal investigation.

The lawsuit is a direct escalation of a months-long standoff between New Mexico's top law enforcement office and the Justice Department. Torrez has argued in court filings that the state cannot fully pursue accountability for what alleged victims say happened at Zorro Ranch without access to the federal government's underlying investigative record. The DOJ, under the current administration, has declined to provide those materials in unredacted form — a position New Mexico's attorney general now characterizes plainly as obstruction of a state criminal probe.

Zorro Ranch is a 10,000-acre property Epstein acquired in the early 1990s in Stanley, New Mexico, roughly 40 miles southeast of Santa Fe. Multiple women who have spoken publicly or submitted declarations in civil proceedings have stated they were trafficked to the property and sexually abused there, sometimes as minors. Epstein died in federal custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York in August 2019 — officially ruled a suicide, a finding that has been contested by his defense attorneys and that a significant portion of the public has never accepted.

The federal government has possessed investigative files on Epstein for years spanning multiple administrations, including materials gathered during the controversial 2006–2008 Florida investigation that resulted in a non-prosecution agreement widely condemned as a sweetheart deal — a deal that was later ruled by a federal judge to have violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act. Those federal files, Torrez's office argues, contain names, communications, and forensic details that are directly relevant to potential state-level charges in New Mexico. Redacted versions, the complaint contends, are functionally useless for that purpose.

What makes this lawsuit politically combustible is the identity of the parties on each side. The Trump administration entered office in January 2025 alongside loud public promises — made in part by the president himself and amplified across right-wing media — that the Epstein files would be released and that the full scope of the trafficking network would be exposed. That rhetoric has not translated into cooperation with the one state government that has an active criminal investigation and a concrete legal basis for requesting the documents. Instead, the DOJ's posture has been to withhold. Torrez's lawsuit forces that gap into the public record.

The attorney general's office has been laying groundwork on Zorro Ranch for some time. New Mexico does not have the statute-of-limitations constraints that have complicated civil proceedings in other jurisdictions, which is part of why state prosecutors believe a criminal case remains viable even six years after Epstein's death. Accountability, under New Mexico's theory, does not die with the principal offender — it extends to those who facilitated, enabled, or participated in the abuse. That is precisely why federal records matter: they may contain the names, travel logs, financial transfers, and communications that connect the ranch to a broader network.

The Justice Department has not publicly explained why the unredacted files cannot be shared with a co-equal state law enforcement authority conducting a legitimate criminal investigation. Standard inter-agency cooperation frameworks — including formal legal mechanisms for sharing grand jury materials and investigative records with state attorneys general — exist for exactly this kind of situation. The decision to refuse, or to slow-walk, is not a bureaucratic default. It is a choice, and it is one being made at the policy level.

Torrez's filing puts a federal court in the position of deciding whether the DOJ's redactions are legally defensible or whether they constitute an unlawful interference with New Mexico's sovereign authority to enforce its own criminal statutes. That is not a narrow procedural question. It goes to the architecture of federalism, the limits of executive privilege in an active criminal investigation, and — unavoidably — to why a federal government that claims to want Epstein accountability is fighting the one state that is actually trying to build a case.

For the women who have said they were abused at Zorro Ranch, the lawsuit is a marker: someone in official power is still pushing. Whether the courts force the files open, or whether the DOJ's resistance holds, the legal record being built in this case is itself part of the historical reckoning with what happened on that property — and who made it possible.