Two New Mexico state Democratic lawmakers said Monday they will work during next year’s legislative session to establish a “truth commission” to investigate the activities of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein at his Zorro ranch near Stanley in Santa Fe County.

It’s been six years since the financier’s death in a Manhattan jail, but his activities in New Mexico require further exploration, according to state Representatives Andrea Romero (Santa Fe) and Marianna Anaya (Albuquerque), who previewed the process of establishing the commission on a Zoom call with local journalists.

Romero said the commission would “put the story together for the public,” while working around issues of statutes of limitations for certain crimes and the privacy of victims.

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“We envision very much like a 9/11 or J-6 commission,” Romero said. “As we start releasing information to the public, it has been vetted. There’s essentially a check and balance on the information that we’re providing: information that needs to be redacted or victims or witnesses that need to be protected.”

Previous House commissions established by the New Mexico Legislature over the decades produced investigative reports on corruption, abuses at schools and prisons.

Establishing this type of commission does not require the approval of both legislative chambers, but instead would be a House parliamentary process, which could be launched during the upcoming session, Romero said.

“We’re unsure if we need sponsors, there’s still a lot of parliamentary history we’re going through,” she told Source NM in a call.

The tentative makeup of the commission would be two Democratic and two Republican House members, with subpoena power. It’s unclear exactly how fast the commission would be able to meet after the session wraps in March, but Romero said it needed to move quickly, and work to “prevent this from ever happening again.”

Romero noted that “we’ve heard from many, many different sources that New Mexico…is a great place to do [trafficking]. That’s just horrifying to me; that there was a choice here to make this a sort of a no man’s land for these activities,” she said.

Epstein purchased the 7,500-acre Zorro Ranch from former New Mexico Governor Bruce King in 1993. According to court documents, the ranch, which has its own airstrip and helipad, was the site of sex trafficking, including by Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 as Epstein’s co-conspirator.

Two New Mexican attorneys general have opened previous investigations into Epstein’s activities in the state: Hector Balderas’ criminal investigation in 2019 closed within the year without filing any charges. In 2023, current Attorney General Raúl Torrez investigated the role financial services companies played in failing to identify the abuses at the ranch.

Anaya said that while the state pursued a criminal investigation under Balderas, the overlapping jurisdiction with federal investigators hampered it.

“I think the investigation that actually could have happened here, the full-fledged investigation, was maybe unnecessarily put on hold,” Anaya said. “We do have some documents from that, but it’s definitely not comprehensive.”

At the federal level, New Mexico Democratic U.S. Representative Melanie Stansbury serves on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which has been releasing documents from the 2019 federal sex trafficking case against Epstein. Recent documents included an alleged lewd image and inscription from President Donald Trump to Epstein for his 50th birthday.

Romero said the commission will likely be discussed during an upcoming interim Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee meeting in November.