The New Yorker:

The Arizona rancher was accused of killing a migrant. A tragedy, and a possible murder, quickly became a political cause.

By Rachel Monroe

In March, on the opening day of his trial for second-degree murder, George Alan Kelly wore a denim vest over a plaid shirt and sat quietly, looking down at the defense table. Kelly is a seventy-five-year-old man with thin white hair and a stooped gait. He and his wife, Wanda, live east of Nogales, Arizona, on a hundred and seventy acres. The area, which is called Kino Springs, is close to the border between the United States and Mexico; from parts of the Kellys’ land, you can see the fence.

In January, 2023, Jeremy Morsell, a Border Patrol agent who served as a liaison to ranchers, texted Kelly multiple times about migrants moving through the area: on January 13th, a “group of 23 and a group of 6. Some may have had narcotics, just a heads up”; three days later, a group of twelve; eleven days after that, a group of ten. On January 28th, Morsell told Kelly that “there has been narcotics trafficking picking up around Kino.” Two days after that, Kelly was making himself a sandwich—peanut butter, mayonnaise, pineapple—when he heard what he later described as a gunshot. When he looked out the window, he told investigators, he saw his horse, Sonny, running, as if startled, as well as a group of men heading south, away from the house.

Kelly told Wanda to call Morsell. On the phone, the agent later reported, Kelly sounded agitated, near panic. “I’m being shot at,” he said. “I’m shooting back.” Kelly grabbed his AK-47 and stepped outside, where he fired nine “warning shots,” as he called them, and began walking toward his barn, in the general direction the men had been heading. Morsell called Kelly back; this time, according to Morsell, Kelly said that he only thought he’d heard a gunshot, and that the men had been too far away for him to tell if they’d been armed.

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