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.
Soon afterward, two Border Patrol agents and a handful of Santa Cruz County sheriff’s deputies arrived at the ranch. They fanned out across the property, looking for Kelly. When they found him, on a road near the barn, he didn’t tell them about the shots he had fired; Wanda didn’t mention them, either. The search didn’t turn up anything, and the officers then left. A few hours later, just before sunset, Morsell received another call from the ranch. “It was a Mr. Kelly I’d never heard before,” he later testified. “He sounded scared. He said it was worse than he could ever imagine.” When Morsell prodded him for details, Kelly spoke in an odd, evasive manner. “You know how shots were fired earlier? Something was possibly struck,” he said eventually, according to Morsell’s report. “An animal?” Morsell asked. “You could possibly classify it as an animal,” Kelly replied. When sheriff’s deputies returned to the ranch that evening, they discovered Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, a forty-eight-year-old Mexican man, lying face down in the knee-high grass, dead of a gunshot wound. Under questioning, Kelly said that at least one of the men he’d seen that afternoon had turned a gun in his direction, and that he had fired his own weapon in self-defense, “not at them but over their heads.” That night, Kelly was placed under arrest for murder.
Right-wing media quickly took up the story. “We’re being prosecuted for defending ourselves, which is a God-given right, by the way!” one radio host barked; on Fox News, Tucker Carlson called Kelly’s prosecution “true insanity and a danger to us all.” The argument made on Kelly’s behalf, both by the couple and by their defenders, proceeded along a double track: Kelly’s shots weren’t what killed Cuen-Buitimea, but, also, if they had been, his actions would have been justified. On a fund-raising Web page, Wanda depicted her husband, who goes by Alan, as “a humble person with simple needs,” an “animal lover” who “likes socks.” Alan was “innocent,” Wanda wrote, of a crime she described as “killing a Cartel member on our property.” Inspired by the Kelly case, Republicans in the Arizona legislature introduced a bill that would allow property owners to threaten deadly force to stop someone from trespassing or attempting to trespass on their land. (After passing the Arizona House and Senate, the bill was vetoed by Governor Katie Hobbs.)
Many of the facts of the case looked bad for Kelly. He had admitted to firing his high-powered rifle multiple times; nine shell casings were found on the ground; hours later, and a hundred and fifty yards away, there was a man dead of a bullet wound. Kelly’s defense team argued that, because he’d fired his warning shots into the air, someone else must have shot Cuen-Buitimea. (The fatal bullet was never found.) Perhaps the first gunshot that Kelly reported hearing was what had killed him. Or, because law enforcement didn’t find the body on their first visit to the ranch that day, perhaps Cuen-Buitimea had been shot elsewhere, then had staggered, or been dragged, onto the ranch.
Kelly was represented by Brenna Larkin, a trim former mixed-martial-arts fighter with a brisk manner and a cascade of brown hair. In her opening statement, she spoke of her client with a kind of paternal protectiveness; when describing Kelly, she used the words “fear,” “scared,” and “afraid” more than a dozen times. Throughout the trial, Larkin and Kelly’s other defense attorney, Kathy Lowthorp, returned repeatedly to the idea that borderlands are a dangerous zone where different rules apply. This was a way to intimate that someone else could have killed Cuen-Buitimea. But also, and perhaps more important, it was a way to frame Kelly’s actions as a reasonable response to a lawless, threatening environment. “Personally, I wouldn’t have done what he would have done. I would’ve shot at the person with the rifle, not up in the air,” Lowthorp said at one point. “That was pretty gracious, wouldn’t you say?”
In 2013, Alan Kelly self-published a book called “Far Beyond the Border Fence,” about an Arizona rancher named George; his wife, Wanda; and their two adult sons. The novel’s action begins when George’s son’s horse, Deck, is stolen. When George spots two suspected thieves on his property, heading south, he shoots at them with his AK-47. The men return fire, then escape across the border. The sheriff eventually shows up:
In “Far Beyond the Border Fence,” the sheriff tacitly agrees that moral authority is on the rancher’s side. The men that George shoots at turn out to be cartel members who quickly escalate from trespassing to horse theft to kidnapping George’s son and daughter-in-law. George and his other son eventually undertake a heroic rescue operation, crossing the border (illegally) into Mexico, armed with rifles.
In real life, Kelly also seemed to see himself as a grizzled hero in the Clint Eastwood mold, doing battle against a criminal enterprise. Three weeks before the shooting, he texted a friend, “OVERUN WITH DRUG CARTEL. AK GTN A LOT OF WORK.” A week after that, he exchanged messages with his son Matt:
Kelly seemed baffled, at times even wounded, that law enforcement saw things differently. Investigators found no drugs or weapons on Cuen-Buitimea’s body. In his backpack, he’d carried cans of tuna, tissues, and extra clothing, including a hoodie that read “Treat People with Kindness.” He also had a radio on his belt—evidence that, according to the defense team, he’d possibly served as a scout or a guide. A photograph on his phone showed him standing on a ridge with binoculars around his neck. Larkin and Lowthorp spun this into lurid theories involving rip crews, cartel hits, and fentanyl trafficking. The prosecution offered a countervailing archetype: Cuen-Buitimea as a man seeking, as they repeatedly put it, “the American Dream.”
In February, 2023, Santa Cruz County’s sheriff, David Hathaway, a former D.E.A. agent with experience working in Latin America, went to Mexico to offer his condolences to Cuen-Buitimea’s daughters. While there, he heard that there was a potential witness to the shooting. Hathaway eventually met with the man, Daniel Ramirez, a Honduran living in Mexico, who struck him as a “humble campesino.” (Hathaway did not tape their initial conversation, but he did record a summary of their encounter before leaving.) Ramirez’s account broadly matched the evidence at the scene, albeit with some notable inconsistencies—for instance, he initially said that the shooting had happened to the west of Nogales, and that he saw Cuen-Buitimea fall backward, when the body was found face down.
When Ramirez eventually testified, through a court interpreter, he painted a picture of migration that was more muddled, and less cinematic, than the attorneys’ narratives. In the course of several years, he had illegally crossed into the U.S. eight or ten times, paying around twenty-five hundred dollars on most occasions. Once, in lieu of the fee, he’d carried marijuana with him. Each time, he’d been caught and deported back to Mexico. Last year, he and Cuen-Buitimea decided to make another attempt, with the goal of settling in Phoenix and getting roofing and construction jobs. They joined a group led by a man Ramirez knew only as El Cholo. They crossed into the U.S. without incident, but after an hour and a half of walking through the desert they encountered the Border Patrol. As the group scattered, the two men stuck together. When Cuen-Buitimea and Ramirez paused to catch their breath, Ramirez heard shots, then saw his friend fall. He ran back across the border into Mexico. “I was throwing up because I was so nervous,” Ramirez testified. “I was vomiting and vomiting and vomiting.”
When it was Wanda Kelly’s turn to testify, she placed her pocketbook on the defense table. She had cropped white hair, sensible shoes, and a grandmotherly bearing that seemed to inspire people to treat her with solicitude. “How are you doing, Mrs. Kelly?” Thomas Fink, the judge presiding over the case, leaned over to ask her at one point. “If you need a break, let us know.” But, throughout her five hours on the stand, Wanda carried herself confidently. She gave the impression of someone secure in her belief that, but for the madness of her current situation, she had led an orderly, good life. When asked about her cat or her horse or her patio furniture, she chuckled fondly, as if amused by a private joke.
Both Kellys had given conflicting statements to law enforcement about the number of men seen, whether they were armed, and how far they were from the house. On the stand, Wanda was firm, sometimes to the point of stubbornness, chalking her earlier contradictions up to confusion and fear. Kimberly Hunley, the chief deputy county attorney of Santa Cruz County, spoke to Wanda with the mild, unflappable patience of a teacher dealing with a frustrated child. On occasion, their sparring descended into combative politeness. “Ma’am, can you answer my question, please?” Hunley asked at one point. “Ma’am—,” Wanda replied, with some venom. Midway through the morning, Hunley pressed Wanda on a key detail: the day that Kelly was arrested, the case’s lead detective, Jorge Ainza, had asked Wanda if she believed the men she’d seen that day had posed any threat to her, her husband, or their property. “I would say they were walking by,” Wanda told him at the time. Now, on the stand, she answered differently. “Sweetheart, I could have told him that the sky was purple that night,” Wanda snapped. “I’m sorry. I was all messed up.”
Wanda was more comfortable during the cross-examination, which was handled by Lowthorp, a former police officer with a blunt, humorless affect. In response to Lowthorp’s questions, Wanda described the couple’s arrival in Arizona, a story that had the feeling of family lore, burnished by many retellings. In the nineties, the Kellys ran a hunting-and-fishing lodge in Montana. One winter, they drove their R.V. south to escape the cold. In Prescott, Arizona, there was still snow on the mountains. “I said, ‘Alan, I’m not leaving Montana to come to the Arizona snow. I want it warm,’ ” Wanda said. “Hence, you’re at the bottom of the state,” Lowthorp said. “Yeah,” Wanda replied, with a little laugh of satisfaction.
During a mid-afternoon break, I spoke to a blond woman attending the trial. She said that she was a rancher who was there to support the Kellys. Although she didn’t know them personally, she felt a kinship. “This could’ve been any of us,” she said. Ranchers have provided many of the stories supplying the border-crisis narrative. In Texas and Arizona, they’ve reported cut fences, break-ins, stolen horses, vandalism, trash, and a general atmosphere of disorder and anxiety. These stories often share a common arc: landowners who once regarded border crossers with sympathy now report fear and enmity. The blond woman told me that she used to leave water out for migrants, but she doesn’t anymore. She said that she once saw men armed with pistols on her property, and that she’d also come across items she interpreted as signs of sex trafficking: used condoms, discarded underwear. She was afraid to leave her daughter alone, for fear that she would be kidnapped and taken into Mexico. (The majority of sex- and labor-trafficking victims are immigrants.) “I’ll just put it this way,” she said. “The mood has changed.”
The number of migrants crossing the southern border has reached record levels. Customs and Border Protection’s Tucson sector, which includes the Nogales area, was the nation’s busiest in the past six months, with nearly three times as many migrant apprehensions as a decade earlier. In Kelly’s version of this evolution, recounted in Larkin’s opening statement, the shift was not just in number but in kind. The migrants Kelly used to see on his land were desperate, frightened families, she said. Then Kelly began to see “different things”: “Individuals carrying backpacks. Men, always men. . . . And he knows that these are individuals engaged in illegal activity, because, when they see him, they run away.” In an interview with Detective Ainza, Wanda pinpointed when the couple stopped feeling safe on their property: “The moment Biden was announced. . . . They were there a month or so later, in their garb, in their big backpacks and their guns, walking across the property. And that scared the daylights out of both of us.”
It’s certainly true that the failures of the U.S. immigration system have made people more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and death—but it’s primarily migrants, not the landowners whose properties they pass through, who are at risk. There have been eight homicide cases in Santa Cruz County since 2019; according to the sheriff’s department, none of the homicides were committed by migrants. During the same period of time, eighty-six migrants were found dead in the county, mostly from exposure, according to data compiled by Humane Borders, an N.G.O.
Law enforcement testifying in the Kelly case also had a different perception of the area’s dangers. Morsell testified that “upwards of ninety-eight per cent” of apprehensions in the Kino Springs area in January, 2023, were for illegal entry or reëntry, and that it had been more than ten years since he’d seen a migrant carrying an AK- or AR-style rifle on the U.S. side of the border. Another agent affirmed that the region is dangerous, saying, “It seems that, in the desert, everything’s out to get you, from the vegetation to the heat.” He then mentioned, almost as an afterthought, “potential bad individuals.”
Joanna Williams, the executive director of the Kino Border Initiative, a Catholic migrant shelter and advocacy organization in Nogales, Mexico, told me that there has been a noticeable change in migration patterns and demographics, albeit not in the way that the Kellys describe. In 2016, around three-quarters of those aided by the Kino Border Initiative cited poverty as their main reason for migration; by 2021, the same share said that they were fleeing violence.
“Sometimes it’s the same people,” Williams said. “This morning, I was talking to a man who used to go up to Washington State to harvest apples and cherries. He used to cross through this desert to be in the U.S. and work and send money back to his family in Michoacán. And he kind of finished that chapter of his life where he migrated for poverty—he’d earned the money, his kids were growing up. He was, like, ‘Great, I can go back and live my life in Michoacán, because that’s what I want to do.’ He hadn’t been to the U.S. for about ten years, and then the violence and the worsening security situation in his town started to affect him. And now it’s not him migrating as an individual. It’s him and his whole family that are being displaced.”
The other major shift, of course, is the increasing salience of immigration as a political issue, spurred on both by increased migration rates and by Donald Trump’s persistent demonization of migrants. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said, in his 2015 campaign-announcement speech; earlier this month, he described border crossers as “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients, and terrorists, the worst they have” during a speech in Michigan. “This is country-changing, it’s country-threatening, and it’s country-wrecking,” he continued. “They have wrecked our country.”
Williams told me that she’s seen the impact of such rhetoric in southern Arizona. “People on the U.S. side that we know through churches and so forth, they end up parroting what we’re hearing in the news,” she said. “Even though it’s, like, you have the actual lived experience, you know what it’s like, you’ve been around before this news cycle!”
Around a year before the death of Cuen-Buitimea, Kelly called Morsell about another group of migrants on his land. “Shots fired! Shots fired!” he shouted before the call was dropped. Morsell, who was off duty, contacted the sheriff’s department, which didn’t find anything. On another occasion, Kelly called to announce that there was a group of twenty armed men on his property—a group that no one else apparently ever reported.
In her cross-examination of Morsell, Lowthorp asked the agent about Kelly’s demeanor during their phone calls on the day of the shooting. In his earlier testimony, Morsell had described Kelly as sounding “amped up,” “adrenaline-filled,” and “excited.” “When a person is under adrenaline, they’re under anxiety, they’re hyped up, their body is reacting to some form of danger,” Lowthorp said. “You don’t think he made this up, do you?” Morsell granted that Kelly’s fear had seemed real. Whether the danger—the two or five or fifteen “drug mules” armed with rifles and carrying large backpacks whom Kelly had reported seeing and shooting not at but over—had been equally real was a more open question.
After three weeks of testimony, last Thursday the case was sent to the jury to consider a number of potential charges, ranging from aggravated assault and manslaughter to second-degree murder. The charges hinged on whether Kelly’s actions were in line with what a “reasonable” person would have done under the same circumstances. But the underlying question appeared to be one of vision: Was Kelly someone with a firsthand understanding of the dangers of the border, or an elderly man with a dangerously overheated imagination whose proximity to a highly politicized area made him less, not more, in touch with reality?
A day later, the jurors had not yet reached a verdict, and Judge Fink urged them to keep deliberating. On Monday afternoon, with the jury still unable to agree on a verdict, the case was declared a mistrial. The Santa Cruz County Attorney’s office has not yet announced whether it will retry Kelly. “It is what it is,” Kelly told reporters before leaving the courtroom. “They won’t wear me down.” The border remains a contested zone—we can’t look away, and we can’t agree on what we see there. ♦