Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz built a life with her three young daughters in the suburb of Overland, Missouri.Mother Jones illustration; courtesy Missouri Workers Center
When 27-year-old Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz took her three daughters and boarded a plane from St. Louis to Guatemala City on June 17, her friends begged her not to go. But Glendy had no other option: Her husband, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, who worked as a roofer and was the family’s breadwinner, had been deported a year earlier.
On July 22, just weeks after Glendy reunited with Nixon in rural Guatemala, neighbors found the couple bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field. Their 14-month-old daughter Giovanni was crying, dehydrated, next to their bodies. Two communities—one in Missouri, the other in the western Guatemalan region of Retalhuleu—are left to pick up the pieces.
In Guatemala, that includes Nixon’s older brother, Rolando Pérez Paz, who was deported alongside Nixon in 2025. Now, Rolando and his wife are caring for his three nieces. He can’t help but wonder what could have been.
“If my brother hadn’t been deported, he might—well, only God knows—but he might still be alive,” Rolando told me in Spanish from his home in Retalhuleu. “Both of them might still be alive.”
“If my brother hadn’t been deported…he might still be alive. Both of them might still be alive.”
News of the couple’s deaths slowly got back to St. Louis. Glendy’s friend Laura, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear that she, too, might be targeted by ICE, got a call from another friend: “Glendy is gone.” An email circulated within the Fuerza organizing committee, a local immigrant workers rights group for which Glendy rarely missed a meeting. By the time St. Louis Public Radio picked up the story, Glendy and Nixon’s friends were already planning a vigil.
Asked about Nixon and Rolando’s deportations, an ICE spokesperson wrote that Nixon had two convictions for driving while intoxicated. Mother Jones was able to corroborate only one of those charges, and there are no court records under Rolando’s name.
To Alicia Hernandez, an organizer with the legal aid group MICA Project, the story was familiar: a husband taken in a traffic stop and sent away and a wife forced to leave the United States to reunite with him. Their deaths are part of a broader story of revenue-seeking policing in a region that once withstood intense federal scrutiny and has now become part of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.
The St. Louis area is home to 54 separate police departments. Some have fewer than 10 officers and serve townships with a thousand or so residents. Those municipalities—sometimes no larger than one or two subdivisions—rely on their police departments as a major source of local government revenue, extracting money through traffic stops and municipal court fines. ICE’s deportation surge presents a new financial opportunity.
“I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and he said no.”
After the 2014 police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the St. Louis area’s patchwork law enforcement apparatus came under national scrutiny. Some departments consolidated; others, under pressure from the federal government, enacted rules meant to limit racial profiling and profit-motivated traffic stops. But now, instead of pushing the region’s police toward reform, the federal government is offering financial incentives to target immigrants like Nixon and Rolando. ICE is paying six St. Louis–area police departments to deputize officers as federal immigration enforcers under what’s known as a 287(g) agreement.
“It’s quite a bit of money,” Scott Robinson, chief of police for Breckenridge Hills, a small municipality bordering Overland, told a local TV station earlier this year. ICE has promised some participating departments money for equipment, salary and benefits reimbursements, and $100,000 for new vehicles. For Breckenridge Hills, which employs just over a dozen officers, that’s a substantial sum. “They sign these 287(g) agreements to supplement their budgets,” Hernandez said.
About 60 percent of ICE arrests in St. Louis start as traffic stops. “We see situation after situation where someone is pulled over for rolling a red light, driving without a driver’s license, having a broken tail light,” Hernandez told me. “And then from there, they are put on an ICE hold.”
Locally, immigrants know where the “hot spots” are, Hernandez said. They issue warnings like “Don’t drive through Overland.” About a quarter of all ICE arrests in the St. Louis area during President Donald Trump’s second term so far have happened in Overland, a suburb of small midcentury brick homes. Glendy and Nixon settled there around 2020.
According to a statement from ICE, Nixon and Rolando were picked up by federal agents on April 15, 2025. “They got us at 5 in the morning—we were maybe 50 meters or so from our house when they grabbed us,” Rolando said. First, they spoke with Nixon, who was in his 40s, then they questioned his older brother. They shackled their hands and their feet. “I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and [the officer] said no,” Rolando said.
“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case.”
The two brothers were held in downtown St. Louis, Rolando said, then moved to Phelps County Jail, a small rural jail operated by a sheriff’s department that entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE this year. (The Phelps County Sheriff’s Department refused to answer a Freedom of Information Act request, instead deferring to ICE.)
As the month dragged on, Rolando said, the Pérez brothers were moved to yet another rural Missouri jail, then to Louisiana. By the middle of May, Nixon and Rolando were back in rural Guatemala. There, Rolando was reunited with his wife, but Nixon’s family was left thousands of miles away.
Glendy, then 26 and nine months pregnant with her third child, was left to fend for herself. “Her world completely collapsed,” her friend Yohana, who asked to use a pseudonym, told me in Spanish, “because she was left all alone.”
She tried for a year to make it work without her husband, all while worried that she would be deported herself. The Department of Homeland Security had its own solution: self-deportation.
“Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE threatened in a September 2025 social media flyer. “Avoid the jail cell. Avoid the humiliation.” Last year, then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spent over $200 million on advertisements pushing that same message. US Customs and Border Protection has even launched a “self-deportation app,” CBP Home.
But self-deportation, researcher Austin Kocher explained, is a marketing tactic meant to appeal to Trump’s base by declaring that if people would only follow the law and immigrate the “right” way, they could be safe. “It’s trying to develop legitimacy for a deportation program that is not always particularly popular if people understood the normalcy of the people who are wrapped up in it,” Kocher said.
Representatives with Fuerza, the immigrant rights group, said Glendy had an open asylum case with a hearing set for 2027. She came to the United States as a young mother fleeing violence and poverty in Guatemala six years ago. But that likely would not have stopped her from being criminalized and deported, as the vast majority of asylum claims in Missouri are rejected.
“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case,” Kocher said. According to UN data, 32,000 people have been deported to Guatemala in the first half of 2026 alone. “This is a consequence of having a whole system that is so bent towards deportation that it can’t even listen to the legitimate claims of legitimate asylum seekers.”
“I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?”
Records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that there are 49,576 backlogged cases in the Kansas City Immigration Court, which oversees the state of Missouri. In the first half of 2026, over 95 percent of asylum applications processed by that court were denied. The same week Glendy and Nixon were killed, the Trump administration launched a new plan to expedite deportations of asylum seekers.
After her husband’s deportation, Glendy took on two jobs, working in a factory during the day and cleaning offices at night. Sometimes, Laura watched the kids while Glendy worked. Laura and Glendy’s daughters—girls so close they had their first communion together and saw each other nearly every day—had sleepovers that stretched from one night into the next. Laura and Glendy took turns driving them to school. Whenever Glendy made tamales, she shared some with Laura’s family. They helped each other out wherever they could.
But Glendy couldn’t stop worrying. She gave Laura and another friend power of attorney to help her children in case she was taken. “I won’t let that happen,” Laura said.
This past April, police officers working with ICE arrived at Glendy’s local middle school, asking questions about three students there. District Superintendent Chris Kilbride rushed to the scene and “got the officers away from the school as quickly as possible,” he told me. Although no students were detained, parents in Overland were terrified.
A few weeks after Glendy gave birth to her youngest daughter, Giovanni, she started bringing Laura to monthly meetings held by the local immigrant advocacy group Fuerza. “She was like, ‘Hey, let’s go! You can get informed about what’s going on in the community,’” Laura remembered. There, they commiserated, shared meals, and got reports of the latest ICE arrests. At every meeting, there was childcare. “We would take our daughters for them to know what’s going on as well.”
As members of Fuerza, the women went door-knocking, asking neighbors to join their cause. They met with local officials to ask them not to sign 287(g) agreements. Organizing for their rights helped them feel less alone, but Glendy still feared leaving the house to go to work.
“For those of us without children, it’s a bit easier to manage,” said Yohana, a Nicaraguan Fuerza member who works in construction. “But if you have children at home, you can’t just tell them ‘there’s no food today.’” Glendy had no reliable transportation and worked irregular hours; the bills kept piling up. “I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?”
Teachers from the Ritenour School District, which two of Glendy’s daughters attended, reached out to help; friends offered rides and childcare. But a year after Nixon’s deportation, it still wasn’t enough. By May 2026, Glendy was telling her friends she planned to return to Guatemala.
“I didn’t want her to leave. And she told me she didn’t want to leave but she was obligated to,” Laura said. “It’s just getting hard,” Glendy told her, shortly before getting on the plane. The last time the two saw each other was the first time Laura saw Glendy cry.
“They should never have gone back, but the laws of this country made them go,” Yohana said. In a photo taken June 17, the day Glendy returned to Guatemala, she grins alongside her daughters outside St. Louis Lambert International Airport. The two older girls carry large stuffed bears. Glendy’s youngest daughter is in a carrier strapped to her chest, smiling at the camera in pigtails. It’s a warm and sunny day in St. Louis, but they’re all wearing jackets in case it gets chilly on the plane.
Nixon and Glendy’s family buried the couple side by side after a procession through the Guatemalan countryside. The Guatemalan National Civil Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office are investigating the killing, but they have not publicly identified a suspect or motive. At an early August vigil for the couple outside Overland City Hall, the town’s mayor said Overland will not sign a 287(g) agreement—though two municipal police departments bordering Overland have already done so.
Laura and Yohana are fundraising for Nixon and Glendy’s three daughters and talking to the press. But neither was willing to use their real names in this article, out of fear that they, too, would be targeted. In late July, Laura tried to tell her 10-year-old daughter what happened to her best friend’s family.
“Why are people so mean?” Laura’s daughter asked. “She literally just left, and now she has no mom or dad, and I don’t get to see her anymore?”