She Followed ICE’s Advice to Self-Deport. Five Weeks Later, She Was Dead.
Mother Jones · L · trust 51/100
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.
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