She Followed ICE’s Advice to Self-Deport. Five Weeks Later, She Was Dead.
When 25-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 […]
Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, a 25-year-old mother of three, followed advice from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and decided to self-deport from the United States to Guatemala with her daughters. Her husband, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, a 40-year-old roofer and the family's primary breadwinner, had been deported a year earlier.
On July 22, just weeks after Glendy reunited with Nixon in rural Guatemala, their bodies were found bound and shot in a sugarcane field alongside their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, who was crying, dehydrated, and in distress. The tragic incident has left both Missouri and western Guatemalan communities, Retalhuleu, grappling with the loss of two individuals.
Rolando Pérez Paz, Nixon's older brother and a deportee alongside Nixon in 2025, is now the sole guardian of his three nieces in Guatemala, unable to shake the thought that his family might still be alive if Nixon had not been deported. News of the couple's deaths eventually reached St. Louis, where Glendy's friends were already preparing a vigil.
ICE officials acknowledged that Nixon had one conviction for driving while intoxicated, while Rolando's deportation remains unverified. The story is emblematic of a broader issue of revenue-seeking policing in the region, which has now become entangled in the Trump administration's deportation strategies. The St. Louis area is home to 54 separate police departments, many of which have minimal resources and depend on traffic stops and municipal court fines to generate revenue.
In a bid to supplement their budgets, six St. Louis-area police departments have agreed to work as federal immigration enforcers under 287(g) agreements with ICE, receiving financial incentives for equipment, salary reimbursements, and new vehicles. These agreements have led to an alarming number of arrests, with about 60 percent of ICE arrests in St. Louis starting with traffic stops.
ICE officials assert that immigrants should be held accountable for any crime, regardless of their asylum-seeking status. In the case of Nixon and Rolando Pérez Paz, they were arrested during a routine traffic stop, shackled, and transferred to ICE custody. Nixon's family is left thousands of miles away in Missouri, while Glendy, nine months pregnant, is left to cope with the devastating loss alone.
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