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 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........

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