Progressive Politics

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/50138099

An Overland couple who had recently returned to Guatemala was found bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz were killed weeks after González de la Cruz self-deported to be with her husband, who was deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year.

Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying beside her mother’s body in southern Guatemala. The child showed signs of dehydration and was taken to a medical center, where she is recovering, according to Guatemalan news outlet ABC Stereo.

...

In the early hours one morning last April, Pérez Paz was driving his 51-year-old brother, Rolando Pérez Paz, to their roofing jobs when they were stopped near their home by ICE.

A group of agents exited an unmarked vehicle and swarmed them, taking them out of their white work van and later putting them in handcuffs and shackles before taking them to the Phelps County Jail, Rolando Pérez Paz told St. Louis Public Radio on Monday from his home in Guatemala.

The agents didn’t explain much other than telling him there wasn’t a warrant out for their arrests but that they were being arrested for entering the county illegally and that they would be deported.

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González de la Cruz remained in Overland, where she gave birth to the couple’s third daughter in June 2025. She worked two manual labor jobs while raising their children but eventually decided to return to Guatemala with her girls as financial pressures mounted — and grew increasingly fearful that she would be detained and separated from them despite working through an active asylum case, according to organizers with Fuerza, a St. Louis-based immigrant rights group she was a part of.

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Rolando Pérez Paz said he is caring for Nixon and Glendy’s three young daughters but has had difficulty explaining the deaths to them.

“If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn't be going through this sorrow,” he said. “Unfortunately, immigration — the [U.S.] government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them.”