The baby was still crying when they found her.
Her name is Giovanni. She is 14 months old. She was discovered in a sugarcane field in southwestern Guatemala, dehydrated but alive, lying beside the body of her mother. Her father’s body was there too. Both of her parents had been bound, gagged, and shot.
Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, 43, and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, 25, were residents of Overland, Missouri — a working-class suburb northwest of St. Louis — until federal immigration enforcement took their life there apart. St. Louis Public Radio first reported their deaths on July 27.
Guatemala’s National Civil Police said both showed signs of physical trauma. Reuters reported their hands were tied behind their backs in a field outside Retalhuleu, roughly 112 miles west of Guatemala City, and that Pérez Paz appeared to have been shot in the neck, González de la Cruz in the head.
They had gone out on July 20 to register a motorcycle. Family reported them missing that day.
Their three daughters are now in the care of extended family. Guatemalan prosecutors are investigating. Nobody has been charged.
The Traffic Stop That Started It
In the spring of 2025, Pérez Paz was driving his older brother Rolando to their roofing jobs in the early morning when they were pulled over near their home in Overland.
Rolando told St. Louis Public Radio that agents jumped out of an unmarked vehicle, pulled the brothers from their white work van, and put them in handcuffs and shackles before hauling them to the Phelps County Jail.
He said the agents told them there was no warrant — they were being arrested for being in the country illegally, and they were going to be deported.
Both men had come to the United States without legal status, fleeing poverty and violence in Guatemala. Both men were deported.
ICE confirmed the arrest to STLPR and, in a statement, described its work as removing murderers, rapists, and gang members from American communities.
An agency spokesperson claimed Pérez Paz had two drunk-driving convictions in Overland and four years of probation.
No records supporting that account appear in the Missouri court database.
ICE also pointed to a 2010 open-container charge in Palm Beach, Florida — a local ordinance violation that prosecutors dropped.
What the record actually shows is a May 2024 guilty plea for driving without a valid license, after an Overland police stop, and a fine of about $200.
That is the criminal history. A roofer with a traffic ticket.
Overland’s own police department, Chief Andy Mackey confirmed, had nothing to do with the stop, the detention, or the deportation.
She Stayed as Long as She Could
González de la Cruz did not leave right away.
She stayed in Overland and gave birth to the couple’s third daughter in June 2025 — a newborn, a husband 2,000 miles away, and two other little girls to raise.
She worked two manual labor jobs. She had an active asylum case moving through the system, which is to say she was doing exactly what people are constantly told to do: wait your turn, follow the process.
She was also part of Fuerza, the immigrant rights organizing committee of the Missouri Workers Center.
Organizers there said she showed up to meetings three weeks after giving birth.
She was working two jobs, bringing new members, showing up
— even as her family came apart around her, they wrote after her death.
Money got tighter. The fear got worse. Organizers said she grew increasingly afraid that she would be detained and separated from her daughters despite that pending asylum case.
So she made the decision thousands of families have made under this administration: she self-deported, packed up her three American-raised girls, and went to Guatemala to be with her husband.
Weeks later, both parents were dead.
“If immigration hadn’t picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive,” Rolando Pérez Paz told STLPR.
He is now raising his brother’s three daughters and struggling to explain to them what happened.
“Self-Deportation” Is a Policy Choice, Not a Personal One
The administration markets self-deportation as immigrants making a voluntary decision to go home. Look at how that decision actually gets manufactured: take the family’s income, leave a mother alone with three children and no legal protection, keep her afraid that any traffic stop could separate her from her kids permanently, and then call whatever she does next a choice.
Zachary Mueller, a strategist with States at the Core, a nonprofit that helps communities push back on authoritarianism and political violence, told STLPR the case exposes the hollowness of the public-safety argument for mass deportation.
Two people are dead. Three children have no parents.
Even Overland’s mayor is asking questions.
In an interview published July 29, Mayor Marty Little said his city was never told federal agents were operating in it: “we were not notified whatsoever before, during or after.”
He described the danger of masked men in unmarked trucks pulling people over in a town where residents know their actual police officers by name — a risk, he said, to residents and to the agents themselves.
He called it a loss of local control and a loss of any voice in how his own residents are treated.
There is one more detail worth noting. When STLPR reached the Brentwood traffic attorney who had represented Pérez Paz in 2024 and told him his former client had been shot to death alongside his wife, the lawyer said it made no difference to him, and hung up.
That indifference is the whole machine in miniature.
What’s Next
Pérez Paz and González de la Cruz were buried side by side in Guatemala, carried in a processional along a hillside.
Back in Missouri, neighbors and organizers are holding a candlelight vigil for them at 6 p.m. on Sunday, August 2, in front of Overland City Hall.
Their baby survived a night in a sugarcane field. She will grow up never knowing either of the people who lay beside her.
