Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz was 27 years old. She lived in Overland, Missouri, a suburb of small midcentury brick homes outside St. Louis. She had three daughters. She worked in a factory during the day and cleaned offices at night.

On June 17, she took her daughters to St. Louis Lambert International Airport and boarded a plane to Guatemala City. There's a photo from that day. She's grinning. The two older girls are carrying big stuffed bears. The baby is in a carrier on her chest, in pigtails. It's warm and sunny, but they're all wearing jackets in case the plane gets cold.

Her friends had begged her not to go.

On July 22 — five weeks later — neighbors in rural Retalhuleu found Glendy and her husband Nixon bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field. Their 14-month-old daughter was found alive next to their bodies, crying and dehydrated.

Guatemalan police and prosecutors are investigating. They have not publicly named a suspect or a motive. Nobody can tell you who killed them or why.

What we can tell you is why Glendy was in that field instead of in Overland.

What "self-deportation" actually is

In September 2025, ICE put out a social media flyer with this message:

"Leave on your OWN terms. Avoid the jail cell. Avoid the humiliation."

Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spent over $200 million on advertisements pushing that same idea. Customs and Border Protection built an app for it, called CBP Home.

That is a marketing campaign, paid for with your taxes, aimed at convincing people to remove themselves so the government doesn't have to.

Researcher Austin Kocher described the strategy plainly to Mother Jones: it's designed to build "legitimacy for a deportation program that is not always particularly popular if people understood the normalcy of the people who are wrapped up in it."

Glendy was the normalcy. She had an open asylum case with a hearing scheduled for 2027. She came to the U.S. six years ago as a young mother fleeing violence and poverty. She rarely missed a meeting of Fuerza, the local immigrant workers' rights group. She went door-knocking. She made tamales for her neighbor's family. She gave two friends power of attorney over her children in case she was taken.

She didn't leave because she wanted to. She left because the government made staying impossible.

How it started: a traffic-stop machine that found a new revenue stream

Glendy's husband, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, was a roofer and the family's breadwinner. On April 15, 2025, federal agents took him and his older brother Rolando at 5 in the morning, about 50 meters from their house.

"I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and [the officer] said no," Rolando told Mother Jones.

They were shackled hand and foot, held in downtown St. Louis, moved to Phelps County Jail, then another rural Missouri jail, then Louisiana. By mid-May 2025 both were in Guatemala. ICE told Mother Jones that Nixon had two DWI convictions; the magazine could corroborate only one, and found no court records at all under Rolando's name.

Glendy was 26 and nine months pregnant.

Here's the part that should make every taxpayer angry. The St. Louis area has 54 separate police departments, some with fewer than 10 officers, many funded by squeezing residents through traffic stops and municipal court fines. After the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, the federal government pushed those departments to stop profiting off traffic stops.

Now the federal government is paying them to do it again — with immigrants as the product.

ICE has 287(g) agreements with six St. Louis-area police departments, deputizing local officers as federal immigration enforcers. In exchange, ICE has promised participating departments money for equipment, reimbursement for salary and benefits, and $100,000 for new vehicles.

The police chief in Breckenridge Hills — a department with just over a dozen officers, bordering Overland — told a local TV station: "It's quite a bit of money."

An organizer with the legal aid group MICA Project put it more directly: "They sign these 287(g) agreements to supplement their budgets."

The results are exactly what you'd expect:

• About 60% of ICE arrests in St. Louis begin as a traffic stop — a rolled red light, no driver's license, a broken tail light.
• About a quarter of all ICE arrests in the entire St. Louis area during Trump's second term have happened in Overland alone.

Immigrants in the area pass along the warning: Don't drive through Overland.

The asylum system that was never going to hear her

Glendy's asylum hearing was set for 2027. It's fair to ask whether it would have mattered.

Records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show the Kansas City Immigration Court, which covers Missouri, has 49,576 backlogged cases. In the first half of 2026, that court denied over 95% of the asylum applications it processed.

"This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case," Kocher said. "This is a consequence of having a whole system that is so bent towards deportation that it can't even listen to the legitimate claims of legitimate asylum seekers."

According to UN data, 32,000 people were deported to Guatemala in the first half of 2026 alone.

The same week Glendy and Nixon were killed, the Trump administration launched a new plan to speed up deportations of asylum seekers.

A year of trying, then giving up

After Nixon was deported, Glendy took two jobs. Friends drove her kids to school. Teachers from the Ritenour School District reached out to help. Her friend Laura watched the girls; their daughters had their first communion together and saw each other nearly every day.

It wasn't enough. She had no reliable transportation, irregular hours, and bills stacking up.

"I picture the situation and ask myself, 'My God, how did Glendy sleep?'" said Yohana, a fellow Fuerza member. "How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?"

In April, police officers working with ICE showed up at Glendy's local middle school asking about three students. The district superintendent rushed over and got them away from the school. No children were detained, but parents in Overland were terrified.

By May 2026, Glendy was telling friends she was going back.

"I didn't want her to leave. And she told me she didn't want to leave but she was obligated to," Laura said. "It's just getting hard," Glendy told her, right before the flight. It was the first time Laura ever saw her cry.

"They should never have gone back, but the laws of this country made them go," Yohana said.

The part nobody voted for

Every piece of this was a choice somebody made.

Somebody appropriated the $200 million for the ads. Somebody wrote the "avoid the humiliation" flyer. Somebody built the app. Somebody structured 287(g) so that a 12-officer police department could balance its budget by handing neighbors to ICE. Somebody let an immigration court reach 49,576 cases and deny 95% of asylum claims.

Congress funds all of it. This is not weather. It is a program, with line items.

We have written about what this machine does when it's running: ICE shooting a man who lived in Houston for 35 years and put three kids through college. Two more people killed in a single week, with ICE lying about both. Agents on tape describing how they picked targets in Los Angeles. A social media surveillance dragnet that Congress paid for.

Glendy's story is the version where ICE never has to touch her at all. The government just made her life unlivable and told her leaving was her own idea.

At an early August vigil outside Overland City Hall, hundreds of people gathered. The mayor said Overland will not sign a 287(g) agreement. Two police departments bordering the town already have.

Glendy's friends are raising money for her three daughters. Neither Laura nor Yohana would use their real names for the story, because they are afraid of being targeted too.

In late July, Laura tried to explain to her 10-year-old what had happened to her best friend's family.

"Why are people so mean?" her daughter asked. "She literally just left, and now she has no mom or dad, and I don't get to see her anymore?"

Source

She Followed ICE's Advice to Self-Deport. Five Weeks Later, She Was Dead. — Sophie Hurwitz, Mother Jones, August 2026. Image: Mother Jones illustration; courtesy Missouri Workers Center.