NIXON AND GLENDY

Mass deportation has a body count. These are two of the names.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz came to the United States looking for something painfully ordinary: the chance to stay alive.

They worked. They raised three daughters. They tried to build a future in Missouri. They weren’t asking for luxury. They were asking for tomorrow.

Then ICE tore their family apart.

Nixon was driving to his roofing job when a group of agents emerged from an unmarked car, surrounded the van, and pulled him out. There was no warrant. It didn’t matter. ICE detained Nixon, caged him, and deported him to Guatemala. Glendy remained behind with their children, trying to keep a roof overhead while pursuing her asylum case and living with the constant fear that she would be next. Eventually, survival became impossible. She gathered the children and returned to Guatemala so her family could be together again.

That decision became a death sentence.

On July 20, the couple disappeared after traveling to register a motorcycle. Days later, they were found in a sugarcane field. Their hands and feet had been bound. They had been gagged. They had been beaten. They had been shot to death.

Their 14-month-old daughter was found beside her mother’s body, dehydrated and crying.

Two parents gone. Three little girls left without them.

No government official pulled the trigger.

The people who murdered Nixon and Glendy bear responsibility for the killings.

The United States government bears responsibility for forcing this family back into the conditions they had fled. Those are different acts. They are not unrelated acts.

This is what disappears inside political slogans. Deportation is discussed as if it’s an administrative procedure. A statistic. A policy objective. A number on a press release. But every deportation lands somewhere. Every removal has a destination. Sometimes that destination is hunger. Sometimes it is persecution. Sometimes it is a sugarcane field where a toddler is left crying beside her murdered parents.

There is a particular cruelty in pretending outcomes exist in isolation from the decisions that made them possible. Governments make choices. Those choices alter the trajectory of human lives. Sometimes they alter whether those lives continue at all.

Supporters of mass deportation often speak as though the government’s responsibility ends the moment an airplane touches down. Reality doesn’t respect that convenient fiction. Returning someone to a place consumed by violence does not erase the danger. It delivers them back into it.

Rolando Pérez Paz, Nixon's brother, is now raising the couple's three daughters. He's had difficulty explaining to them why their parents aren't coming back. "If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive," he told St. Louis Public Radio, "and the children wouldn't be going through this sorrow. Unfortunately, immigration — the government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them."

Three little girls will spend the rest of their lives without their mother and father. One of them will never remember their faces except through photographs and stories told by relatives trying to explain an absence no child should have to understand.

Every politician who promises millions of deportations should be required to answer a simple question.

What, exactly, do you believe happens after people are sent back?

Because sometimes the answer is waiting in a sugarcane field.

And history has a habit of remembering not only who pulled the trigger, but who decided that sending people back into the line of fire was an acceptable price to pay.

---

A candlelight vigil for Nixon and Glendy is planned for 6 p.m. on August 2 at Overland City Hall — for anyone who wants to show up rather than just read about it.

Closer to the Edge exists because we’d rather be a reader-funded menace than a well-behaved footnote.