Death By Deportation: The Silent ICE Killings No One Is Counting
The death toll is quietly rising behind the ICE deportation machine.
There is an eerie sort of silence that falls over this country when a human being dies at the hands of ICE, yet no trigger was pulled, no shot was fired.
You’ll find no blood in the streets. No blurry, shaky cell phone footage, thick with screams and trauma, will spread like wildfire across social media. There will be no trending hashtags, no midnight vigil nor protest organized. The various Departments of Homeland, Immigration, and National Security will not make a sound. They will not rush to defend their agents against “doxxing,” because there will be no single agent to name. This particular monster will have no face to fill the news headlines. It is merely a cog within a machine that is functioning exactly as it was designed to.
Slowly. Methodically. Legally. Backed by the full force of the United States federal government.
Ticking away in the dark shadows of this country is a version of ICE violence that never goes viral, even as the bodies pile higher and higher and the trauma spreads like a virus through families who will never even be given a public name or voice.
In the early hours of one April morning last year, 43-year-old Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz was driving to his roofing job in Overland, Missouri, with his 51-year-old brother, Rolando Pérez Paz. With their home still in the background, an unmarked vehicle approached. Agents swarmed into the street, surrounding them, dragging the brothers from their work van. They were given as little information as possible, with agents only informing them that there was no warrant, there was no formal piece of paper to outline their fate, only that they were illegal, they were under arrest, and they would be promptly deported.
Pérez Paz’s partner, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, stayed in Overland without him, for a while. In June of 2025, she gave birth to their third daughter. She worked two grueling manual labor jobs, just trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. But the bills piled up faster than the checks came in. There was always too much month left at the end of the money, and the walls of pressure were closing in fast.
Both Pérez Paz and González de la Cruz fled to the United States without legal status, due to mounting violence and widespread poverty in their home country of Guatemala. After her partner was unceremoniously deported, González de la Cruz was actively working through an asylum case. But tensions were mounting under the Trump Administration. People were being shot by masked agents in unmarked cars in the streets, disappearing from their homes and jobs, never to be seen again, and with nowhere left to turn, she packed up her girls and voluntarily returned to Guatemala, where she at least had a partner.
Both Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz were just found bound and shot to death in a Guatemalan sugarcane field. Their mouths were gagged, their hands and feet bound, their bodies covered in the evidence of physical trauma. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was dehydrated and inconsolable beside her mother’s body – all of them victims of the very violence they tried so desperately to escape in a country that preaches what it does not practice: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
A spokesperson for ICE has effectively spoken around the point, only confirming that Pérez Paz was located and arrested by agents for “being unlawfully present in the United States.” The spokesperson went on to cite two drunken driving convictions that could not be found in the Missouri court database and a 2010 open-container charge against Pérez Paz that prosecutors dropped.
“Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists. ICE remains committed to removing criminal aliens from our communities by enforcing immigration laws and maintaining the integrity of our borders.”
Nixon’s brother, Rolando, said, “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. Unfortunately, immigration — the [U.S.] government — doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”
Pérez Paz and González de la Cruz were not shot in the street with fanfare. No one witnessed and recorded their deaths to go viral on Twitter. Their names won’t be found on the list of “deaths in custody,” because their feet weren’t even on American soil when Immigration and Customs Enforcement took their lives. They’re simply two people who will be discussed in a closed-door meeting as the prime and perfect example of what the system is supposed to do. Two deaths. Infinite and insurmountable trauma. Half a hemisphere away from the Western World. No culpability to be found. No one to answer to.
America, under Donald Trump’s leadership, has created a seedy, shadowed underworld of systematic, hands-off murder, sending throngs of Brown people to their deaths under the guise of a simple, legal deportation, in a way that rings sickeningly similar to the SS sending throngs of Jewish people into a simple, legal “shower.”
No one fired a gun in the street because, in cases like this, no one had to. They simply played the long game and secured a clean, outsourced kill. ICE’s culpability ended the moment Pérez Paz was put on a plane to Guatemala, and that very architecture of deniability is the whole point.
As they commit cold-blooded murder in our streets, they’re counting on you to look away from the standard, “run-of-the-mill” deportations that are happening en masse across this country. The ones that get no press. The ones that don’t go viral.
Don’t.
This is the exact machine we’re intended to rage against.