Missouri Couple Found Tied Up and Shot Dead After ICE Deportation

A Guatemalan couple’s attempt to reunite following an ICE deportation ended with the two being shot to death in a sugarcane field in the country.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, were found gagged with their hands and feet bound, showing signs of physical trauma, St. Louis Public Radio reports. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying next to her mother, with signs of dehydration. She’s now recovering in a medical center.

“I felt that they took the thing I wanted most,” Rolando Pérez Paz, Pérez Paz’s brother, told STLPR. “I felt a huge pain because it was my brother, my sister-in-law—people that wanted to work, to fight.”

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Ronaldo were driving to their roofing jobs in April 2025 near their home in Overland, Missouri, when they were stopped by ICE agents, who emerged from an unmarked car and pulled them out of their white work van. The agents told them that there wasn’t a warrant for their arrests but that they were being detained for lacking legal status.

González de la Cruz initially stayed in Overland, giving birth to their daughter last year and working two manual labor jobs to support the couple’s three children. But financial pressures mounted, and she was afraid she would be detained and separated from her children despite an active asylum case, organizers with St. Louis immigrant rights group Fuerza, which she was working with, told STLPR. So she decided to self-deport to Guatemala with her children to join her husband.

The couple was reported missing in Guatemala on July 20 after attempting to register a motorcycle in a nearby town, Rolando Pérez Paz told the radio outlet. In the last few months, the family struggled with money and had trouble with violence and the federal government—issues that had led them to seek asylum in the U.S. in the first place.

An ICE spokesperson told the radio outlet that Nixon Pérez Paz had two convictions for drunk driving, but STLPR did not find any court records to confirm that account. The spokesperson also said that Nixon Pérez Paz had an open container charge in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2010, but prosecutors had dropped that.

“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,” Ronaldo told the radio outlet. He’s now caring for his three young nieces but doesn’t know how to explain their parents’ deaths to them.

“Unfortunately, immigration—the [U.S.] government—doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

Even Fox News is confused as to who exactly President Trump has been negotiating with in Iran. 

President Trump claimed this week that he’s talking to Iran “right now,” but Iran’s foreign ministry has fervently denied that claim, saying it’s not interested in direct negotiations. When asked about the contradiction on Fox News Tuesday, Trump struggled to explain.

“We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said. “But Iran has come out publicly and said, ‘We’re not talking to the U.S.”

“Well, they just came out and said ‘We are talking’ a little while ago,” Trump interrupted. 

“So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?” 

“For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say, ‘We’re not talking’ or ‘We didn’t discuss nuclear.’ Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that,” Trump said, avoiding answering the direct question. “We’ve had some very good talks.” 

He then went on to change the subject entirely, instead discussing recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham’s insistence upon an Iran deal—surprising, if true, given the late senator’s violent, hawkish approach to foreign policy. 

“He was very much a hawk … [even] he was somebody that said it was a good time to make a deal.… Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”  

It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war. This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again. 

Despite the White House’s myriad attempts to rein in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiratorial rhetoric, Donald Trump himself is still expecting anti-vax results.

The president is reportedly losing faith in his health secretary’s ability to slash childhood vaccines. The issue came to a head during a May lunch at Trump’s National Golf Club in northern Virginia, when Trump pressed Kennedy as to why he wasn’t doing more to probe the (widely debunked) tie between vaccines and autism. At the time, Trump told Kennedy point blank that he believed the secretary “had the yips,” The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday night, citing sources familiar with the conversation.

The topic reared its head again at a mid-June meeting between the two men in the Oval Office, during which Trump lamented that Kennedy simply wasn’t doing enough.

Trump reportedly believes he has given Kennedy ample time to prove himself, and is disappointed that Kennedy hasn’t made more progress.

Practically every conversation between Trump and his health secretary circles back to the vaccine conspiracy, reported the Journal. The president has shared with his aides that he believes Kennedy will be a failure if he fails to produce results.

In fact, lobbyists and Department of Health and Human Services staffers suspect that Trump will replace Kennedy with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz, likely after the midterms, the Journal reported.

Trump regularly turns to Oz for health policy advice, even on issues that have nothing to do with Oz’s agency. Oz, in turn, makes sure Trump gets his way every time.

The president’s priorities on the matter have since been made clear: HHS must do more to peel back the federal guidelines for the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of shots given to children.

Sources who spoke with the Journal suggested that the president is all in on the anti-vax conspiracy, sharing that Trump expects to see autism rates drop as a result of the decreased inoculations.

Limiting vaccine access was a core tenet of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—until White House advisers pressured him to lie low, fearing that his rabble-rousing, anti-science ideology could further harm Republican odds come November.

Already at issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, Trump started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living. He has also slashed taxes for the wealthy and stalled the mechanics of Congress by strong-arming his allies into supporting his wildly unpopular voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running HHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

Kennedy has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is crashing out on social media over the latest development in Kash Patel’s $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic. 

The Atlantic filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit Monday, arguing that Patel’s suit did not  “plausibly allege” that the magazine had published any of the challenged statements with actual malice. 

“Complaint fails to state a viable defamation claim against Defendants,” the filing said.

Journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick had reported in April that Patel was known to drink to excess, delay time-sensitive operations, behave erratically, and was often unreachable, raising concerns about whether he was a national security risk. Patel filed the lawsuit alleging the article was “replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office.”

In response to the latest filing, the FBI’s Rapid Response account on X posted its own rant Monday night against the publication, seemingly on behalf of its director. 

“The Atlantic spends its days propagating false narratives because it has zero interest in any form of real journalism. It adds no value to society except as the leading slop rag of the day,” the FBI wrote. The account then proceeded to rant about several of the FBI’s recent “historic wins.”

Is it normal for a government agency to get down in the mud for its beleaguered director? In Trumpworld, maybe. 

The Atlantic also filed a motion to stay discovery, except for Touhy requests, allowing the publication to seek factual discovery—documents and depositions from key individuals—from the FBI and Department of Justice.

“If Director Patel did not want to face this process, he should not have filed this suit,” editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg said in a statement.

Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, is opposing the Trump administration’s move to arrest and deport Haitians following its decision to end their Temporary Protected Status this week, calling it a “mistake” and “a blow to the state of Ohio.”

DeWine said in an interview with CBS Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations against the Haitian community would be bad for Ohio’s economy and that of Springfield in particular, where many Haitians have settled. 

“These are people who have helped Springfield really come back,” DeWine said to CBS, explaining that Haitians have filled jobs and opened businesses where the economy once struggled. “The Haitians who are living there and employed there, they came there to work, and they came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.”

DeWine also noted that Haiti’s security and political situation is still unstable, with gangs controlling large parts of the country and the capital, Port-au-Prince. The State Department has warned Americans not to travel there, and DeWine described the country as being in “virtual chaos” with “no semblance of government.”  

“Haiti is hell today. So you’d be sending people … back to hell,” DeWine said. “Very few of these Haitians will voluntarily go back to Haiti. If they have to leave, they’ll go someplace else. They want to work. They want to support their family. They don’t want to go back to Haiti.”

To the Trump administration, none of this matters. White House adviser Stephen Miller is excited about the prospect of deporting Haitians. He has claimed that Haiti is safe “for Haitians” and celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the administration to end Temporary Protected Status.

“We can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants,” Miller said.

More than 300,000 people are set to lose those protections this week, and many of them are among the 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians that live in and around Springfield. Back in 2024, President Trump spread a racist rumor that the community was “eating cats and dogs.” Now, Ohio’s economy could suffer a $400 million loss, and people are in danger of being sent to a war zone because of Trump and his administration’s racist deportation policy.