Giovanni Gonzalez de la Cruz was born in June last year in St. Louis.
A brand-new citizen, her future could take a remarkably different path than her immigrant parents’, who fled poverty and violence in Central America.
Her mom, Glendy Marisol Gonzalez de la Cruz, 25, worked two jobs, mostly in fruit packing. She returned to work three weeks after giving birth. Gonzalez de la Cruz and her three daughters, including little Giovanni, lived in Overland, Missouri. She was waiting for her asylum hearing in 2027, according to a spokesperson from Fuerza, a community organizing project under the Missouri Workers Center that advocates for immigrant rights in the St. Louis region.
Giovanni’s father, Nixon Giovanni Perez Paz, 43, wasn’t there to see his youngest daughter’s birth. He had been picked up by ICE in April of 2025 on the way to a roofing job and was deported that same month to Guatemala. He was undocumented.
An ICE spokesperson told St. Louis Public Radio’s Brian Munoz, who first reported the story, that Perez Paz had been convicted twice for drunk driving in Overland and put on four years’ probation, but there are no records to back up that claim in the Missouri court database.
Gonzalez de la Cruz was nine months pregnant when her husband was deported. She couldn’t afford the rent on her own, and she worried about her daughters being separated from her. She moved back to Guatemala a few weeks ago, on June 17, to reunite her family.
I wonder how desperate and scared she must have felt to take her girls — ages 11, 5 and 1 — back to a place where she feared for her life.
The news reports of what happened next read like a scene from a horror film: Giovanni, a 14-month-old baby, was found in a sugar cane field in southern Guatemala, suffering from dehydration and crying next to her mother’s body. Her parents had been gagged, bound at their hands and feet, and shot to death.
How long had Giovanni been out there crying? What had she witnessed? What would become of these orphaned children?
Regardless of one’s position on our country’s broken immigration system, surely any human would find this baby’s circumstances tragic and heart-wrenching.
Actually, many Americans reacted to this news with shocking callousness and cruelty.
Thousands of comments — at least some of them actual people and not bots — responded on Facebook with posts like: “Don’t care,” “What is the real story […] poor parent choices,” “I mean, clearly, they weren’t meant to be here at any point,” “Not my problem, come legally.”
Scrolling through the responses to the news of these murders, you’ll find comments cheering the deportation that led to two dead parents and three orphaned girls.
But then, there’s an entirely different group of commenters — those who see this family as humans and as their neighbors.
Jennifer Morales posted that she had helped this family in the past.
“I would have never imagined this would be the kind of update I would be reading. For those of you assuming that this family didn’t do things the ‘right way,’ you are incorrect … This poor family fled from violence to the U.S. and it betrayed them … I’m saddened and in disbelief at the inhumane and cruel comments from other parents.”
This latter group planned a vigil in honor of the family.
What happens in a country to lead to such divergent responses to the brutal murder of two people? It’s more than just the absence of basic empathy; it’s outright cruelty.
A look at American history — especially the parts this administration doesn’t want anyone to hear or read about — reveals a long-standing pattern of how some white people have viewed the suffering and murder of their nonwhite countrymen. They are the ones who attended lynchings of Black men as celebrated social events. The ones who threw rocks at Black children trying to attend previously segregated schools. The ones who ignore — or far worse, justify — the countless children maimed and killed overseas by American bombs.
People behave this way if they see others as less than human.
They don’t see Giovanni as a St. Louisan, as one of ours.
They see a baby crying over her dead parents as a chance to score points in a debate.
Giovanni’s family deserved far better.
Aisha Sultan is a St. Louis-based journalist who studies parenting in the digital age while trying to keep up with her tech-savvy children. Find her on social media: @AishaS.