Media Must Put Human Faces on the Deportation Crisis

In the early hours of an April morning, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz was driving his brother to their roofing jobs when ICE agents exited an unmarked vehicle, swarmed them, placed them in handcuffs and shackles, and told them they were being arrested for entering the country illegally — with no warrant. Nixon was deported to Guatemala. His wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz — who had an active asylum case — self-deported with their three young daughters to rejoin him. Weeks later, the couple was found bound, gagged, hands and feet tied, shot dead in a sugarcane field. Their one-year-old daughter was found alive beside her mother's body, dehydrated, having been there for hours. Three daughters are now orphans. "If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive," Nixon's brother said. "Unfortunately, immigration — the U.S. government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them." 

This story received local coverage and a vigil attended by hundreds. It received almost no national attention. That silence is a choice — and it reflects a broader failure of the mainstream media to cover deportation not as a policy abstraction, but as a cascade of human consequences with names, faces, and children left behind.

We call on The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, and other mainstream outlets to cover Nixon and Glendy's story — and the countless untold stories like it — with the same prominence they give to White House press briefings and congressional hearings. Deportation policy is not an abstraction. It is a government action with life-and-death consequences. The public deserves reporting that makes that undeniable.