Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of St. Cecilia Catholic Church in south St. Louis as more than 50 community members gathered for a funeral Mass on Tuesday.
Lucy Garzón slowly walked down the aisle, surrounded by family. At the altar rested the ashes of her son, Brayan Garzón-Rayo, in an urn draped with a white cloth.
Beside it stood a framed portrait inscribed with words Lucy knows by heart:
En la tierra, mi guerrero. En el cielo, mi ángel.
On earth, my fighter. In heaven, my angel.
Garzón-Rayo arrived in the United States from Colombia in 2023, seeking safety with his family. He died in April while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
For weeks, his body remained in rural Crawford County — unclaimed and far from his family in St. Louis. His mother carried the weight of that with her every day.
“Every day I wake up with that emptiness in the pit of my stomach, knowing I still haven’t been able to give him a proper burial,” Lucy Garzón told St. Louis Public Radio in Spanish last April, noting she couldn’t afford it. “That’s what has me drowning right now.”
That changed last month. With help from the Ashrei Foundation, a local nonprofit that supports underserved communities and works to disrupt generational cycles of poverty, Garzón-Rayo’s remains were finally returned to his mother. The organization coordinated his repatriation from rural Missouri with support from partners, including St. Francis Community Services.
The context
Sara Ruiz, the Ashrei Foundation’s executive director, said she was shocked — but not surprised — to learn about Garzón-Rayo’s case.
“A long-standing American tradition [is] ensuring that we have a disposable human workforce that we can scapegoat for political reasons and for financial benefit,” she said. “That is absolutely at play right here in Missouri — seeing what happened to Brian and his family's experience after that just makes it so evident.”
Ruiz said mass incarceration systems are operating within the United States, including in Midwest states like Missouri. She said it reinforces what she calls a poorly conceived "prevention through deterrence" strategy, but doesn’t consider the realities of why people flee their home countries.
“People don't look at the border, or don't look at life on the interior, and say: ‘Yeah, that looks really great. I think I'll give that a try,’” Ruiz said. “That's not how people make decisions.”
Garzón-Rayo had been in ICE custody for just a few weeks. In March, St. Louis police arrested him after a string of low-level offenses. By April, he was dead — STLPR reporting uncovered that he died by suicide.
An ICE death report also revealed that, despite being held in federal custody for weeks, Garzón-Rayo was never given a mental health evaluation.
His death comes amid a nationwide surge in immigration enforcement, part of a federal crackdown that’s filling local jails and straining already fragile oversight systems.
Garzón-Rayo spent his final days in the Phelps County Jail in southeastern Missouri. It’s part of a patchwork of small-town Missouri facilities ICE relies on to house detainees. The same jail recently held a rural mother from Hong Kong, who was detained during an immigration check-in in St. Louis.
Advocacy groups warn that these rural facilities often lack access to adequate medical and mental health care.
A 2024 joint report by the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights and American Oversight found ICE’s mechanisms for investigating deaths in custody to be “critically flawed” and largely ineffective in preventing future fatalities.
Ruiz said immigrant deaths, at times, are normalized as an unfortunate byproduct of an overburdened system.
“They're written off as deaths that don't matter because people shouldn't have been here in the first place,” she said. “That's a really dangerous logic if we're also going to purport to be a nation that respects the rights and dignity of the human person.”
ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including questions on jail conditions, after Garzón-Rayo’s death
Mourning the dead
At St. Cecilia’s, there were no answers — only grief.
Mourners filled the church, some of them families with small children and others community providers who work with immigrants. A few slipped in quietly after the service began, heads bowed and faces drawn.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment a long time. I feel some peace,” said Lucy Garzón following the Mass. “I never imagined that there would be so many people here.”
While the Ashrei Foundation was able to help one St. Louis mother, Ruiz said she wants the community to do more.
"None of this should have happened,” she said. “If we can help this mom and Brayan’s family through this most awful part of their life — [so] that they can feel loved and cared for — then that's the basic bare minimum that we can offer as a community. Beyond that, none of this is good enough.”
Garzón-Rayo came to the United States looking for refuge. On Tuesday, his journey came to a close — not in the detention cell where it unraveled, but in the arms of his mother more than a hundred miles away.
Editor’s Note: Lucy Garzón also goes by Adriana Garzón. STLPR has referred to her as “Lucy” for continuity.
