This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project – St. Louis, a nonprofit news team covering Missouri’s criminal justice systems. Subscribe to their email list, and follow The Marshall Project on Instagram, Reddit and YouTube.
There was a precious time last summer when a Guatemalan immigrant finally felt at home in Missouri.
He, his wife and their young son were in a festive group of random people who’d gone to a mid-Missouri river to relax and float downstream in a throng of canoes and kayaks.
“It was beautiful,” he told The Marshall Project – St. Louis in Spanish. “We had been all over and we felt welcome.”
Now, they are afraid to enjoy those moments. Apart from going to work and running necessary errands, the family is hunkered down, hiding for their lives.
Six months into President Donald Trump’s second term, a historic crackdown on undocumented residents intensifies. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a growing pack of agencies have helped transport, detain and deport thousands of people from all corners of the country, while pushing others deeper underground.
Immigration attorneys in St. Louis say people are being detained without notice. The local ICE office lobby is often packed. The Guatemalan family has a relative who was recently deported.
The Trump administration has increased travel bans, detention space and daily arrest goals. High-profile elected officials have been wrestled to the floor and handcuffed while trying to intervene and demand due process. Meanwhile, millions of noncitizens remain in the shadows, wanting to be left alone to earn a better living for their families.
The Marshall Project – St. Louis is withholding the undocumented family’s names because they fear being detained by immigration authorities.
“We haven’t left to go anywhere,” the father said from inside a bare-bones rental home along a busy street in the St. Louis area. “We can’t because of fear. For us, as Latinos, somebody might ask us for documents, call the police or something else.”
The Triumph
He described their home of El Triunfo, Guatemala, as a threatening and corrupt rivertown on the border of southern Mexico controlled by organized crime.
That’s why he fled to Mexico in 2018, first to Cancún, then to Mexico City, and Nuevo Laredo, right across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.
In Nuevo Laredo, he said extortionists threatened to kill him and a family friend who was hosting him there if he didn’t pay $4,000 and help serve as a lookout for the group. He did that for a few months before paying $10,000 for a guided crossing into the United States.
He made it to Houston and paid another $1,500 for the final leg to St. Ann, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb where he initially lived. He arrived in February 2019 with a heavy heart.
“I had come here to support my family and get ahead,” he said. “I was also leaving them behind.”
St. Ann doesn’t seem like the place to find solace. A community of small, post-World War II houses and a lot of parkland, it became known for an aggressive police department that held and turned people over to immigration authorities.
Aaron Jimenez, the city’s elected chief of police, said the reputation is a holdover from a prior administration and era.
“We aren’t looking to deport people,” said Jimenez, who said he is serving his last term as chief. “We have so many other problems in our area, like homelessness and overdoses.”
Once he arrived, the Guatemalan man started working odd jobs to begin paying for his wife and son to join him.
His wife made the voyage to Missouri in 2023, about four years after he did. It cost them $16,000. A year after that, their son made the guided crossing without them for $8,000.
“It’s better to have him suffer a couple days than to have him stay in my hometown,” he said.
Finally united, they had that fun day on a mid-Missouri river. They also drove to Chicago last summer to pursue documents at the Guatemalan consulate. While there, they toured The Bean at Millennium Park and had a taste of home at a Guatemalan fast-food restaurant.
They enrolled their son, now 11, in school, where he easily made friends. The wife would linger at drop-off to chat with parents.
The good vibe didn’t last.
These days, the mom won’t linger at school pick-up or drop-off. Their once outgoing son can’t hang out at the neighborhood park or pool this summer. The father is scared that neighbors would report them to the police, so they mostly stay inside.
Recently, the father said he was pulled over while passing through Clayton, the prominent seat of St. Louis County government, with his latest boss in the vehicle.
He said he doesn’t have a driver’s license, but he pays for insurance.
The police let him go. Many others haven’t been so lucky.
Their bodies are also still recovering since they left Guatemala. He injured his back falling from the second story of a home while working as a roofer; she was hurt in a crash on her way to Missouri.
Immigration enforcement
Jessica Mayo, an attorney and co-director of the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project in St. Louis, said that people are being detained without notice, sometimes through deceptive means that can lead to deportation. Some are separated from their children without plans in place to care for them.
“Many immigrants in this country right now are living in a constant crisis mode of fear and anxiety,” Mayo said at a rally in June.
She said the immigration system isn’t designed to help people.
“The fact that it can be used to destroy communities and families is not an accident,” she told the crowd. “This has been going on since long before Trump, but Trump is certainly doing everything he can to ramp it up.”
Jimenez, the St. Ann police chief, said in an interview that there needs to be a quicker path to citizenship and authorized worker programs.
“Let’s get these people who are really good people vetted,” he said. “That’s easier than, ‘Let’s get rid of everybody.’”
While he said his department isn’t prioritizing deportations, they have referred some people to immigration authorities in recent months, including a Peruvian man who allegedly assaulted a young woman. For his part, the chief said he doesn’t seek to refer people accused of nonviolent offenses.
“I do leave it to the officer’s discretion,” he said. “If we didn’t want that, then we might as well have robots as police.”
Easy decision
The so-called Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have seen mass migration driven by poverty and high crime, with more expected in the coming years, according to the Congressional Research Service.
About half the population of Guatemala is under the age of 25, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency data from 2024. Returning isn’t a viable option for the man from El Triunfo and his family.
The Guatemalan man said his brother, a street vendor, was kidnapped in late May after crossing the border into southern Mexico to buy supplies for work. Family members checked hospitals and put up signs asking for the public’s help locating him.
He shared a recording with The Marshal Project – St. Louis of a telephone conversation with a man who claimed to have information about his brother and demanded a $4,000 ransom for it. He said his extended family had paid the equivalent of about $500 to other opportunists. His brother hadn’t surfaced, and threats remained against another.
“We hope that he returns, and that if he’s dead they return the body,” he said, a tear trickling through the whiskers of his unshaven face.
He said he’d quickly try to return to Missouri if he were detained and deported. His back is sore and the trip is costly, but there’s less risk and more opportunity to work in St. Louis than in the Guatemalan rivertown his small family fled.
They’d also like to have more children.
“Not right now because of what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t want something to happen to me and she is left alone, a pregnant woman trying to get a job.”
