The smell of death surrounds Donald Trump’s regime from Guatemala to Pittsburgh

Ooooh that smell

Can’t you smell that smell

Ooooh that smell

The smell of death surrounds you

— Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell”

The United States government might wash its hands of any responsibility for the more than 700,000 human beings who’ve been deported since Donald Trump returned to the White House some 18 months ago, but it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to determine who’s to blame for the blood stains that have been left behind.

Last month, police outside the city of Retalhuleu in southwestern Guatemala found Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, 43, and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, dead in a sugar cane field. They’d been bound, gagged, and then executed by gunshots, with their 14-month-old daughter crying next to her mother’s lifeless body.

When Trump took office in January 2025, the couple was living in a suburb of St. Louis — working essential jobs and raising their three daughters while seeking to become legal residents of a country that had offered refuge from rampant crime and poverty back home in Guatemala.

The dream turned into a nightmare with one traffic stop in April 2025, as Pérez Paz was driving to work. Although a subsequent NPR investigation found just one permanent mark on his record — a paid $200 fine for driving without a license — Pérez Paz was swiftly deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. González de la Cruz had an active asylum application, but after struggling to support her kids while working two jobs she decided to return home voluntarily.

The couple was murdered only weeks after they reunited in Guatemala.

“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,” the dead man’s brother, Ronaldo Pérez Paz. told People magazine. “Unfortunately, immigration — the (U.S.) government — doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

No, it doesn’t. Nor did anyone with that government see the humanity of Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian asylum seeker with a history of mental-health struggles. She ended up in immigration custody after an arrest and was dumped by ICE agents at a Pittsburgh bus stop wearing summer clothes during a brutal February cold snap. She was found dead three days later, and a medical examiner has ruled that Michel’s death was a homicide.

“I believe that we need to observe all our brothers and sisters as neighbors,” Jaime Martinez of the Pittsburgh immigrant-rights group Frontline Dignity told the Guardian, invoking the golden rule that was shattered by Trump’s cruelty-is-the-point regime.

The smell of death permeates the so-called brain trust of American militarism that decided back in February — for reasons still unfathomable — to bomb Iran back into the Stone Ages, in an on-again, off-again campaign where it seems the collateral damage is the point.

Last week, according to a deep analysis by the New York Times, U.S. forces dropped a massive, 2,000-pound bomb in the middle of a dense residential neighborhood on Iran’s Qeshm Island along the contested Strait of Hormuz, pulverizing a family’s home.

The 3:40 a.m. blast killed Zahra Jafari; her husband, Qeysar Jafari, a taxi driver; and their son Sina, according to Iranian news agencies, who said two other children were rescued alive from the rubble.

Less than halfway through Trump’s second presidency, his strongman rule is increasingly becoming a death cult. The stench of immoral indifference to the humanity of anyone not part of the MAGA movement is spreadingas fast as the COVID-19 virus that helped bring an end to Trump’s disastrous first presidency.

» READ MORE: People are dying in Trump’s squalid concentration camps | Will Bunch

I realize I’ve probably overused my lifetime quota for invoking one of the greatest four minutes of filmmaking I’ve ever seen, but yet again I am reminded of Martin Scorsese’s brilliant montage in Goodfellas as dead bodies pile up in parked Cadillacs or on freezer-truck meat hooks in the wake of a huge armored-car heist. It’s a testament to the greed, brutality, and senseless violence of the mob life.

Today, I can’t help but hear the mournful piano coda from “Layla” as I watch the corpses of Trump’s recklessly lethal rule wash up on Caribbean beaches near the driftwood of their obliterated fishing boats, or inside the bombed sanctuary of an Iranian girls school, or from medical neglect inside ICE’s growing gulag archipelago.

The nattering nabobs who scoff at the notion that the United States — whose president on Saturday posted an AI photo of him kissing Jesus on a golden cross wrapped in the American flag — has sunk into fascism because there are no Auschwitz-style death camps just don’t get it.

Whether it’s ICE agents firing bullets into an immigrant’s car, or deportation flights that dump its passengers back into the gang violence they thought they’d escaped, or ending the programs that saved millions of kids in Africa from malaria, the Trump body count is already into the thousands, and it grows every day of his warped presidency.

The statistics matter, but you can’t put a number on the rank immorality of an utter disregard for whether people who don’t look like you live or die. Whatever the Trump death toll turns out to be, this stain on the American soul is never coming out.

There are rings of death in Donald Trump’s America. There are the direct attacks that jolt the conscience — the notorious fatal shootings by immigration agents of immigrants such as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and protesters such as Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the pointless wars that bombed the Iranian school in Minab or an apartment building in Venezuela, and the boat attacks on vaguely alleged smugglers off South America that have killed more than 200.

But there’s also an outer band of gross neglect or indifference to human life that has led to scores of additional deaths, including the more than 50 people — some who’d complained of medical conditions that were ignored — who’ve died in ICE custody since Trump returned to office, or the unknown number who’d faced murder or poor medical care after deportation to the trouble-laden nations they’d tried to escape.

Then there’s the biggest — and most abstract — ring of all. It’s difficult to agree on an exact count, let alone bring accountability, for what researchers say is a wave of death — 600,000 people, mostly children, according to one Boston University study — that has resulted from the decimation of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). And what will become of the domestic surge of preventable diseases such as measles under a government whose top health official is a notorious critic of vaccines? At what point does bad policy become depraved indifference?

Death is contagious. In Ecuador, prosecutor Alexandra Bravo was investigating the U.S. drone strikes that destroyed three of her homeland’s fishing boats when a gunman on a motorcycle assassinated her and her sister. There’s no evidence that the United States has any direct responsibility for her death, but there’s every reason to believe she’d still be alive if this Trumpian death cult had not destabilized the planet.

The MAGA movement thrives on a brand of white supremacy that pumps up its adherents by dehumanizing everyone around them. And when people are stripped of their humanity, the Ten Commandments seem to no longer apply to their tormentors. It’s hard to reach Trump’s promised goal of 1 million deportations every year unless the deportees are just a number — not a mom, or a dad, or a cherished neighbor.

A bad president can be replaced every four years. A killing spree screams out for immediate action. We need to take whatever steps are possible right now to stop this rogue government before tomorrow’s headline about the next Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz or Daphy Michel.

The stench of death has already become unbearable.

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