Estela Ramos Baten, the mother of honor student and star athlete Nory Sontay Ramos — who was deported with her on July 4 to Guatemala following a routine immigration appointment in Los Angeles — died on Sept. 8 in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. She was 45.
On a phone call, Nory explained that her mother had been “overwhelmed” with stress since their deportation and terrified to be back in Guatemala, the country she had fled in 2015 after allegedly receiving threats from members of the 18th Street Gang. Estela suffered from “persistent headaches” tied to high blood pressure. “She barely slept,” Nory said. “She just kept thinking about our situation and the possibility of the gang finding us. She was very worried.”
According to Nory, last Monday evening around 7:00 p.m. (Guatemala time), her mother told her she was feeling unwell. “We insisted on taking her to a doctor, but she refused. She was too afraid to go out,” Nory said, breaking down in tears. After they helped her to bed, Estela called her partner in Los Angeles, who had been concerned after hearing she wasn’t feeling well. She told him she “wanted to rest” and urged him “not to worry” and to get some sleep himself.
Hours later, her condition worsened. Estela began vomiting and collapsed. Nory, 18, and one of her sisters, 22, who lives in Guatemala and was with them at the time, tried to help but they had no medicine.
In her weakened state, Estela told her daughters, “I feel like I’m going to die.” Nory and her sister stroked her head, trying to comfort her. Soon after, Estela became unresponsive. Believing she had simply fallen asleep, they tried to wake her. When she didn’t respond, they screamed for help, attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and called a neighbor. The neighbor, upon seeing Estela pale and cold, phoned for an ambulance. By the time paramedics arrived, Nory said, her mother was already dead. It was 11:30 p.m. local time.
The death certificate, read during her funeral by local authorities, listed the cause of death as “liver cirrhosis,” a chronic disease often related to alcohol abuse.
Estela’s oldest daughter, who lives in Los Angeles and whom we are not naming for security reasons, said her mother “had a drinking problem when she was young,” but had stopped drinking “a long time ago.” Cirrhosis, experts say, can significantly affect blood pressure, something Nory said they were unable to treat after being deported. Since their arrival in Guatemala on July 4, they said they had tried to find the same medications Estela was taking in Los Angeles, but fear of being recognized by the same gang that had once threatened them kept them largely confined indoors.
“I want people to know that my mom’s medications were taken away and not returned,” Nory told MSNBC in an in-person interview in Quetzaltenango on Aug. 27. Through tears after her mother’s death, she repeated: “They took away my mother’s medicine. I had no way to help her.”
MSNBC reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to clarify whether medications were confiscated. The agency said that “during her short stay [at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center], she was given a medical evaluation and prescribed the medications she needed.” But Estela claims her medications were confiscated in Los Angeles, where she was first detained, not in Texas, and that at the time of her deportation, they were not returned. ICE also said Estela and Nory were “given due process and exhausted all legal options to remain in the U.S.”
The deportation
Estela and Nory were detained on June 30 during a routine immigration check-in in Los Angeles — one of many in their yearslong attempt to adjust their legal status in the United States, where they had lived since 2015. That day, they were transferred to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas, and two days later they were deported to Guatemala.
Both told MSNBC — first in phone interviews and later in person — that they were not allowed to call relatives to notify them of the deportation. They also said their belongings were confiscated, including a list of prescribed medications Estela had long relied on to manage debilitating headaches caused by high blood pressure. When they arrived in Guatemala, their phones and other belongings were returned, but not the medications.
During our time in their house, Estela, a short woman with brown skin and traditional Maya features, spoke softly. She rubbed her hands constantly, almost nervously, and often stood by the heavy iron door that guarded the house, checking to make sure no one was outside. Every noise from the street made her jump. In broken Spanish, since her native language is K’iche’, a Mayan dialect, she whispered her greatest fear: “My friend heard the gang leader is asking questions about me. Where is Estela?”
According to immigration documents, Estela required medical attention for facial and body injuries, and Nory fainted from fright.
According to Estela’s sworn statement to U.S. immigration authorities, the threats began in 2014, the year she separated from her husband and moved back to her parents’ home in the remote village of Pitzal, Momostenango, about an hour north of Quetzaltenango. Without a husband, she explained, she was seen as vulnerable and an easy target for gang recruitment.
The violence escalated in late 2015. Eight members of the gang stormed her home and “nearly killed” her in front of Nory, she testified. “We heard someone banging on the door,” Estela told immigration officials. “When I opened it, eight people came inside. … Suddenly [one of the gang members] began hitting me in the face, dragging me by the hair across the floor, and shouting: ‘This is my final warning. If you don’t change your mind, the next time I see you on the street, I’ll kill you.’”
According to immigration documents, Estela required medical attention for facial and body injuries, and Nory fainted from fright. “He punched her in the face, dragged her on the floor by her hair, injured her, fractured her finger, and left her bleeding from my nose and my mouth,” reads a declaration submitted by Estela and Nory’s lawyer. The document adds, “Nory … witnessed the severe brutalization of her mother.”
That day, Estela said, she decided to leave for the United States, but shortly after their arrival, their asylum claim was denied. Immigration court documents show the judge found they had “failed to demonstrate … or establish eligibility for asylum,” in part because the evidence included “a photo [of one of the gang members] being arrested.” Estela wrote in immigration documents that the gang member was later released on bail and resumed threatening her and her family.
Nevertheless, the judge ordered voluntary departure in 2019. According to records reviewed by MSNBC, the case was appealed, and as of March this year they had no outstanding warrants.
A painful void
The pain of Estela’s death has been deeply felt in Los Angeles, where her partner and her eldest daughter remained after Nory and Estela were deported.
“José” — a pseudonym we are using for Estela’s partner for safety reasons — told MSNBC during a video call that he was devastated. “Last night when I spoke with her, I never imagined it would be the last time I’d hear her voice,” he said through tears.
He explained that he had been preparing to send her medications, but delays arose because they had to request new refills after immigration officers confiscated her monthly supply. On the call, he showed us the package he had been preparing filled with vitamins, pain creams and other supplements. “The stronger medicines,” he said, “were arriving today.”
My first thought was that the gang had killed her. I said, ‘They killed her, they killed her.’ But it wasn’t that. It was stress, it was sadness. Deportation killed her."
Estela's Partner, 'JOSE'
At that moment, he let out a pained groan: “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how I’m going to live without her. I feel trapped, alone. I feel like [immigration] is coming for me at any moment. My greatest wish is to bring Nory back to Los Angeles. But how? How do I do it?” After a pause, he added: “When they called to tell me she had died, my first thought was that the gang had killed her. I said, ‘They killed her, they killed her.’ But it wasn’t that. It was stress, it was sadness. Deportation killed her.”
Nory’s sister in Los Angeles, who lives with her young children, said Nory gave her the news. “Nory called to say my mom wasn’t feeling well. I begged them to take her to a doctor, but my mom refused. I understood; she was terrified to leave the house and always told me she would never forgive herself if something happened to Nory.” She added that after being deported, their mother once told her: “If something happens to Nory, I’ll kill myself.”
One of her children, a 7-year-old raised with the help of Nory and Estela, overheard her cries upon hearing the news. When he realized his grandmother had died, he began sobbing. “My heart hurts,” he said. “Please don’t send me to school. I don’t want to be deported like my grandma and never see you again.” Through tears, she promised him that would never happen. “It was the only way to comfort him,” she said. “But the truth is, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
The last gift
Last Tuesday morning, Estela’s body was transported from Quetzaltenango to the village where she was born in Momostenango. Riding in the white funeral van were Nory and one of her sisters.
Upon arrival, the body was received by dozens of villagers, including women in traditional Maya dresses, many carrying children on their backs. The arrival was broadcast by a local TV station, a custom in the community. Images showed the town’s mayor offering condolences in K’iche to family and friends. Then, walking together, neighbors accompanied the casket to the place where she would be laid out for the wake.
Nory, who had not been in Momostenango since childhood, said returning felt unsettling — it was there, after all, that the threats against her mother had begun. “I don’t want to go. I’m scared,” Nory said. “But I’m not going to leave my mom alone.”
And she hasn’t.
Since the casket arrived in their village, Nory has remained by her mother’s side. The local broadcast showed her hugging the casket, clinging to it for hours in the same black hoodie she wore the day she was deported.
In keeping with local tradition, common across much of Latin America, where burials often take place within 24-48 hours, Estela was laid to rest last Wednesday. She was buried with the flags of Guatemala and the United States draped over her coffin. As Nory watched her mother’s body being lowered into the ground, she cried out in anguish, “Why did you leave me?”
When asked what she remembered after her mother died, Nory said very little. “My mind went blurry. I don’t remember what the paramedics said, I almost passed out. All I remember is this feeling — I had this bad feeling in my heart. I wanted my mom to see a doctor. I told my sister in Los Angeles to please send us money because my mom needed to see a doctor, but my mom refused to go.”
The money they had been saving to hire a lawyer to appeal their deportation case will now, Nory explained, go toward the burial. But before that, some of it was used to buy a traditional Maya dress so Estela could be laid to rest in it. “My mom always wanted a traditional Maya dress. She loved them and would get so excited when she saw them. It will be the last gift we can give her.”
