Spread the word through the town: Mr. Michael P. Jones, owner of the Pauley Jones funeral home — modest yet refined — is looking for an artist among the nearly 8,000 residents of Denison, in western Iowa, to draw a chair and a Cuban flag on the urn he now carries, on which the following inscription will be engraved: “Feglys Campos Arriba (10/21/88–8/15/25). Forever in our hearts.”
Tall, athletic, in his fifties, Mr. Michael P. Jones wears a playful tie that stands out against his blue shirt, the same color as the clear sky in Denison, the typical Midwestern town surrounded by soybean and corn fields. He grew up in a family dedicated to the funeral business and is an expert when it comes to processing costs for burials, cremations, and the scattering of ashes. His funeral home, which is over a hundred years old and hosts about three wakes a month, recently handled the funerals of Mrs. Deloris Adams, a social worker who died at 94, and Mrs. Lile Ann Petersen, a former elementary school teacher who drew her last breath at 92. Both were charming, elegant women, people of faith, survived by several children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews.
But the latest deceased at the Pauley Jones Funeral Home is not named Conrad or Fahn, but rather Campos Arriba. He was not born in Crawford County but in the Cuban province of Guantánamo, and he was not an older white person but a 36-year-old Brown man who did not die of Parkinson’s or old age, but was shot by the local police.
The news has frightened the people of Denison, a town where nothing ever happens. Residents leave their doors unlocked, along with the wide gardens and porches, and leave the windows of their cars and pickup trucks rolled down. “They don’t rob you here, but now they kill you,” says a disgruntled neighbor. People eat mac and cheese and tacos, play Powerball with the shared hope of becoming millionaires, and go to bed around 6 p.m. Any slight disruption to this routine becomes an event: from the gym classes at the town pool to the garage sales advertised in the weekend newspaper. Locals take pride in a few things, like being born in the same town as actress Donna Reed, who left the town the motto from one of her movies — a phrase they have engraved as a reminder atop an ethanol tank: “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The last incident that shocked the town was the discovery in 2003 of 11 skeletons of Latino migrants who had left on a train from the Mexican city of Matamoros and were found months later by workers cleaning the railcars at a grain plant. Esteban, who moved to Denison from Texas 17 years ago, says the only living thing the police have ever killed in the town was a dog. That’s why the people of Denison are now outraged. If you ask about Feglys Antonio Campos Arriba, almost everyone bursts into tears and says the same thing: “A very well-mannered guy,” “He wanted to work all the time, even on vacation days,” “He liked to dance and sing,” “That shouldn’t have happened to him, especially not the way it did,” “There was no reason to kill him.”
This is also what Mr. Michael P. Jones thinks, wiping away a tear. When he talks about Feglys, he does not seem like someone used to dealing with death on an almost daily basis. On August 17, Brenda Hernández and a friend approached him, wary of the fees he might charge for Feglys’s funeral services. He had no family in the United States as his father, daughter, and sister still live in Cuba, and his mother and another sister, in Spain. Brenda, a sharp 24-year-old, had first gone to the neighboring Huebner funeral home, where Feglys’s body was located. They spent two days looking for him, until the Iowa State examiner confirmed the location.
— And how do you know Feglys? — a slender girl working at Huebner asked Brenda.
— He was my friend from the Smithfield pork plant — Brenda replied.
— Did he work? — the girl wanted to know.
— Yes, he worked until he was fired.
— And why did they fire him?
— Because his work permit expired.
— And how do you plan to pay for this service? — the girl asked, worried.
— That’s not your concern, we as a community will raise the money — Brenda told her.
The girl at Huebner advised her to look for another place in the state that could cremate Feglys for a $1,000 fee, if they couldn’t raise the little over $6,000 she was charging. The Latinos of Denison — friends, neighbors, and acquaintances of Feglys — began collecting funds. Brenda and her friend called Mr. Michael P. Jones, who asked if Feglys was the young man the police had shot at Washington Park. If it was him, he said, they could give whatever they wanted, a donation, and he would cover the cost of the service.
***
In Denison, everything is close by, even the Smithfield factory, which hires most of the town’s migrants. More than 10,000 pigs are slaughtered every day at the plant, a business that nets its owners more than $14 billion annually nationwide. It’s the migrants who carve the pigs, debone, skin the animals, and process the meat. White people occupy other positions, such as supervisors or managers — a boundary the people of Denison know all too well.
That divide is felt outside the plant too: at the pub, where only white people go, and at Cronks, where only Latinos gather; in the futbol games organized by Mexicans, and the soccer matches played by Iowans; or at the morning Mass in English, and the afternoon service in Spanish held at one of the many churches in the area. Sometimes the reminder is more explicit, like the red-and-white flag hanging outside an abandoned house that reads: “Trump Nation.”
At the factory, people are sad, and they want to know what happened on August 15 around 11 p.m. in Washington Park, in the center of town. An armed police officer killed Feglys, a migrant like them, a worker like them, who stacked pork loins and pushed carts piled high with hides. Feglys, who arrived on foot before anyone else, would drink Red Bull then work for hours. Until he was fired.
Feglys was always on the move. To his mother, Magalys Arriba Fuentes, 58, a weary woman who makes a living cleaning floors in Madrid, he promised that someday he would bring her to the United States. “He wanted to have a good life and give it to us,” says his mother. Feglys was born in Guantánamo and was a “very miserable” child. In his twenties, he moved to the Isla de la Juventud, where he worked at a meat processing company, despite having studied veterinary science at a technical school. In 2019, he left with some cousins and one of his two sisters for Russia, and then passed through Macedonia, Slovenia, and Serbia, until he reached Spain. “It was very bad for us here,” his mother says. “He didn’t get papers or a job, and he returned to Cuba in 2022.” By April 2023, Feglys was on the move again, this time to Nicaragua, to begin a journey to Mexico. He entered the United States on July 22 of that same year through the CBP One app, which has brought nearly a million people into the country.
Yamila Gainza, from his hometown in Cuba, welcomed him into her home in Texas. She remembers him as a “decent” and “defenseless” young man. She was the one who helped him obtain his work permit. Later, with a friend, Feglys moved to Denison, a town that many migrants have relocated to recently. The place may seem cold and distant, but they arrive fleeing the high costs of states like Florida, New York, or California. In Denison, where a Smithfield worker — or an employee at one of its bacon, window, or ethanol factories — can earn $23.95 an hour, a family pays $700 a month in rent for a three-bedroom house, less than half of what it would cost them in any of those other states.
There’s another benefit to living in Denison. According to its residents, they’ve never seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents prowling around with their faces covered, as they do across much of the country at a time when the government has tasked them with expelling migrants. No one knows exactly why they haven’t come to Denison, and locals joke that the town is in the middle of nowhere — far from everything, even ICE. But in case they ever do show up, Smithfield workers already have a plan and a secret escape route.
Across the state of Iowa, ICE has arrested nearly 500 migrants this year, and in neighboring Nebraska, the government is preparing to open the “Cornhusker Clink,” a Midwestern version of Alligator Alcatraz. Julia A. Cryne, an immigration lawyer in Omaha, just over an hour from Denison, says she has received several calls from clients “in a panic,” “afraid of being arrested and detained, even when they are already in the legal process of securing their immigration status.” Cryne is troubled by the construction of the new detention center. “I worry that ICE has chosen such a remote location, which I believe is partly designed to make it harder for immigrants to access lawyers and communities that can help them with their cases.”
The lawyer has also seen how the cancellation of work permits for beneficiaries of programs such as humanitarian parole and CBP One has brought chaos to the labor market, especially in the agricultural sector. That’s how Feglys, one day, ended up on the street. After his arrival in Denison, he found work at Smithfield. He was, people say, happy. Sometimes he would pass by Brenda Hernández while she worked, singing a few lines or breaking into a dance.
His mother says Feglys was never diagnosed with any mental illness, but some coworkers claim he wasn’t well — that he was “completely functional” and “you could talk to him,” but they think he had lost his mind. “This country is hard when you’re alone,” one acquaintance said. For Brenda, more than once Feglys saved her from the tedium of the factory, from the day-to-day grind, from the unbearable work that leaves them with aching shoulders, sore backs, and painful hands — so much so that many workers end up needing carpal tunnel surgery from the repetitive, mechanical motions of everyday life.
Just over two months ago, José Luis Quiñones, a 32-year-old Cuban who crossed the border in 2024 and arrived in Denison with his girlfriend, saw Feglys crying outside his house, sitting in the chair under the tree where he sat every day, pacing around it again and again, and where people would stop by to leave him food. Behind him stood the Ho Hum motel, where Feglys paid about $550 a month for a small space — no more than four meters long by four wide — without a mattress, which grew dirtier and more broken down as Feglys himself did.
José Luis, a tenant at the motel, learned then that Feglys had lost his job at Smithfield after his documents expired. He wasn’t the only one to be fired. Donald Trump put an end to the benefits received by migrants who entered the country through programs like CBP One or humanitarian parole, and more than 100 Smithfield workers ended up unemployed. Ray Atkinson, senior director of external affairs at the plant, insists that they simply complied “with all applicable labor laws and regulations,” and that they carried out “a relatively small number” of layoffs that would not have a major impact on operations.
One of those laid off was Nicelio Pego, a 40-year-old Cuban. The factory called to inform him he could no longer keep his job once his work permit, granted under humanitarian parole, had expired. Now he runs a hamburger stand right across from where Feglys used to live, and he always greeted him with a joking shout: “Hey, what’s up, man?” Feglys would answer in kind. “If he hadn’t lost his job, this wouldn’t have happened,” Nicelio laments. “Even I feel afraid. When a cop pulls me over on the road, I roll down all four windows, put my hands on the wheel, and I’m scared, because I’m Latino, I’m an immigrant, and they think we came to take over their country.”
***
On August 15, 2025, a few hours before the murder that would shock Denison, M. went to bring lunch to Feglys outside the motel, as she had been doing for days. Feglys wasn’t there. She asked someone where she could find him and was told he was at Washington Park. Two nights earlier, he had been evicted. He had gone two months and 20 days without paying rent, practically since he lost his job. Feglys was no longer the solid man he once was — strong, well-groomed, shaved, and perfumed. His hair had grown messy, and he had stopped bathing. He hadn’t contacted his family either. Yoandra Salgado, who collected the rent month by month, says he was evicted due to hygiene problems, as the dirt bothered the neighbors. But she feels she could have done more. “Yes, we should have helped him when he was alive,” she says.
That morning, M. caught sight of him in the park, and Feglys greeted her enthusiastically. He took the little container of food and thanked her. He said he would stay for a few days on the park’s open lawn, next to the lush green grass where Denison children ride bicycles or play basketball. M. told him she would try to find him a shelter. Feglys replied the same as he did to several other acquaintances: that he appreciated the help, but what he really wanted was to work.
— “Do you want to work? — M. asked. — Then you need to cut your hair, trim your nails, and take a shower.
Feglys agreed. J., M.’s husband, picked him up in his car around 4 p.m. and took him home. He invited him to shower indoors, but Feglys, feeling modest, preferred to bathe in the yard. “I remember pouring shampoo on his head and he was happy,” says J. He then gave him a pair of sweatpants, a gray sweater, underwear, and flip-flops — the same clothes he died in. Once clean, Feglys asked to be returned to Washington Park.
Several Denison residents saw him that same day. They greeted him and gave him food. Around 8:00 p.m., J. drove past the park. Feglys waved to him, and J. stopped. “He told me he wanted to ask me for a favor. I said yes, of course. And he said, ‘Do you think you could give me a hug?’”
The next morning, the town awoke to the sound of gunshots and a body in Washington Park. John Waite, a 51-year-old neighbor who lives across from the park and has a two-year-old border collie that Feglys used to play frisbee with, was about to go to bed when he heard the first shot. He heard screams. More shots. “I ran to my door and saw him fall face-first onto the grass,” he says.
It was almost dark; the basketball court’s single light barely illuminated the area, but he could see how the officer placed his hand on Feglys’s neck to try to stop the bleeding. He didn’t dare get closer. “With an armed cop who had just shot someone? No. I’m from Miami. I’ve seen a lot of things.” Then another officer arrived. John assumed the injured man had to be Feglys, the only homeless person wandering Denison’s streets. “He was dead. The officer flipped him over and started doing chest compressions.” Then the ambulance, firefighters, and more officers arrived. According to John, it took hours to transport him to Crawford County Memorial Hospital.
Those who knew Feglys can’t understand what happened, how it could have been possible. “Feglys was killed unfairly for sleeping in a park. If they killed him, someone who didn’t harm anyone, who’s safe here?” asks his friend Madelynes de Armas, who often washed his clothes for him.
The incident, which has not made headlines in the major U.S. media nor been addressed by political campaigns, remains unresolved. The Denison Police Department said in a statement that officers responded to a service call at Washington Park and that Feglys “was uncooperative, and a physical confrontation occurred.” They also claimed that the officer “suffered serious injuries and discharged his weapon,” and that he was subsequently taken to the hospital for treatment and later released.
But the community remains dissatisfied. John says that after the shooting, he saw the officer walking in the park “with a bandage on his left ear.” “He didn’t look seriously injured,” he says. Brenda Hernández, authorized by Magalys to handle matters for her son, was informed by authorities over the phone that Feglys had been shot in the chest, neck, and wrist, that his body showed marks from a Taser, and that DNA from another person had been found in his mouth. During a video call arranged so Feglys’s parents could identify the body, his mother could only cry and ask, “Why did they do this to my baby? He didn’t deserve this.”
Brenda is demanding a report of the incident consistent with what she saw in recent days. When the body arrived at Mr. Michael P. Jones’s funeral home, she realized that Feglys had actually been shot many more times than the authorities had admitted. “I want an explanation to give to his mother; what I saw deserves an explanation,” she says. “This isn’t a case of a stray bullet. To me, it’s a matter of xenophobia, of racism, all thanks to this damn administration. I don’t feel safe anymore. I tell myself: if something happens to me, why should I turn to justice, when they’re the first to want me out of the country?”
***
Mrs. Magalys is finishing her workday in Madrid. Today she had to clean an office. “I don’t know what could have happened to my son,” she says on a phone call, crying. “No one should lose a child like that. The police are there to protect us, not kill us.”
Despite taking pills to dull the pain, the mother hasn’t even asked for a day off; instead, she’s reserved her three vacation days for when Brenda arrives. With the money raised from Feglys’s friends, neighbors, and former colleagues, she will buy a plane ticket to Madrid to bring the small urn on which a Denison artist painted a Cuban flag and a chair.
Nothing in the town eases the people’s anger. On the chair under the tree where Feglys sat, at the foot of 30th Avenue, they’ve erected an altar with flowers, teddy bears, candles, Corona beer, Tapatío birria ramen, and a sign that reads: “Justice for Feglys.” A few days ago, dozens of residents marched together to the police station, shouting for an explanation, for the footage from the officer’s body camera to be shown once and for all, and for them to please be told the truth.
“If he did something to the police, why aren’t the police releasing the videos?” asks Brenda. They’ve already learned that, on the night of the murder, around 3:00 a.m., police officers woke up nearby neighbors to demand the security camera footage from their homes. For now, they won’t know much more. Catherine M. Lucas, general counsel for the Iowa Department of Public Safety, said that there is a 180-day period for the prosecutor to issue a report with the results of the legal review of the shooting. “Until the prosecutor issues the report, we cannot comment on any pending investigation,” she insisted.
A week after Feglys’s death, his neighbors, former coworkers, and friends gathered in Washington Park. There is a kind of collective guilt they cannot ease. “What we did for him was not enough,” some say. “I feel guilty; we owe that boy,” say others.
Night falls over Denison, a tidy town, though the constant smell of manure from the Smithfield plant hangs in the air. A quiet town, interrupted now and then by a freight train that crosses all of Iowa. Amid the crowd gathered with candles and flowers, a pastor — the only one in town willing to offer a Mass for Feglys — takes the floor. He spent two years on the streets and knows what he is talking about. “I know anguish; I’ve experienced it myself,” he says. “We want to see justice. There are things we cannot understand, we cannot process. But we know God will bring peace to this community.”
People nod. Some hug each other. Others have nothing to say. The open lawn where Feglys slept is empty. A few children toss a ball at the basketball hoop. In the darkness, a voice rings out like a verdict: “It’s true that life is shit.”
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