8:05 PM
Alejandro Sau had been alone before. When he was a boy in Mexico, he said, his mother left him at a friend's house and didn't come back. That friend took him, and his two sisters, to a home for abandoned children in Sonora. He lived there for a year until his grandmother came to take care of them.
His mother later returned. But after a few days, Alejandro said, she took his younger sister and left again. She said she was just running an errand.
In November 2007, when Alejandro was 15, his grandmother paid to use someone else's visa for him to cross the border. She put him in a car filled with people he did not know. Alejandro was afraid.
"It was very quiet. Nobody talked," he said. "I didn't know their names."
The car dropped Alejandro at a gas station in Nogales, Ariz. His grandmother picked him up and drove him to his new home in Phoenix. He enrolled at North High School.
They lived in a one-bedroom apartment behind a shopping center. His grandmother cleaned hotel rooms, and Alejandro helped on weekends.
In summer 2010, his grandmother lost her job. The new immigration law made finding work more difficult for her. Alejandro began to feel like a burden.
That fall, during his senior year, Alejandro decided to move out so his grandmother could get a smaller apartment and not need to feed him. He called his friend Gerson.
---
In 2006, lawmaker Russell Pearce introduced legislation making it an Arizona state crime to be an illegal immigrant.
He proposed a law like it again in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
In 2009, Pearce wrote that his bill was necessary to stop an "illegal invasion." The law, he wrote, would mean "less crime, lower taxes, smaller class sizes, shorter lines in our emergency rooms and reduced deaths, murders, maiming, drugs, home invasions, carjacking and kidnappings. There will be fewer jobs taken from Americans and increased wages."
In January 2010, Pearce introduced the idea again, as Senate Bill 1070.
In February, the bill passed the state Senate, as it had before.
Then, on March 27, an Arizonan named Robert Krentz was checking fences on his ranch in Cochise County when he was shot and killed. Authorities followed tracks from the scene 20 miles south to the Mexican border.
Suddenly, SB 1070 found traction. People were frustrated and angry. Polls began showing widespread support for the bill.
On April 19, an amended version of SB 1070 passed the state House.
On April 23, Gov. Jan Brewer signed it into law.
---
Gerson Gonzalez grew up in Iztapalapa, a borough of Mexico City. His mother sold trinkets and candy at a corner store to earn a living.
In 2007, his mother told him she had uterine cancer and was afraid she would not be able to care for him. She told him he had to go live with his father in the United States.
"I was afraid I would never see her again," Gerson said. "I did not want to come. I could not understand why she wanted me to go."
Gerson was 15 years old at the time, no longer a boy but not yet a man.
In March of that year, Gerson stood next to the fence in Nogales, Sonora, and looked through the slats. The houses on the other side looked bigger. To him, the United States looked like a dream.
His father -- a man he had never met -- was in Phoenix.
Maybe we will become close, Gerson thought. Maybe he will call me mijo.
That night, he jumped the fence with a coyote and four other men and started walking north.
He carried a gallon of water, a gallon of Gatorade and a can of beans. He thought of the crossing as an adventure, a mission.
The first attempt failed. The second attempt succeeded. The coyote crammed him into a truck and drove him from southern Arizona to a Phoenix house, where he stayed until his father came and paid for him.
Gerson remembers going to his father's apartment and eating a heaping plate of food. He sat down on the bed and fell asleep before he could untie his shoes.
He had walked into a life he had not expected. His father had another family, and Gerson had half-siblings.
Gerson was angry that his mother had sent him. But he was here. He enrolled at North High School and started learning English.
Gerson lived first with his father's other family. Then, when his father and girlfriend broke up, he and his father moved out and lived on their own in a one-bedroom apartment off Indian School Road and 12th Street.
In September 2010, Gerson's friend Alejandro called him, needing a place to stay.
By then, the two were 18. Alejandro moved in with Gerson and his father.
Alejandro was the only one of the boys who owned a cellphone. In October, the phone rang. Gerson's father, also an illegal immigrant, was calling -- from Mexico. He had been picked up and deported.
The two boys could not stay in the apartment for long. Two weeks later, they called their friend Jonathan.
---
As 2010 progressed, families living illegally in Arizona faced new pressures.
The economy was worsening, and as of July, suddenly the state had the toughest immigration law in the country.
"Things became unmanageable for these families," said Nina Rabin, a law professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It was so disruptive, people could not stay here."
Rabin is the co-author of a report released in September 2011, based on a survey of 70 students, parents and teachers in Pima County.
It was a small sampling, but Rabin's findings were consistent: In the face of the law, families were separating, with parents making the choice to leave their children in Arizona to continue school.
She interviewed a school counselor who specialized in working with students without parents.
In a typical year, the counselor reported working with 40 to 60 students. In 2010-11, she worked with 120.
The passage of SB 1070 was not the sole reason for the departures. But it was, Rabin found, the last straw.
She called it the "determinative factor." "Arizona," she said, "became unlivable."
---
In 2006, when Jonathan Labrada was 14, he and his mother took a bus north and walked across the desert to join his father in Arizona.
He was picked up by Border Patrol agents once and then again. On his third attempt he made it.
His younger brother and sister, who had both been born in the United States but lived in Mexico City, came later. The family lived in a two-bedroom mobile home, in a trailer park off West Van Buren Street and 31st Avenue in Phoenix.
Jonathan went to North High School, began learning English and joined the wrestling team.
After the immigration law passed, Jonathan's father moved to a small town in central Texas, where work was easier to find. Jonathan and his mother, brother and sister stayed in Phoenix.
In October 2010, his friends Gerson and Alejandro arrived at their door.
Yes, Jonathan's mother told them. You can stay here.
Jonathan, Gerson and Alejandro shared a room in the back of the trailer. Jonathan's little brother slept on a bed in the kitchen. His mother and sister slept in the front room.
Jonathan's father sent money, the boys went to school and Jonathan's mother cooked for them every night. It was the most stability Gerson and Alejandro had felt in years.
But it was short-lived. Weeks after the others moved in, Jonathan's mother sat him down. We will all move to Texas, she said, and we will be a family again.
Jonathan said no. He wanted to graduate from North High School, the place where he learned English and made friends. The teachers there cared for him. And he wanted one more season wrestling for the Mustangs.
Over fall break, he drove his mother, brother and sister to Texas in the family's aging minivan. Then he turned around and drove back to Phoenix.
He and his two friends had a plan.
Posted in: 
