ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÏńAV

NOGALES, SONORA — ¶ÙŽÇñČč Lupita Mota grabs her cane and pink Betty Boop tote bag, blows a kiss to her two cockatiels, and says goodbye to her 76-year-old husband before she heads out the door.

She has to be at the Home of Hope and Peace by 9 a.m.

It’s not far, but the 73-year-old totters up a steep dirt road, then grabs on tight to a metal railing as she pulls her way to the top of a long stairway that winds up the hill.

Every day she can, she makes the trek to help prepare lunch for more than 100 hungry children from impoverished neighborhoods. This might be the only warm meal they have all day.

The Home of Hope and Peace is a grass-roots organization that works to empower Nogales residents to create their own opportunities so people don’t feel forced to immigrate to the U.S., risking arrest or death in the desert.

The center is in the heart of the area it aims to help. To the north is the steel border fence. To the south, tiny houses, some held in place by old tires, cling to the hillside.

“It’s about building a more just community in order to have a generation of boys and girls who don’t only see the border as a place of deportations and misfortunes,” said the center’s director, Jeannette Pazos, “but also of opportunities.”

Existed for four years

The organization has existed for only four years, but the idea — and the community of mostly women who want a better life for future generations — is much older.

Esther Torres, the pioneer of the lunch program, opened up her home near the center 36 years ago to children she saw who were in need.

She started feeding soup and tortillas to a handful of them as their parents scavenged the nearby landfill.

Before she knew it, there were dozens of children at her door.

“It was as if we had a party at the house every day,” she said.

A few neighbors joined her, and together they made lunch bags with sandwiches, fruit and juice for more than 100 children.

Later, they started to knock on doors, to visit area maquiladoras and ask for assistance. Those who had relatives on the U.S. side would also take letters with pictures of the children and distribute them at their churches.

Eventually, Torres and the others were able to buy the land where the Home of Hope and Peace now sits.

“Then we thought, why not offer education?” Torres said. “Many of the women would come and ask us to write letters to their husbands,” who often were in the United States.

Together with Border Links, a Tucson-based group that aims to increase public awareness of border issues, they built a classroom and opened a Plaza Comunitaria with computers donated by the Mexican government, so people could get their elementary and middle school diplomas.

The center now has a big cafeteria with a commercial kitchen, a playground, a community garden and dormitories for when groups from the U.S. visit to learn about the border and the school.

Twice a year they put on a camp where children rotate through different stations, including dance, sports, values and handcrafts; they learn about peace and their rights as children.

City hurt by violence

The drug cartel wars of the late 2000s in Nogales deeply affected the children here. Some lost parents or close relatives to the fighting. Some witnessed shootouts.

“Peace is something we have to work on every day,” Pazos said. “It’s a commitment to the community.”

And at the Home of Hope and Peace, everyone has something to contribute.

People from the Tirabichi, the nearby dump, helped build a rooftop made of plastic bottles and a chicken coop made of old furniture.

Students from U.S. colleges come down to visit and volunteer. Together with local artists, they have painted murals depicting the unity between both countries.

“If we don’t help ourselves, no one is going to do it for us,” Pazos said.

A reality of the border is low wages, a high cost of living and sometimes violence, she said, but also a community that is organized and seeks the common good.

Nogales is home to people from the south who migrated to work in the growing maquiladora industry and to those who tried to cross into the U.S. but either never made it or were sent back. About a third of the population lives in poverty.

Many around the Bella Vista neighborhood, where the Home of Hope and Peace is located, work as street vendors or sweeping the roads. The lucky ones have jobs in a maquiladora, where the minimum wage is about $5 a day.

A way out of depression

Most of the volunteers who help run the center are from the neighborhood. Some are migrants themselves.

¶ÙŽÇñČč Lupita arrived in Nogales in the late ’70s from the central state of Jalisco. With her 11 children gone from home, the center was a way out of her depression.

“With so many kids, I would ask God, ‘How is it possible that I’m all alone?’” she said as her eyes swelled with tears. “I would spend all day curled up on that sofa.”

She started going to the center to take drawing and painting classes. But then her husband developed a heart condition, and she had to quit to take care of him.

As he got better, she returned to the center, this time to learn how to knit and crochet.

As part of the co-operative, women make medallions commemorating a female migrant who died in the desert. They also make handbags out of plastic grocery bags, and they knit sweaters, slippers, even dishwashing sponges to sell. They keep 60 percent of the profit, while 40 percent goes to the center.

A couple of years ago, ¶ÙŽÇñČč Lupita started volunteering in the kitchen.

“I like to come and talk and laugh with the other women,” she said.

Inside the kitchen, everyone has a chore to do.

Wearing a yellow apron, her black hair pulled back with a headband, she starts by making the soup.

“It smells good, abuela,” one of the women from the center says as she walks in.

“Who do you think made the soup?” ¶ÙŽÇñČč Lupita asks with a smile.

While the food is cooking, she sits on a plastic crate and rubs her aching knees.

Some pull out their yarn and needles and get to work. They consult each other when they get stuck and ask for advice when they’re unsure about how something looks.

As groups of children start to trickle in at about noon, wearing their navy blue or beige school uniforms, the women get to work again.

The kids wolf down the soup and beans, and then run to jump on the merry-go-round, making it spin as fast as they can.

As the day wraps up, ¶ÙŽÇñČč Lupita grabs her bag and waits for someone to help her get home.

Even with her cane, the long stairs and the steep road are hard for her, even harder than going up.

But she’s determined. She’ll be back tomorrow.

BANÁMICHI, Sonora — Everything here comes from the river.

The water rushes along both sides of the lush green mountains teaming with ocotillo, mesquite trees, and even some organ pipe cactus. It is life to the towns in the Sonora valley.

Lydia Díaz had a good life here. The river provided her family’s cows with water to drink and grass to eat, offering her four teenage children their fill of milk every day — a whole liter at a time if they wanted that much.

She didn’t need to buy groceries — with the river’s help, the corn, beans, squash and green beans the family planted in a nearby field grew plentiful enough to feed all six of them.

She and her husband had jobs. Díaz cleaned the town’s swimming pool and her husband, Adolfo Escalante, worked the fields for the Lopez brothers, a local family that plants peanuts and runs a cattle business.

But all of that is gone.

‱â¶Äąâ¶Äą

Between Aug. 6 and 7, about 11 million gallons of copper sulfate acid solution spilled from Cananea’s Buenavista del Cobre mine into the Bacanuchi River, a tributary of the Sonora River. The San Pedro River runs north from Cananea, about 25 miles from the Arizona border, while the Sonora River flows south. The spill contaminated the Bacanuchi and Sonora rivers and left more than 25,000 people in seven counties without water.

Mexican officials called it their country’s worst mining spill in recent history. And then it got worse. More than a month after the spill, heavy rains from Hurricane Odile caused the dams to overflow and the river to swell, soaking nearby fields with toxic water.

The crops are ruined and the people don’t know if they’ll be able to grow on their land again.

Residents don’t know much about the spill because reliable information has been hard to come by. They’re still not clear about how it happened, the full extent of the contamination or what the company and the Mexican government could have done to prevent it.

Díaz didn’t hear about the discharge for several days, and then only through word of mouth. Until then, her family had continued to bathe and drink from the contaminated wells.

The state newspapers are writing about the spill and its aftermath, but she said she rarely has the 10 pesos, less than $1, to buy one.

A neighbor from the nearby town of Arizpe learned the water was contaminated when he took his horse to drink from the river, which runs right by his property, and saw it running orange and red.

Since then, he said, a pregnant donkey miscarried and several puppies have died.

‱â¶Äąâ¶Äą

Grupo Mexico, whose Cananea mine is one of the largest copper operations in the world, is not talking to the media about the spill. But it has said employees noticed a copper solution dripping from a containment dam at about 10 a.m. on Aug. 6.

Initially, the company said heavy rains led to the discharge, but later acknowledged it was due to faulty pipe seals in the Tinajas 1 system, part of the construction site of a new copper processing plant.

It took them 25 hours after the initial discovery to notify authorities — and two hours beyond that to contain the spill. The company built a barrier to stop the discharge and used lime to neutralize the acidity.

Adding lime “causes metal contaminants to precipitate out of solution which helps to contain the contamination in the area where it happened,” said Raina Maier, a professor in the University of Arizona’s Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science. Its effectiveness depends on response speed, though, and questions linger about how long the containment damn had been leaking.

The solution that spilled was highly acidic and contained heavy metals such as arsenic, aluminum, copper, iron and manganese. While the acid can be neutralized, Maier said, the metals can either remain where they precipitate out of solution or they can move if they are not removed.

Grupo Mexico has contracted with several companies whose crews are removing contaminated silt with shovels and wheelbarrows. The company has said it’s about three-quarters done with the first phase of cleanup efforts.

‱â¶Äąâ¶Äą

All wells within 1,600 feet of the river are closed.

Díaz and her neighbors rely on water jugs and the tanker trucks that fill the town’s communal water storage.

She has running water a few hours at a time, once or twice a day. It depends on how much the households closer to the water source have used before it gets to her.

“We used to be able to open the tap and drink from there,” she said. “The water was fresh.”

Not anymore. She realized how anxious she’s become when she was afraid to drink from the faucet at her mother’s home in Carbó, about three hours away.

The federal and state government continues to test the well water for acidity and heavy metals to determine when it’s safe and will open up new wells.

But the feeling of uncertainty and distrust is hard to shake. Residents and local officials even dispute the amount of acid that spilled.

“They say so many things that you don’t even know what to believe anymore,” said David López, who co-owns the business Díaz’s husband used to work for.

Díaz doesn’t know who to trust.

“We are still in the dark,” she said. “We don’t know what might happen to us now or how it may affect us in the future.”

Less than two-dozen cases of severe intoxication, from people who came into direct contact with the polluted water, have been reported.

There’s no telling how many others are suffering in silence. Díaz’s daughter-in-law developed rashes on her arms, thighs and breasts but is too embarrassed to go to the doctor.

Other people talk about having black feet after walking through the contaminated water.

“And if we get sick,” Díaz asked, “what are we going to do?”

Heavy metals can cause cancer, said Antonio Romo Paz, a chemist and biologist at the Universidad Sonora, during a recent forum about the spill.

“Heavy metals accumulate in the body and deposit in the bones and other organs, that’s why they are cancerous,” he said.

Díaz’s daughter, Lydia del Socorro, a petite 15-year-old, was born prematurely and has asthma and sensitive skin. She is bathing with purified water just in case, but her mother worries the contaminants of the spill will harm the fragile girl — and all her children.

‱â¶Äąâ¶Äą

Grupo Mexico, which created a $150 million trust to clean up the spill and help residents, has distributed millions of liters of water throughout the communities along the river. It also opened a mobile water treatment plant in HuepĂĄc that produces 3,500 to 4,000 five-gallon jugs of purified water a day.

Dozens of tanker trucks fill the towns’ central water tanks or drive street by street filling plastic barrels people leave on the sidewalk in front of their house.

Some residents have invested several hundred dollars on a cistern-and-pumping system to have tap water for a few hours a day. The government is also starting to distribute some systems for free or at a reduced cost.

The cisterns, in black or beige, now dot the streets of towns like BanĂĄmichi.

Díaz couldn’t afford one, but her son works at a hardware store and was able to borrow one that was defective. Still, she tries to conserve as much water as possible in case she runs out.

She tries to keep a cistern full. Her husband fetches water from a nearby clean well to fill water jugs for washing and to flush the toilet.

She reuses the dishwater from the previous day, then rinses the dishes with water from the tanker trucks. But she doesn’t trust that the water is safe, so she gives the dishes a final quick rinse in the family’s ration of purified water.

Many people don’t trust the five-gallon water jugs emblazoned with the Grupo Mexico logo. Some claim to have found insects or mold inside them.

‱â¶Äąâ¶Äą

As devastating as the spill has been for the river counties, with populations that range from a few hundred to nearly 10,000 people, this isn’t the first time it has happened.

Banámichi residents remember a spill in the mid-1980s, but little information is available about what happened and how it compares to the Aug. 7 discharge. López remembers seeing the sand a whitish color as a 10-year-old, but he doesn’t know what was in it.

In 1979, a major spill contaminated the San Pedro River. Earthen dams failed after harsh winter rains in 1977-78 and 1978-79 and polluted acids were released into the water, killing aquatic life over a 60-mile stretch north of the border, a 1987 Arizona State University report said. Water samples had high concentrations of heavy metals and high acidity.

Investigators believe minor spills had been occurring for years before the larger failures of the late 70s, the report said.

Both the San Pedro and the Sonora rivers are contaminated in their source areas from leaching of tailings, infiltrations of acidic leach solution, said Dick Kamp, an investigator for a 2003 report about mining-related water quality threats in Cananea and the watersheds.

Through the years and in the hands of different owners, the mine has had maintenance issues, including cracks on slopes and erosion.

On Sept. 20 of this year, Carlos Arias, head of the Sonora civil protection unit, issued a binational alert reporting that a small overflow of a retention pond had caused some discoloration on a tributary of the San Pedro River.

Acid and metal levels are within normal range, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality lab test results showed.

Cananea, where the mine is located, is the epicenter of the problem, said Sergio Maurin, a city councilman and former mineworker who is now part of a nonprofit called SĂșmate a Cananea. The group seeks solutions for the city, including job opportunities.

Maurin’s main concern is a tailing pond much larger than the pond that spilled in August.

“If that tailing pond fails,” he said, “it will destroy the whole state, not only the Rio Sonora.”

He is working to get the city included among the list of affected counties.

‱â¶Äąâ¶Äą

Unlike in previous incidents, technology has helped document and expose the current spill damage.

When asked about what they saw, many residents pull out their smartphones and display photos of orange-red water or floating dead fish.

The mayor of Arizpe, Vidal VĂĄzquez, even took a selfie at the site of the spill after September rains dumped more contamination into the river and posted it on Twitter. Media outlets immediately picked it up.

Before the spill, people here didn’t think contamination in Cananea affected them, said Adolfo López, the former mayor of Banámichi.

They saw the mine as something positive because it created jobs. Only “when people saw the river contaminated, they realized the magnitude of the problem,” he said.

Not only did the spill contaminate the Rio Sonora, LĂłpez said, it destroyed its brand. Before, people associated the region with its beef, cheese, bread and pristine waters. Now, he said, the Sonora River equals contamination.

A Banámichi resident had to sell his 40 cows after dumping thousands of liters of milk down the drain because the government said it couldn’t be consumed. He didn’t have enough water for the cows to drink or to grow their food.

For the López brothers, not being able to water their peanut crop can mean a 50 percent loss if it doesn’t rain. Last year at this time, each plant had 80 to 90 peanuts. This year each has about 30.

The LĂłpez brothers buy about 2,000 calves a year to export to the United States. They are struggling to find water the animals need to survive.

Their alfalfa field, which runs along the river, got soaked in contaminated water after the heavy rains brought by Hurricane Odile caused an overflow and it is now destroyed. They don’t know if the land will be usable again.

Inside a warehouse they have eight tons of barley seeds ready to sell — but no one to sell it to because people don’t want to risk not having enough water to irrigate. Normally, they would get about a $1,000 per ton.

October is also the time to plant garlic. But if they can’t use the wells, they won’t be able to plant this year.

“Our worst fear is that this land will be useless,” Adolfo López said.

Like most families in the region, theirs has been made up of farmers and ranchers for generations, each building on what came before.

“It’s sad to think you won’t be able to consume or sell what you grow,” said David López.

They’ve been working in the fields and with cattle since they were five or six years old.

David pulls out his phone and shows a picture of a toddler holding a hoe twice his size.

“That’s my son,” he says with a smile. “He’s 3.”

Of seven siblings, David and Adolfo are the only two still living in Banámichi. The rest are in Tucson, Sierra Vista, Naco and Hermosillo. They want their children to take over the family business one day — if the family business survives.

Residents along the river are doing all they can to protect their livelihoods. Adolfo joined a local committee to follow up on the legal aspects of the spill. Others will look after cleanup efforts, health and water quality.

A binational group that includes Tucsonans is trying to raise funds to hire independent analysts.

The mayors of all seven river counties are part of a council, together with government officials and Grupo Mexico, to continue monitoring the pollution’s long-, mid- and short-term effects, and the distribution of funds to compensate residents and ranchers.

“All we want is for the river to be cleaned so we can lead a normal life and be reassured residents will have clean water,” Adolfo said. “We want for future generations to have the option to live here and have a good quality of life, clean and healthy.”

DĂ­az said one of her daughters keeps telling her they should leave.

“But where are we going to go? Where are we going to live?” she asked. “We can’t start over.”

As thousands of women crossed the border with their children this summer, the government opened more detention centers to send the message that they will be sent back if they come illegally.

But the difference between being detained or dropped off at a bus station to reunite with family members in the United States could be a matter of the day they crossed, a chicken pox quarantine — or just plain luck.

Reyna Perdomo left her native El Salvador on June 26. She was caught in South Texas on July 5, a few days after the government opened a family detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, that can hold nearly 700 women and their children.

Perdomo said she met another woman on her journey. Both of them were brought to Tucson to be processed. But while Perdomo was taken to Artesia, the other woman was sent on her way.

“I cried, because she was only held three days, and she was told to call her family so they could buy her bus ticket to Minnesota,” Perdomo said recently from the Border Patrol training facility in southeastern New Mexico. Perdomo also has family in Minnesota.

She’s been detained for more than two months, with limited access to an attorney who can prepare her asylum claim. Several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, say that’s all too common, and on Friday they sued the federal government for creating what they called an illegal “deportation mill,” where women seeking protection from violence in their home countries are not being given their fair day in court.

“You can’t win an asylum case if you don’t have the time to put it together,” said Laura Lichter, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and one of the attorneys who has spent time in Artesia. “It’s an extremely complicated area of law.”

About two-thirds of the women in Artesia would have successful asylum claims, Lichter said, if they were represented by an attorney and had time to prepare their cases.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said in an email that the agency makes the determination on a case-by-case basis, depending on the availability of beds in family detention centers when migrants are apprehended.

The women are also screened for criminal history, said Amber Cargile, ICE spokeswoman in Phoenix. Those who have been in trouble or deported before, for instance, are more likely to be detained.

Other factors are at play, too. In late July, for example, ICE stopped receiving and deporting women and children from the Artesia facility for about 10 days after a chicken pox quarantine.

To Laura Lunn, an immigration attorney who volunteered at the Artesia center and worked with Perdomo, whether a family is detained or released depends on luck.

“If bed space is full when someone is being processed, then they get to be released — likely on bond or on their own recognizance,” she said.

The reasons are often unclear. Lunn saw one case where two sisters came to the country to live with their mother in Florida. One was sent on her way, while the other remains in Artesia.

government response

So far this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, nearly 63,000 single parents with at least one child have been apprehended at the border — a nearly 500 percent increase over last year.

In response to the surge, the government is opening more centers to hold families. Until this year, there was only one — an 85-bed facility in Pennsylvania.

The government also started working to deport unaccompanied minors and families more quickly. Nearly 300 women have been deported with their children from the two family detention centers in Texas and New Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“We continue to have much work to do to address this issue, and our message continues to be clear — our border is not open to illegal migration,” Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson has said. “Unless you qualify for some form of humanitarian relief, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values.”

The government should have responded earlier to the increase, said Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit organization that advocates immigration reduction in the United States. There should be a variety of places that can be adapted quickly when necessary, he said.

But immigration attorneys and human-rights advocates say detention is not the solution.

“We would love to see the immigration court system get enough resources and judges and lawyers to speed up its processes,” said Clara Long, a Human Rights Watch researcher who visited the Artesia center in July.

In Krikorian’s view, not detaining people is what led to the current problem.

“Letting people go with permisos, summons to show to immigration court, and having people calling home and saying ‘It’s true’ is one of the major reasons we have this spike in illegal crossings in South Texas,” he said.

Krikorian thinks everyone who crosses the border illegally should be detained, and all the adults should be prosecuted for illegal entry.

one shot

Nearly all of the women in the Artesia detention center are in expedited removal, meaning they don’t have a right to see an immigration judge unless they say they are afraid to return to their home country and they pass an asylum officer’s interview. About two-thirds of those detained in Artesia have asked to go through the asylum process, attorneys said.

Perdomo had her first appearance before an immigration judge via videoconference this week and will have another one in September. She is seeking asylum, and passed the first credible-fear interview. She’s among the 38 percent of women in Artesia who have cleared that threshold.

She said she had a small business in El Salvador selling tacos, bread and sodas. One day she was robbed and told that from that day on, she had to pay the criminals a fee to operate.

“I’m alone,” said the 23-year-old single mother. “I don’t have anyone to help me survive, and if I didn’t work for them, they would kill me and my son.”

She reached out to her sisters in Minnesota, who helped her flee. El Salvador is one of the world’s most dangerous countries, with an annual rate of 41 homicides per 100,000 people. She couldn’t go to the police, she said, because many of them are corrupt.

Despite that, asylum approval rates from Central America have generally been low. U.S. immigration courts granted 6 percent to 7 percent of asylum applications from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in fiscal year 2012.

While detention of asylum seekers in expedited removal proceedings is mandatory, it becomes discretionary when the person passes the credible-fear interview. Perdomo, like many of the women in Artesia, is applying to be released on bond. But ICE has decided the Artesia women are not eligible because they pose a risk to national security: Releasing them would send a message to others that if they come, they can stay.

So for Perdomo and her fellow detainees, their only shot at leaving the center is to go before an immigration judge. Until recently, the few bonds that had been set were for $25,000 and $30,000.

A different judge started issuing bonds that are more aligned with the national averages for people in immigration proceedings. That’s closer to $6,000, Lunn said. Perdomo has her next court appearance on Sept. 8.

rock, hard place

Asylum cases before immigration judges can take months, or even years.

“For low-priority detainees, it makes no sense to continue to be detained,” Long said, “especially when children are involved.”

Perdomo, like many of her fellow detainees, is growing desperate.

Some days she wonders what life is worth if she’s locked up, she said in a telephone interview. It’s especially bad when her 2-year-old boy, Jesson Chacon, cries and she has no control over what can be done to help him. In detention, access to doctors and medicine is up to strangers, not mothers.

Half the children were under 6œ years old, and many were toddlers or still nursing at the end of July, when Long, with Human Rights Watch, visited.

“Until I actually spent the week in Artesia, I didn’t really get in a gut level why detaining families is so absolutely wrong,” immigration lawyer Lichter said.

“These are not summer camps, despite pictures of Barbie dolls on the bed. People are under extreme stress,” she said. “Mothers are watching their children getting sick and wither in front of them.”

Leticia Zamarripa, an ICE spokeswoman in El Paso, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But in a Department of Homeland Security release, Johnson said, “ICE ensures that family detention facilities operate in an open environment, which includes classrooms with state-certified teachers, access to an online legal library and bilingual teachers.”

Sometimes Perdomo said it feels like a dead end.

“If I’m in my country, it’s a terrible suffering because I fear for my life and the life of my son,” she said. “But I come here only to fall into another type of suffering.”

Chris Koor Garang dreamed for years of knowing his parents’ fate, of learning whether they were alive or dead.

His family had been split apart by the war in Sudan one violent night in 1989.

About a week into his first trip home in nearly two decades, he got a letter from his parents. They were alive and in a nearby village in southern Sudan. They wanted to see him right away.

But he couldn’t just leave. There were people who needed his medical care. A little girl had been bitten by a snake and had an infection all the way to her foot bone. A woman had been carried in on a stretcher — a two-day trip to the clinic — after a botched C-section performed by villagers.

He stayed three more days, finishing up what he had traveled about 9,000 miles to do, before climbing on board a pickup truck toward the town of Kwajok, where his parents were waiting.

When they finally saw each other, they clung tightly and didn’t want to let go. His father held his head and spat on it , giving him his blessing.

The family was reunited. But it was more complicated than that.

“When I saw them, I was happy. I was glad they were alive but I didn’t have that connection that somebody who stayed with their parents for so long could have,” says Garang, now 30.

“I grew up alone in the camp. I have my own life, my own family. My friends were my brothers,” he says. “It was just like, all right it’s great you guys are alive, now let’s see how life goes."

***

Garang, whose name Koor means lion in Dinka, comes from a cattle-herding tribe in what is now South Sudan, a landlocked country that gained its independence in 2011. It is smaller than Texas and has about 12 million people.

At the height of the conflict between the North and the South, militiamen on horseback and camels rode through his village in the middle of the night, burning everything along their path, raping women and kidnapping children to sell as slaves.

Garang and his brother ran in different directions, both naked and barefoot. There was no turning back.

At age 7, Garang became one of about 20,000 children, mostly young boys, who trekked in groups through swamps, deserts and across the Nile – a 1,000-mile, months-long journey to neighboring Ethiopia.

His brother, he later found, was killed that night.

The boys in Garang's group crossed the Nile using papyrus leaves. They ate dead gazelles and other animals left by the lions. They drank their own urine to survive.

Thousands lost their lives to hunger, dehydration and exhaustion. Some were killed by wild animals, others drowned while crossing the river. Many were caught in the crossfire.

“There were times I wanted to stop,” Garang says. “But seeing some of my friends who starved and seeing they couldn’t walk because their feet were swollen; seeing them just being grabbed by the lions or their eyes taken out by the vultures — I didn’t want that happening to me, so I just kept going.”

By the time they arrived in Ethiopia they were walking skeletons. But their peace there didn’t last long. War broke out in Ethiopia and once again they were chased out at gunpoint.

This time they ran back into Sudan on their way to Kenya, where the United Nations set up a camp for about 10,000 of them in 1992.

In Kakuma Camp, a sprawling settlement in northern Kenya where the average daytime temperature is about 100 degrees, groups of boys lived together in mud huts for nearly a decade. They became each other’s parents, brothers and friends.

When one woke up screaming in the middle of the night because of bad dreams, another one stayed up and walked with him until it passed.

It was boys taking care of boys.

They were still in survival mode, though, making due with twice-a-month food rations of oil and maize and trying to avoid being recruited to fight in the war.

There was no time to wonder if their families were dead or alive.

***

In the late 1990s, as the war in Sudan raged on, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees determined there was no solution for the Lost Boys but to be resettled to a third country.

The likelihood of them having relatives in Sudan became less likely as time went on. There were also concerns of them being recruited into the war because many of them had military training, says Larry Yungk, a senior resettlement officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Washington.

About 3,600 refugees were selected to come to the United States. On April 3, 2001, Garang became one of 74 Lost Boys who would call Tucson home.

Here he met Carol Tierney, a volunteer who worked with many Lost Boys, but clicked with then-17-year-old Garang the most.

“All of the boys were very needy,” Tierney says, “but what they mainly needed was my checkbook. Chris was the only one who didn’t.”

Slowly he started to trust and become part of her family of six children and 19 grandchildren. He went on their family vacations and celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas with them.

She became Mom Carol and her husband Bill became Papa.

They still text every week and say “I miss you” or “I love you” if they haven’t seen each other in a while.

“He’s the seventh kid,” her kids joke, “but does he always have to be the favorite one?”

When Bill’s Alzheimer’s progressed, Tierney says, Garang was the only person in the family Bill recognized. He would point and call him “my boy.”

As Bill lay dying, Garang spent more than 24 hours straight at his bedside. After he died and the rest of the family had left, Garang stayed behind to bathe him.

“This is what I want to do for Papa,” Tierney remembers him saying.

“We chose each other,” she says of Garang.

***

Garang had found love, but he still needed to know what happened to his family.

“Even if it’s over the phone, just knowing their mother or father is alive has been one of the most important parts of their lives,” says Sasha Chanoff, co-founder of the non-profit RefugePoint, which works with the most vulnerable refugees.

Finding out they have living relatives helps refugees feel they didn’t lose everything to the war, Chanoff says.

During his first trip in 2007, Garang learned that not only were his father and mother alive, but that he had dozens of siblings from his father’s other wives.

Before he returned to Tucson, he traveled with his parents to his birthplace, where his placenta is buried. He spent a couple of days with his family and left them money to build a house and start a business. Instead, they loaned it to neighbors.

Over the years he has had to learn to navigate his two worlds, to lead instead of being led.

On one trip, his parents had paid 50 cows for him to marry a village girl. When he told them he wanted to find a woman to love and marry here in America, they couldn't understand.

“They don’t date like we do here,” he says.

One of the first times he visited, he stayed up until 2 a.m. listening to people who needed something from him. He wanted to get out. He was frustrated that the money he earned as a certified nursing assistant was not enough to help everyone.

The excitement of returning to his homeland was eclipsed by the sight of people starving and the suffering of those he left behind.

There were never enough mosquito nets. There were never enough needles and rolls of thread. There was never enough medicine.

All eyes were on him. He had made it out. He was expected to help save his family. His village. And his country.

***

Garang couldn’t shake the feeling he had failed another brother he hadn't yet met.

In 2005, he got news from a friend that he had a brother who had been kidnapped and taken to Khartoum as a child slave. He paid several hundred dollars to get then 10-year-old Chol Garang Chol back and found a family to take care of him in Nairobi, only to learn a couple of years later that the boy was being mistreated.

Garang enrolled Chol in a boarding school in Nairobi. Another brother soon followed, then three more. This year he is putting all five of them through school under the condition they earn only As and Bs. If they don’t, he says half-jokingly, they can go live in Kakuma.

“I am hard on them because I want them to have a different way of thinking,” he says.

Chol, a tall and lanky 19-year-old who wants to become a doctor, rented a three-bedroom home in a gated community in Nairobi, where he makes sure his siblings have everything they need. Garang also hired a Kenyan woman to care for them.

The house has a bright green, empty room, ready for when Garang visits. Earlier this year the walls were bare. The brothers were waiting for Garang to send money so they could buy decorations.

Garang pushes his brothers to continue their education, and he pushes himself to continue his. He went to the University of Arizona to study public health and eventually wants to go back to get a master's degree. He juggles three jobs at nursing homes, working 12- and 16-hour days to support his family in South Sudan, his siblings in Nairobi and his son in Tucson.

***

No one tracks where the Lost Boys are now.

Some returned to Sudan. Some got married in Kakuma and started families.

A peace agreement was signed in 2005, and more Lost Boys than with any other refugee group have started non-profits to help rebuild their villages.

Giving back completes the circle that saved him, Garang says.

“In the refugee camp, I didn’t know where my food came from,” he says. “Whoever donated the money to the UN, that’s what made me survive. So why can’t I also contribute and help others?”

The conflict between the North and the South — one of African’s worst civil wars— claimed the lives of more than two million people and displaced four million others.

Of those left behind, more than half live below the poverty line. The entire country only has about 250 paved roads. Only about 1 in 5 people over the age of 15 can read and write.

Garang wants to change that. In 2008, he founded a nonprofit called Ubuntu — an African proverb that represents “the universal bond of sharing and respects that connects all of humanity." Through Ubuntu he tries to go to Kenya every year to restock the clinic and train villagers about hygiene to help stop the spread of disease.

He learned to appreciate medicine and science as a kid in the refugee camp, watching how Red Cross workers mixed salt, sugar and water to rehydrate them. He did the same for fellow refugees.

This year he decided not to go back — in part because he was upset at his mother and brothers, but also due to safety concerns. Thousands have died and more than 1 million people have been displaced in a conflict that broke out in December. About a third of the country’s population will be on the edge of starvation by year's end, UN officials have said.

Two of Garang’s half-brothers have been killed. He sent $2,500 to cover funeral expenses.

***

Kyan, a skinny 5-year-old as shy as his father, is Garang’s life.

“As long as I have the energy,” Garang says, “I’ll do anything for him to have a better life than I had.”

Every week when he is off, he picks the boy up from his ex-girlfriend's house. As soon as Ky, as Garang calls him, climbs on board the black Tacoma with an Arizona Wildcats sticker on the back window, he is the boss.

A trip to Toys-R-Us is almost a given. Ky goes straight to the book aisle.

This is the second year Ky is playing soccer, just as his dad did when he was a kid. When they go to the park, they kick the ball back and forth and invite other children to play. Garang improvises by moving garbage cans to mark the goal posts and Ky expects his father to block every goal. “Goalie, Daddy, goalie,” Ky yells.

“In the camp we also used to play soccer like this,” Garang says as he dribbles the white and green ball. But they used old socks and medical gloves tied up with rubber bands.

“It didn’t bounce as much, but it worked,” he says with a smile.

In his Tucson apartment, a painting of a cheetah in the bush, a picture of thatched roof huts and a frame with the word Ethiopia on it decorate his walls. They are reminders of where he came from — and what he lost.

Almost every day he gets a call from Kenya or South Sudan. His mother is ill. A family home has run out of gas. The friend who was supposed to pay his brothers’ school fees didn’t do it.

"I have parents that are alive and need me. I have siblings that need me. And I have a community that needs me," he says. "So it’s been busy.”

The Department of Homeland Security dropped off close to 200 immigrants — mostly women and children — at the Tucson Greyhound station this week, leaving them to find their own way to cities across the country to report to immigration offices there.

While such releases are not new, the number left here at the same time has put a strain on local immigration advocates and has customs and bus line officials working on a plan to accommodate the unexpected influx of travelers.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona is processing 400 people, mostly families coming from Central America and Mexico who were apprehended in South Texas and flown here over the weekend, officials said.

To process the surge of crossers from Texas, the Border Patrol is turning to all available resources at its disposal, said Daniel Tirado , Border Patrol spokesman for the Rio Grande Valley Sector.

In the first six months of the fiscal year, Border Patrol agents in that sector detained more people than Tucson did all of last year, with an average of more than 600 apprehensions a day.

In comparison, Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents have detained about 61,000 border crossers during the same period, with 18 percent coming from a place other than Mexico.

About 100 agents from other sectors, including Arizona, have been sent to Texas to help.

Border Patrol agents in less busy sectors are processing people by taking their biographical information and completing a file online And the Rio Grande Valley Sector is flying apprehended immigrants to other sectors where they can be processed.

The first flight was to El Paso on May 7. Four days later, the second one arrived in Tucson and the third landed here last week, not including those who arrived over the weekend.

The border crossers flown to the different areas of the border are prescreened. The first flights to Tucson were men traveling alone, Tirado said.

Because there’s limited bed space for families, women who pose no security risk are released with their children. They must provide the address of their U.S. destination, and they are required to report to a local ICE office near t hat destination within 15 days.

Tirado doesn’t know if there will be any more flights, but if agents continue to see the influx in Texas, “those resources available by all means will be utilized,” he said.

Tirado couldn’t provide a per-flight cost estimate.

A group of about 30 people waited at the station late Tuesday, many thrusting their bus tickets at volunteers as they tried to figure out layovers and departure times to unfamiliar destinations across the country, including Maryland, Alabama and Florida.

Shortly before 8 p.m., two unmarked white vans dropped off about 40 more people in the Greyhound station parking lot.

ICE officials said they are working out a process with Customs and Border Protection to make sure each family is able to place a phone call to make travel arrangements, to provide them sack lunches and work with bus stations to help accommodate the influx.

“Unfortunately, we do not receive prior notice and are unaware of when ICE plans to drop off individuals at our terminal,” Lanesha Gipson, spokeswoman for Greyhound Lines Inc. said in an email. “However, we are currently working to establish protocol with ICE in which they inform us of drop-offs several hours in advance to ensure we have the resources to accommodate them once they arrive at our terminal.”

For the last eight months, ICE has released large numbers of families at the Tucson Greyhound station while they await their immigration court date, but not in the volume seen this week.

A handful of local volunteers with Casa Mariposa have visited the station every night.

They provide food, phone calls and often put up families overnight when they are unable to get bus tickets.

The group, already operating at capacity, was overwhelmed with the sudden increase of immigrants left at the station.

“We think this is the right thing for ICE to be doing; we think they should be releasing people. But we just feel they could release them in a more respectful and responsible way,” said Daniel Wilson with Casa Mariposa.

Jimena DĂ­az, consul of Guatemala in Phoenix, said her office was trying to find out what was happening Wednesday and had started to reach out to local churches and nonprofits to ask if they could help the families arriving at the bus stations.

“In general, immigration through Arizona has decreased, except for women and children. The same thing is happening in Texas, but the number there is much greater,” she said.

“We don’t know what’s happening. It can be that they are told that if they come with children they are likely to be released for humanitarian reasons,” she said.

Art del Cueto, president of the local Border Patrol union, said when agents ask people they just apprehend why they are coming, they often mention they heard about amnesty.

“It’s always been our issue, as agents, any time there are rumblings about amnesty it increases the flow,” he said.

Paula Briseño Rodríguez waited for her daughter and granddaughter at the Greyhound station Tuesday. She had been released on Monday along with her 3-year-old son and spent the night with Casa Mariposa volunteers.

She had been traveling in a group that also included two nieces, ages 7 and 4, when they were detained by Border Patrol on Saturday. Immigration officials contacted the girls’ parents in Florida before taking them from her, she said.

Although she has a brother in Delaware who is a permanent resident and said he would try to bring her into the country legally, she said she couldn’t wait any longer.

“One comes here because it’s hard in Guatemala. I left seven children to come here and try to do something,” she said. “One earns 50 quetzales (about $6) a day. You have to eat, so you’re left with 20. How much is that in a week?”

While the dream of a better life pushed many across the border, the fear of violence is also a concern.

“I was talking with a woman from Honduras who said they (gangs) killed three of her relatives on the same day,” said Briseño Rodriguez. “Another man told me you can’t open a small business anymore because they’ll threaten you to get money and if you don’t pay they’ll kill you or kidnap your child.”

ConcepciĂłn GonzĂĄlez and her two daughters, ages 7 and 6, also spent the night with a Casa Mariposa volunteer.

GonzĂĄlez said she was in an abusive relationship that ended when her husband abandoned them. The memories brought her to tears.

“My husband would mistreat me and beat me,” she said. “I came here to start a new life. I just want to work, to better myself for my daughters because I’m their mother and their father.”

Until last year, Tucson was the busiest sector in the country. At its peak in 2000, more than 600,000 people were arrested.

Back then, San Diego Border Patrol agents came to help here because they had experience dealing with high flows.

The difference, said del Cueto, is that Tucson remains a busy corridor. He said the agents being sent to South Texas are still needed here.

About 120,000 people have been apprehended in the Tucson Sector in the last two fiscal years. The sector still leads the country in the amount of marijuana seized. Last fiscal year, agents seized more than 1 million pounds, compared to about 800,000 pounds in the Rio Grande Valley sector.

“The Arizona border is still very much porous,” del Cueto said. “There are still areas where we have no fence — areas like the reservations where it’s like open fields.”

SB 1070 was supposed to standardize local immigration enforcement across Arizona.

But more than a year after the law’s most controversial provision took effect, it is impossible to tell whether the law is making a difference — or even being followed.

An ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÏńAV analysis of thousands of records from 13 Southern Arizona law-enforcement agencies reveals a patchwork of immigration-enforcement policies and data so incomplete there’s no way to determine how police are implementing the law, or whether they are committing the systemic civil-rights violations opponents feared when SB 1070 was passed.

A provision of the law that took effect in September 2012 requires local law enforcement to try to check the immigration status of anyone they stop if they come to believe those suspects are in the country illegally.

But police still don’t regularly keep records of those checks. The few agencies that do rarely have a system for analyzing the data for patterns. And oversight is almost nonexistent.

That’s how the Legislature intended it. Lawmakers advancing the bill in 2010 considered data-collection requirements but decided against them out of worry that further burdening law enforcement would peel away “yes” votes and torpedo the measure, said Rep. John Kavanagh, one of the bill’s major proponents.

As a result, most law-enforcement leaders decided not to bother with collecting data since immigration isn’t their primary responsibility. Some also worried about getting sued — a clause in the bill gives state residents the power to take legal action if they suspect an agency’s enforcement is too lax. That same worry led some departments, such as Tucson Police, to create a form for each immigration inquiry.

“In our discussions, we thought, ‘Are we opening a Pandora’s box here by keeping numbers?’” Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor said. “Let’s say we didn’t keep numbers and someone wanted to sue us, saying you’re not enforcing it. How do I refute that?”

Broad documentation inconsistencies exist across agencies, and sometimes within them. Not even the Border Patrol can provide a full picture.

Records that are available show police calling the Border Patrol for offenses ranging from having an or broken taillights to trying to pass off a fake ID or leaving the scene of a crash. Several people were detained at least an hour waiting for agents, even though the Supreme Court said they should not be held beyond the length of a typical traffic stop.

The reports don’t begin to settle the debate over whether the law encourages racial profiling or illegally long detentions — two key issues justices said they might reconsider when they let the so-called “show me your papers” provision take effect.

In this void of information, supporters proclaim the law a success at deterring illegal immigration, and critics blast it for encouraging civil rights violations — all without evidence beyond the anecdote.

THE STAR’S FINDINGS

The Star reviewed data and incident reports describing three years of referrals to Border Patrol and interviewed nearly every agency leader in Southern Arizona to trace the law’s effects.

Among the newspaper’s findings:

• In many ways, SB 1070 is business as usual: All of the agencies the Star reviewed reported more referrals to Border Patrol in the years before SB 1070’s immigration check requirement than the year after it. Most said their policies were largely unchanged.
• Oversight is lacking: Agencies rely on complaints and sergeants’ communication with officers to monitor trends and identify problems. None regularly reviews immigration-related enforcement.
• No uptick in apprehensions: Border Patrol data show that apprehensions based on calls from other agencies decreased from fiscal year 2007 to 2013, in line with the overall dropoff in apprehensions as the economy sputtered.
• Apprehension doesn’t equal deportation: More than 1 in 5 people referred to Border Patrol by another law-enforcement agency remain in the country while their case is pending.

HARDER THAN IT SEEMED

The aim of SB 1070 was to reduce the number of people living in the state illegally and to discourage others from coming.

“It was one-third statement of protest, one-third deterrent and one-third good enforcement,” said Kavanagh, a Republican representative from Fountain Hills.

At last estimate, in 2010, about 400,000 immigrants without legal status lived in Arizona. The group topped out at roughly 7 percent of the state’s residents, but as their numbers tripled over two decades, it unsettled enough Arizonans to push the issue into the spotlight. SB 1070 was legislators’ response.

Many of those caught in the system have deep roots in Arizona, and deporting them — especially those who have raised families here — takes more than a state law.

Statewide data from the Department of Public Safety, the only agency to uniformly collect information about SB 1070’s effects, show the immigration-check mandate is diluted by layers of local and federal discretion.

About half of the people officers suspect of unlawful status ever made it into federal custody, and even some of them won’t be deported. Many people with strong ties to the United States appeal their case before an immigration judge — a process that often stretches for years.

In the last fiscal year, judges ruled in favor of immigrants about half the time, a report from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University shows.

Monica Hernández was heading home from church in Nogales, Ariz., when because the red lights on the back of her pickup weren’t illuminated. The officer asked for her driver’s license, which she said she didn’t have because she was in the process of legalizing her status.

He cited her for driving without a license and gave her a warning about the taillight. Within two minutes, the Border Patrol was there.

The wife of a legal permanent resident and mother of three U.S. citizen children, HernĂĄndez considered leaving the state she has called home for 18 years after she got pulled over.

But the native of Nogales, Sonora, stayed because of her children, who have lived their entire lives in Arizona. Her oldest son, Moises, is a football player at Nogales High School and participated in the Border Patrol Law Enforcement Explorer Program. Her middle child, Daniela, plays in her school’s marching band. Her youngest, Sophia, does her homework in a Cinderella-themed bedroom.

“You build your life here. Your children’s lives are here,” said Hernández, whose case is pending. She paid a $5,000 bond and was released from the Eloy Detention Center a few days after she was detained.

The officer who pulled her over was following SB 1070 and had no choice but to call Border Patrol, said Nogales Police Chief Derek Arnson.

“If SB 1070 did not exist, the outcome might have been different,” he said.

LIMITED OVERSIGHT

Most law-enforcement chiefs have only a small window into how their officers and deputies are applying the law.

The oversight system in nearly every Southern Arizona agency hinges on public complaints and a sergeant reading and approving the reports of the officers beneath him. But reports with as little as two lines of information often get through.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said he relies heavily on complaints and the press for information about whether his deputies are enforcing the law constitutionally. “If we have an issue of some kind, then we deal with it,” he said.

But a system so reliant on complaints is unlikely to provide robust oversight, said Robert Worden, director of the John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety and professor of criminal justice and public policy at the University of Albany.

People file complaints on 5 percent to 10 percent of the cases in which they believe police behaved improperly, Worden said. Activists argue that immigrants are even less likely to complain because many come from countries where police have nearly unbridled power. Some fear complaining could lead to their or their family’s deportation.

Statistical analysis, especially of traffic-stop data, has gained favor as a way for chiefs to spot problems without having to wait for a complaint — or worse, a lawsuit.

In the past decade, the courts required such reviews of both major Arizona agencies accused of racial profiling — Maricopa County and DPS. Now it is a regular practice at the country’s largest departments.

VARIED INTERPRETATIONS

Gov. Jan Brewer required that every Arizona cop watch a 94-minute training video produced by the state’s peace-officer certification board. But that hasn’t settled disputes over whose status should be checked.

In June, a couple ended up in Border Patrol custody after a Sahuarita police officer stopped them because the license-plate light on their pickup truck wasn’t visible from the state-required 50 feet.

The driver, Laura Rocha, gave the officer her Arizona driver’s license. She had no warrants and her driving privileges were in good standing. The officer also asked her passenger, JosĂ© LĂłpez, for his identification, even after Rocha explained he was her husband.

LĂłpez showed a Mexican ID, the police report said. The only other thing in his pocket was a receipt from the federal government of his petition to legalize his status.

Using the computer in the patrol car, the officer found a record showing the Border Patrol had deported someone with the same name and date of birth, so he called the federal agency.

Agents arrived and took custody not only of López, but also of Rocha, on suspicion she was an “immigration violator.”

Passengers and pedestrians aren’t required to carry ID or to answer questions if they are not suspected of a crime, but few know that, said James Lyall, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in Tucson.

Several law enforcement leaders said it’s good practice to identify everyone in a vehicle in the interest of officer safety. But Daniel Sharp, Oro Valley chief and a TPD veteran, discourages the blanket practice because, to him, a traffic stop concerns only the driver.

Disagreement also reigns about whether crime victims and witnesses should be exempt from checks.

The ACLU and activist groups want law-enforcement agencies to issue a policy protecting victims and witnesses from questions about immigration status.

TPD Chief Villaseñor is among those who refuse. Although he fears the law’s effect on community trust, he said an across-the-board exemption would open the city to a lawsuit under the clause that lets people sue if they think the law is not being fully enforced.

Kavanagh, the state representative, said the bill’s intention was to punish lawbreakers and he doesn’t think anyone would question a policy protecting victims.

DISPUTE OVER DISCRETION

The law gives officers an out in cases where checking immigration status could jeopardize an investigation or is not doable.

But there is no consensus among the 13 agencies in the Star’s review over how much leeway that actually gives officers.

Villaseñor thinks officers must call immigration authorities on every arrest.

“I don’t understand anyone who says that it hasn’t affected discretion of officers,” he said. “The only way officers still have discretion is if they ignore the law.”

But at other agencies, deputies are still told to use their judgment.

“Our officers have discretion to enforce any law they are required to enforce,” Dupnik said. “If we didn’t, we would be a Gestapo organization.”

DPS — the only agency whose records are comprehensive enough to reveal patterns in discretion — showed officers didn’t check the immigration status of about 40 percent of the people they suspected were here illegally.

Many officers considered a lack of ID to be adequate grounds to contact immigration authorities, but others wrote that the same set of facts did not reach the threshold to force a call.

One DPS officer didn’t find the standard met any of the eight times he stopped vehicles and suspected the occupants’ unlawful status — although in each case they admitted to being in the country illegally.

Some officers declined to call because of children crying or pleading for leniency. In one case, an officer let a family go because the child’s soccer coach stopped to say the game was about to begin.

NO RISE IN APPREHENSIONS

Records show officers called Border Patrol frequently, even for minor infractions, before SB 1070 took effect.

Marco Quiroz-Quijada was after his chow mix got out while animal control and a Cochise County deputy were near his home outside Douglas.

Quiroz-Quijada was about to be cited and released when the pair asked for his ID. The Sonora native didn’t have one. He had crossed illegally through the desert and was in the process of legalizing his status through his wife, a U.S. citizen.

The deputy called Border Patrol, and Quiroz-Quijada was taken into custody.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said. “I was being very careful, not having a steady job, trying not to drive because we didn’t want to take a risk — and it still happened.”

That was April 27, 2012 — months before immigration checks were required.

The data the Star compiled suggest that SB 1070 hasn’t led to more people transferred to immigration authorities after first being detained by a local officer. There are, however, limitations to the information provided.

Most Southern Arizona departments record referrals to immigration officials by classifying the incident as an assist to another agency. That leaves out cases where a person was charged with a more serious state crime.

The Star’s data also is missing stops where officers didn’t give a citation or written warning but still called Border Patrol. Agencies couldn’t provide a paper trail to show how often this happened and whether agents responded. No agency kept a tally of people referred.

The Border Patrol couldn’t provide the number of calls it received from other agencies or break down by department the number of people it took into custody.

However, apprehensions stemming from referrals from other agencies have been dropping along with total apprehensions. They plummeted from a high of about 10,000 people annually in the Tucson and Yuma sectors to about 1,300 in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

The pattern is not much different in Arizona’s northern reaches. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the primary immigration agency for areas farther from the border, hasn’t seen anything close to the boom in calls it anticipated when SB 1070 was under debate.

Its Phoenix office received less than half the calls in the last fiscal year than it did two years earlier. And ICE’s requests for local jails to hold inmates it wants to deport fell also, to 13,000 last fiscal year, about 3,000 fewer than two years before.

The recession makes it hard to assess the effect of SB 1070, as many unauthorized workers left for a lack of jobs. But for his part, Kavanagh declares the law a success and thanks activists for over-exaggerating the possible effects and deterring unauthorized workers from coming to Arizona.

The law’s true effects will be clearer, he said, when the economy recovers and the jobs return. “You can’t deter someone who is not coming,” he said.

NO WAY TO TRACK TRENDS

Despite warnings that SB 1070 would boost public scrutiny, few agencies store relevant information in an easily retrievable way, and none analyzes it. Even at agencies that try to keep tabs, cases are lost in the shuffle.

On weekends when he is not able to turn up a construction job, Manuel Flores rides the shuttle from Tucson to Nogales to talk with his wife, Kenia, through the border fence that divides them.

Kenia Flores was deported to Mexico after the two were pulled over in a traffic stop on their way to El Super grocery store on South Sixth Avenue in August 2012. The Tucson police officer referred them to Border Patrol to check their immigration status.

Manuel Flores asked to see a judge to appeal his case, but Border Patrol apparently didn’t get the same request from his wife, and she was deported.

The Border Patrol has a record of picking up the couple from a Tucson officer, but Tucson police could not find a document related to the stop of Flores, who spent three months at Eloy Detention Center until he paid a $3,500 bond.

He also lost the pickup truck the officer impounded because he couldn’t reclaim it within the 30-day window. There’s no record of the impoundment that day, either.

After SB 1070, Tucson police created a form the dispatcher fills out when an officer requests an immigration check. But it’s handwritten on paper so the files can’t be easily searched.

The forms don’t capture every call to Border Patrol because some officers use their cell phone, leaving dispatchers with no record the inquiry ever happened.

There are also problems linking forms to other details about the incident. The department’s traffic citation software uses case numbers that don’t match those assigned to the incident report or dispatch form.

As a result, for the single day’s worth of reports the Star requested, TPD could only provide partial summaries with the reason for each traffic stop listed as unknown.

THE CASE FOR DATA

The only way to accurately gauge SB 1070’s effects is to collect data.

That’s beginning to gain traction. As a result of the Star’s investigation, the Douglas Police Department directed its officers to document every encounter with a person suspected to be in the country illegally and whether Border Patrol responded.

The South Tucson Police Department, which was only able to retrieve one immigration-related case based on the Star’s request, pledged to improve its practices and to classify reports in a way that can be searched and analyzed.

Tucson police are considering changes under direction from the City Council.

Statewide, the Civil Rights Advisory Board is pushing for better data collection and more frequent reviews of Arizona law-enforcement agencies. The board will ask the governor to advocate for a data mandate, said its chairman, Jeff Lavender.

Recent court decisions have driven the point home. Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, found guilty of racial profiling in October, is overhauling its documentation.

Despite its headline-grabbing embrace of immigration enforcement, Maricopa County recorded only about 10 percent of its referrals because deputies did most inquiries by cellphone, leaving no paper trail, spokesman Lt. Brandon Jones said. The department recently rolled out a new form on which deputies record the perceived race of a driver both before and after a traffic stop.

“That was the problem before,” Jones said. “We had no record that we weren’t racially profiling.”

Without data, law-enforcement chiefs can’t disprove allegations based on patterns and are unlikely to see the big picture: how their orders are being carried out, what’s working and what impact they’re having on the community.

“Data,” civil rights board chairman Lavender said, “is difficult to argue against.”