Will the 325,000 undocumented immigrants in Arizona still trust the police?

Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the number of people living in Arizona without legal status. The correct number is 325,000 people.

Rosa Pastrana laces up her sneakers and loops her long ponytail through the back of her baseball cap.

She steps out the front door and climbs into her tall red truck.

Pulling out of the driveway, she begins a familiar route through her west Phoenix neighborhood.

It’s a trip she makes every night.

Every so often, Pastrana slows to a stop and steps out of her vehicle.

She takes a closer look at something that had caught her vigilant eye. She pulls out her phone and snaps photos. She notes the date and time of day.

Perhaps, she thinks, this could be a crime scene.

Neighbors peer out their windows as she continues her rounds. The sight of the petite 45-year-old woman conducting her detective work doesn’t concern them. In most cases, she is crouching outside their homes because they had called her there.

But she doesn’t have a badge or a uniform, with the exception of her sturdy shoes and the cap she wears to cover her eyes when the sun sits low in the sky.

Pastrana is the president of the Osborn Block Watch in Maryvale. Her truck bears a sign in big letters: Phoenix Neighborhood Patrol.

Her presence is one residents have grown accustomed to – one they’ve come to rely on.

For the past six years, Pastrana has covered Maryvale, focusing on the area between 35th and 43rd avenues and Osborn and Indian School roads, doing regular patrols and responding to calls and text messages from neighbors notifying her of suspicious activity.

Once she gets to the location, she calls police and waits for officers to arrive, mediating a relationship between her mostly Spanish-speaking community and law enforcement.

She initially worked to inform her neighbors on how to report crime in an area once ridden with gang and drug activity. But case by case, it seemed a bridge had formed over the gap between the heavily immigrant neighborhood and the police assigned to the precinct, Pastrana says.

Now, she’s worried that the hard work will be wasted and crime once again will rise if deportations ramp up in the city.

The Trump administration is reaching out to broker deals with local and state authorities across the nation to empower and deputize them in federal immigration matters. Agency participation would be voluntary.

“The community has fear, a lot of fear,” Pastrana says. “Ever since Donald Trump won, that day people started to feel scared. And to this day, he still has us traumatized."

If local agencies become immigration enforcers, it will have a “disastrous” effect, Pastrana, local police and experts say. It will make communities less safe because individuals and whole neighborhoods will be reluctant to report crime and cooperate with police in fear of deportation.

The link between undocumented immigrants and police officers has long been delicate, reliant on a group of people to interact with law enforcement who fear their status in the country could be questioned.

Police agencies and prosecutors in Arizona are working to keep lines of communication open even as fear grows. Representatives in metro Phoenix and Arizona’s border counties told The Arizona Republic they remain focused on local police responsibilities, their priorities will not change and they have no interest in being deputized to assist with federal immigration matters.

Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone replaced Joe Arpaio, under whom the Sheriff's Office was found to conduct illegal racial profiling of Latinos. Penzone has created a Hispanic Advisory Committee to help his agency learn about issues and concerns that exist, said Mark Casey, a sheriff's spokesman.

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The agency’s community outreach also was expanded, Casey said, by adding staff who have experience in building relationships with minority communities.

“We’ve attended town halls and coffees and met with the community’s representative and members,” he said. “We want to assure those who are victims or witnesses of crimes that they can come forward to speak. They can do so without concern.”

“We’ll have to earn the trust through our actions," Casey said. "It’s going to be our commitment to show that we are ethical and professional and that we’ll treat everyone with respect.”

Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams said in a statement, "We maintain open communication with our diverse residents and want to ensure that our crime victims and witnesses feel comfortable and confident when reporting crimes to our officers. As your chief, I commit to you that racial profiling will not be tolerated."

The county's chief prosecutor, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, said in a recent news conference that victims and witnesses of crime shouldn’t worry about their immigration status when it comes to reporting criminal activity to police.

"Your cooperation, your participation with the investigation and the subsequent prosecution is necessary to hold offenders accountable," he said. "Your immigration status does not matter. It's not the focus of the criminal investigation."

"We do not live in a community where we all look the same unless you’re not a citizen. That’s not the community we have. There's just no way to know. I will not tolerate a circumstance in Maricopa County where there is any group of individuals who think that because they might not have lawful immigration status that’s it's OK for them to be victimized."

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Steve Kilar, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said he believes Arizona agencies learned lessons about immigration enforcement years ago. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office had its federal immigration authority taken away in 2012 by a federal judge, and the immigration-enforcement law Senate Bill 1070 faced multiple court challenges.

“They have no intentions of turning back,” Kilar said. “They understand the damages ... 1070 did to their reputations. They realize it made their jobs harder when people saw them as immigration officers."

Lydia Guzman, a Phoenix immigration activist, agrees that local authorities understand the importance of community policing and what is needed to make that work.

But there are an estimated 325,000 people living in the state without authorization — according to the most recent data from Pew Research Center — and she understands why they are afraid.

“We have a lot of good cops here in Arizona,” Guzman said. “But we’re seeing in the news every day that someone is getting wrapped up in the system when they following the proper steps. They get detained when they show up to court or when they show up at a police station."

In early February, a woman living in the country illegally was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while at an El Paso courthouse, where she was seeking a protective order against a boyfriend she accused of domestic violence. The El Paso County Attorney's Office said it believed the boyfriend tipped off immigration authorities.

In Phoenix, Guadalupe Garcia De Rayos was detained during a routine check-in at ICE. The Mesa mother, who has been living in Arizona for two decades, was deported the next day.

The same scenario played out for Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia, a single father who was detained on his son's birthday March 2.

“What does that say to the people?” Guzman said. “Shouldn't they be afraid?"

"Right now, we're in new waters. Both law enforcement and the community are at a loss for what they should be doing. I just hope law enforcement will show compassion above all," she said.

RELATED: Deported single dad fears for U.S.-born kids' future

Guzman described immigrants in the U.S. without authorization as the “perfect victims.”

“They can be taken advantage of more than ever now,” Guzman said to The Republic. “If a bad person knows someone’s status, they know they won’t speak up for themselves. They know they’re vulnerable.”

Guzman said this unbalance of power would be observed in domestic and workplace situations alike.

“A person can say, ‘What are you going to do, report me? I can report you, too,’” she said “This is what Trump has done. He’s put people in a position where they can’t seek help.”

The fear seen in Maryvale plays out in other parts of the country.

In Denver, City Attorney Kristin Bronson said the fear of deportation caused prosecutors to drop four domestic-violence cases. She told reporters there that the victims in those cases feared running into officers at court who could deport them.

Police in central Wisconsin are working to ease deportation fears as anxiety levels among Hispanics have reached new heights. That fear has had ripple effects for the region's law-enforcement agencies, which are reaching out to migrants to reassure them that police officers and county deputies are not acting as agents of ICE.

A central point of Trump’s orders and a mainstay of his immigration rhetoric is the view that people in the U.S. illegally present a significant threat to national security and public safety.

“Criminal aliens routinely victimize Americans and other legal residents,” states a memorandum from John Kelly, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Yet Trump's claims about crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and American crime rates in general have been found to be largely inaccurate and exaggerated.

Study after study has indicated that immigrants, including those who are without authorization, commit violent crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

Immigration and crime levels in fact, have had inverse trajectories since the 1990s, according to Census data. While immigration increased, crime decreased.

And so-called “sanctuary cities,” which Trump calls incubators of criminal activity, are generally safer than other cities, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive public-policy organization.

“Look at the trends. They show the truth,” said Philip Wolgin, the managing director for immigration policy at the center. “What we are seeing from Trump’s administration is political opportunism.”

The Washington, D.C.-based group recently conducted a study that analyzed the effects of sanctuary policies on crime and economy. FBI crime rates for sanctuary counties – defined in the study as those not willing to accept ICE detainers – were compared to all crime rates for non-sanctuary counties. The research found that crime statistically is significantly lower in sanctuary counties.

In an interview with The Republic, Wolgin explained that the data specifically showed that the overall crime rate was about 15 percent lower in counties where local authorities refuse to perform federal immigration duties.

A typical sanctuary county in a large metropolitan area experiences 654 fewer crimes per 100,000 residents than the typical non-sanctuary county in a big metro area. The same result was found in smaller counties as well as rural areas, Wolgin said.

To be sure, violent crimes are committed by undocumented immigrants. Grant Ronnebeck, 21, was killed in January 2015 while working at a QuikTrip store in Mesa. The man charged in the killing, Apolinar Altamirano, 29, was in the country illegally. He had been released from custody in 2013 by ICE after posting a bond, even though he had been convicted of a felony burglary. Altamirano's case is still awaiting trial.

“Certainly no one is going to argue that we shouldn’t be stopping violent crimes and violent criminals. But the idea that, ‘Well, the crime only happened because they were here, so we will be safer,’ is a circular logic because now we are no longer prioritizing (for deportation) those violent criminals,” Wolgin said.

“The specter of the bogeyman is a way to crack down on immigration. It’s a falsehood. (Trump) is taking isolated incidents, terrible incidents, and painting immigrants with a broad brush as if they are all criminals.”

Rather than make communities safer, Trump’s immigration orders will have the opposite effect on public safety, Wolgin said.

“Crime will go up,” he said. “If you have a population that isn’t willing to come forward and interact with police, you’ve got a disastrous problem on your hands ... not just for the undocumented communities, but for everyone.”

On a March evening, Pastrana pulls into the Burger King at 51st Avenue and McDowell Road.

Parked, she climbs down from her truck and opens the back doors for her two passengers, 18-year-old Ruben Acevedo and 75-year-old Pedro Estevez.

"These are my security guys," she says, partially joking.

The trio gets to work, grabbing large magnets from the back seat. They place one on each side of the vehicle and one on the back of the truck bed.

"Phoenix Neighborhood Patrol," they read in large blue letters on a reflective yellow background.

They pile back into the truck, and Pastrana makes a left to start a leisurely route through a nearby neighborhood.

"This isn't specifically my area, but I like to patrol here as well because there seems to be more crime the further west and south you go," she says.

West Phoenix was terrorized last summer by whom Phoenix police dubbed the "serial street shooter" — a yet-to-be identified man believed to have killed seven people in 2016. Six of his victims were slain in the Maryvale area.

From a box, Pastrana pulls out a Silent Witness flier created for the investigation, which is still ongoing. She had passed them out to residents living on the streets where the shootings had taken place, urging them to step forward if they had any information.

RELATED: 'Serial street shooter' victim shares story

From the back seat, Acevedo and Estevez survey the area as Pastrana maneuvers down the poorly lit street.

The sun had long set, and many parts of the street are cloaked in darkness.

"That's no good," she says, pointing out several streetlights. "The darkness can breed crime. I'm making a note of that so I can report it to the city."

Acevedo has joined Pastrana's patrols for the past two years after he had met her during a neighborhood meeting and "wanted to do his share." What Pastrana was doing to better the community inspired him to get involved, to show others that those who live in the area care about it.

"Growing up here, I've seen it all," Acevedo says. "I want to help my community be safe and help the people know it's important to work together to keep violence down, especially at a time like this."

Pastrana's neighborhood watch is part of the Phoenix Police Neighborhood Patrol Program, which started in 1994 to train residents in civilian patrolling tactics and to provide tools to detect and report crime.

Because of her leadership in her community, she's had multiple opportunities to speak directly with city leaders and authorities.

While she is comforted by Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton's statements reassuring residents that the city's police department won't turn into a "mass deportation force" and by changes made at the Sheriff's Office, she said she still has doubts.

"What if the time comes that they won't answer my calls?" Pastrana asks. "I trust them, but the people I speak to, they have bosses, and they have bosses. It goes all the way up to the big boss, Trump."

In the meantime, she says she will continue the work in her community and advise her neighbors to have hope.

"Neither Phoenix police nor (Penzone) has given us a sign that they will attack us, so we need to trust them.

"If I see that they come to hurt us, that's when my support for them will end."

Includes reporting from Republic reporter Laura Gómez. Reach the reporter at yjeong@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on Twitter @yihyun_jeong.