Harbury tracked down one of the friends who had been in the car that night. She was frightened but agreed to testify. While seated at the processing station, the woman recalled, Laura wept and begged the border officer—Ramiro Garza—not to send her back. The officer, she said, had a gun and an “annoyed” expression. He put the paperwork in front of Laura, and ordered her to sign. “This is an injustice!” Laura objected, according to the friend. Garza, she said, “mocked” Laura, and pressed again. The pair went back and forth until Laura caved. (Garza denied this version of events, and said that he would never force anyone to sign the form.) Laura’s friend said that her own decision to sign was influenced by the prospect of the long detention that often accompanies fighting deportation. “I didn’t want to be locked in,” she said, “because I have children.”

In July, 2017, Hanen finally handed down his ruling. “This case presents one of the most lamentable set of circumstances that this Court has ever been called upon to address,” Hanen wrote. It left the court with “a profound sense of sadness about the disastrous chain of events that ended in the defendant’s murder.” But he said that he couldn’t overcome the problem that “the only person who can truly reveal Laura S.’s motivation” in checking the box—Laura herself—“was killed.” As a result, coercion was hard to prove. Perhaps she was coerced, Hanen said, or perhaps she signed the I-826 so that she wouldn’t be in detention during her son’s surgery, or for some other unknown or unknowable reason.

“Despite their best efforts,” Hanen ruled, “Plaintiffs have failed to clear the evidentiary hurdle created by the death of Laura S.” The case was dismissed.

Harbury felt heartsick, but she’d always known that the case might have to wind its way through higher appeals courts. Last August, Harbury and the other lawyers filed with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the case should be heard by a jury. They noted that the lawsuit’s outcome “directly affects ongoing life and death situations” for other immigrants. Harbury is hopeful that, if success eludes them in the initial appeals, the case will eventually reach the Supreme Court. And if no justice emerges there? Harbury and her team will turn to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. There, they can draw on treaties meant to protect immigrants like those the United States failed in the Second World War.

For Laura’s family, the stakes of the case are profound. But they also have other, more immediate worries. Not long after Laura’s murder, Elizabeth’s purse was stolen from her car. Her visa—her only proof of legal status—was inside. Then, in 2015, she learned about Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which was intended for people who had come to the U.S. as children and, in many cases, grown up here, who wanted to work legally, get an education, and stay in the place they considered home. Elizabeth decided to apply. She had to prove that she’d come to the U.S. before the age of sixteen, posed no threat to national security, and met a list of other criteria. Not long after submitting her materials, she was notified that she had won legal relief, and officially become a Dreamer.

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Politically, Obama’s DACA policies have been hugely popular. Recent polls show that more than three out of four Americans support allowing Dreamers to remain in the U.S., and two-thirds of Republicans back a pathway to citizenship for them. But, last September, Elizabeth got frightening news: Trump had ordered an end to the program, and had given Congress six months to extend its protections. Elizabeth had to submit a renewal request before an October deadline, but she couldn’t afford the legal fees. Her immigration attorney, she told me, refused to return her paperwork without a substantial payment.

In December, Elizabeth’s DACA status expired. If a legislative solution isn’t reached by early March, nearly seven hundred thousand people in the U.S. will be stripped of their legal status and their protection from deportation. Earlier this month, three former Homeland Security Secretaries, including Michael Chertoff, who served under George W. Bush, wrote a letter to Congress underscoring the importance of a DACA fix. “We write not only in strong support of this legislation, but to stress that it should be enacted speedily, in order to meet the significant administrative requirements of implementation, as well as the need to provide certainty for employers and these young people,” the letter read.

Some Dreamers fear for their lives if sent back. Elizabeth testified against Sergio at his murder trial, and she told me that he has called her relatives in Reynosa from prison to make death threats against her. When she lost her legal status, she also lost her work permit, and therefore her job. Some days, anxiety overtakes her. “I’m still trying my best,” she recently texted me, “which is what matters.”

Still, when I asked Elizabeth what she would tell President Trump if they ever met, she immediately thought of Laura’s boys. “Please be conscious of what happens when a woman gets deported,” she said. “It’s not only what could happen to her—it’s the family she leaves behind, in America. Please think of those kids.”

At home last summer, Laura’s boys celebrated what would have been their mother’s thirty-first birthday. Maria decorated a vanilla cake with fresh carnations and hung streamers from the ceiling in Laura’s favorite colors: purple, pink, and light blue. She gathered the family in the living room—the three boys and Elizabeth, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins—and handed out pens. Each person wrote a message to Laura on a piece of notebook paper, which they tied to pink balloons and launched into the sky.

“Hi, mami,” Laura’s youngest wrote, in Spanish. “I miss you.” He said that he hoped to have four careers—as “a basketball player, a Nascar driver, an engineer, and a YouTuber”—so that he could send his earnings to his mom in Heaven, after buying himself a “fancy refrigerator.”

The oldest boy told me of his plans to persuade the rapper Drake to adopt him. He loved Drake’s music, and his style, and his Instagram feed, and he knew Drake would love his, too. “Hey, Mom,” he wrote. “I need you to take care of me.”

Laura’s middle child kept his note secret, but he showed me a poster board he’d made for his mother, with colorful pompoms and photographs glued above a poem he’d written: “Wave after wave / Crushes onto my legs / I remember Mom’s every word / To help me stand on my own two feet.”

At the kitchen table, the boys played with an iPhone. “Siri, what is ten to the thousandth?” the youngest asked. “Siri, who am I?”

“Who is my mommy?”

“Who is Donald Trump?”

“How old is Donald Trump?”

The oldest chimed in, “Siri, can I call my mom?”

Maria sometimes envies the boys’ approach to death. She told me that twice Laura’s eldest son had stood at the bus stop after school, craning his neck, waiting. “What is it?” she asked.

“When is Mom coming?” he replied.

“Mom’s not coming,” she told her grandson. “Remember where we left her?” she asked gently, pulling him close. “We left her on the other side of the border.” ♦

This story was produced in collaboration with the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Fellows include: Annie Hylton, Anjali Tsui, Sarah Salvadore, Divya Kumar, Astha Rajvanshi, Chris Gelardi, Yemile Bucay, Micah Hauser, and Noor Ibrahim.