PHOENIX — “Cinco dolares,” Silvia Arias says when asked the price of car polish at a garage sale that she and two close friends, Minerva Ruiz and Claudia Suriano, are holding. “Five dollars.” Another sale is made.

The three women planned the sale to raise money to leave Arizona. Though all are longtime residents, viewed as pillars of parental support at the neighborhood elementary school, they’re also illegal immigrants from Mexico. And along with many others, they want to escape a tough new state law whose stated intention is unambiguous: To drive illegal immigrants out of Arizona and to discourage them from coming here.

There is no official data tracking how many are leaving as a result. “It’s something that’s really tough to get a handle on numerically,” said Bill Schooling, Arizona’s state demographer. “It’s not just the immigration bill. It’s also employer sanctions and the economy. How do you separate out the motivating factors?”

Still, anecdotal evidence provided by schools and businesses in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods and by healthcare clinics suggests that sizable numbers are departing. Ignacio Rodriguez, associate director for the Phoenix Roman Catholic diocese’s Office of Hispanic Ministries, said churches in the area are also seeing families leave.

Priests are “seeing some people approach them and ask for a blessing because they’re leaving the state to go back to their country of origin or another state,” he said. “Unless they approach and ask for a sending-off blessing, we wouldn’t have any idea they’re leaving or why.”

Ruiz and Suriano and their families plan to move this month. Arias and her family are considering leaving, but are waiting to see if the law will go into effect as scheduled July 29, and, if so, how it will be enforced.

The law requires police investigating another incident or crime to ask people about their immigration status if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” they’re in the country illegally. It also makes being in Arizona illegally a misdemeanor, and it prohibits seeking day-labor work along the state’s streets.

Ruiz, Suriano and Arias are representative of many families facing what they consider a cruel dilemma. To leave, they must pull their children from school, uproot their lives and look for new jobs and homes elsewhere. But to stay is to be under the scrutiny of the nation’s most stringent immigration laws and the potentially greater threat of being caught, arrested and deported. They also perceive a growing hostility toward Hispanics, in general.

On the quarter-mile stretch of Phoenix’s Belleview Street where both Ruiz and Suriano live, more than half the apartments and single-family homes have “for rent” signs out front.

Alan Langston, president of the Arizona Rental Property Owners & Landlords Association, said his group doesn’t track vacancy rates but that his members believe they will be affected by people leaving because of the new law.

The friends say most of the vacancy signs went up after the new law was signed in late April.

“Everyone’s afraid,” Arias says.