How Can I be Sure?

LOS ANGELES—There were days that were good. Days when I would have these amazing conversations where I was trying to get people to open up to me in general, because if you made friends with somebody they were more likely to open up to you. And I would end up having these long conversations in minority communities about the meaning of the Black Lives Matter movement, and about how social media is creating divisiveness in our society, and the under-representation of minorities in government.

And they would talk to me about how it doesn’t matter if I count them because the government is not going to give them resources. They'd say that the government only needs to know how many Black people live here so that we don't look like a big, whitewashed city.

They'd tell me, ''We’re not going to be given the money to fix our schools, our roads, to build fire stations and hospitals because they (the government) don't care about us.''

And I couldn’t say anything different because it’s kind of true. There hasn’t been a whole lot of effort made on our government’s part to make sure these communities have been taken care of. They've been underserved for decades.

And then there was the whole immigration issue. As we all know, President Trump has been opposed to counting anyone who’s not considered a citizen. So for people who were maybe here illegally, it was really heartbreaking because they were scared that I was going to share their information with the authorities.

I told them that I was sworn by oath and was assured up and down that our Bureau was not going to share their information with the IRS or immigration; but man, can I really be sure about that? Especially with a President that doesn’t know how to follow the rules.

So, whenever I could tell that people were hesitant, I asked them to just give me pseudonyms and give me as much information as they were comfortable with.

But one time, I was really hesitant to go to this house because all of the notes about it--there were 20 notes left by other workers that said, "Can't find these people... The neighbors are being weird about it... This seems like a strange place... There are dogs." So I saved it for the end of the day because I was just like, Ok, I'll try and then if I can't, I'll just move on.

But when I got there, the neighbors told me that the house I was looking for was around the back in the alley. So I went around the back and just as I was arriving a truck pulled up, and it was perfect timing because this place had a giant chain-link fence with, like, two very wild, crazy, vicious-looking dogs behind it, and there was no way I was gonna get past them to even knock on the door. I would have had to perfectly time it to find the people when they were coming home, and I did.

And in the truck was a man with three children, and I was so scared that he was going to threaten me or be weird or, you know, put me in danger somehow. But he wasn't. He just put his truck in park and said, ''Yes, ask me, anything.'' His two boys jumped out and chained up the dogs and opened the fence. His daughter stayed in the truck.

So I was like, Great, Awesome. I didn't know how comfortable he would be. So I just kind of started asking the regular questions of, What's your name? How do you spell it? How many people live here? Stuff like that.

And then he let me know that, up until recently, his wife lived with them, too. But she had been deported back to Mexico, and he was also probably going to be deported soon...And that he was just waiting for the day that someone showed up to take him away and his children would have to grow up in this country without their parents. His kids were in their young teens.

And he started to weep. And his daughter started to weep, and he said, "We miss her, we miss her every day, and we're just trying to get through day by day."

I was already too far into the interview to go back and not put names in. So I just continued with the information that he was willing to give. And I felt so horrible because, I thought, what if our President gets his hands on this guy's information and now he knows where he lives because of me? And what if I split up his family even further?

And he said to me, "I don't steal. I don't do drugs. I don't commit any crimes. I pay my taxes. I'm an honest worker, and I don't take a single dime of government money for assistance." He said that to me. He really wanted me to know, like, " I'm not the bad guy."

This was a day that was not so good. After that, I came home and poured myself a whisky and had a good cry.

--Alyson Schill