In 2020 Census, Big Efforts in Some States. In Others, Not So Much.

But outside the major metros, money and personnel are scarce.

“It’s not that philanthropies aren’t doing enough,” said Lila Valencia, the senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center. “It’s just that it’s going to take so much more than we have.”

The office of Gov. Greg Abbott did not immediately respond on Sunday to requests for comment on the state’s policy concerning the census.

Hidalgo County, over a thousand square miles of scrub and urban sprawl on the Mexico border, has been here before. Officially, 866,000 people, almost all Hispanic, live here. Unofficially, county officials count more than a million.

The county sued the federal government after the 2010 census undercounted the area. In some places fewer than one in five households filled out forms. Residents refused to open doors to Puerto Rican census takers, whose accents marked them as strangers. Others never received forms because they used post office boxes, which the Census Bureau does not count as mailing addresses.

This time, the county will spend $300,000 on census response. But it has been planning for this moment since 2017.

For more than two years, civic groups, school leaders, businesses and others have convened with county officials to chart strategy. Planners overlaid the Census Bureau’s address list on aerial photographs of the county — and found 15,000 overlooked households. Every household that completes a census form increases the county’s share of federal money for schools, medical care and other needs. But completing those forms will be tough. Much of Hidalgo County is poor and rural; internet outside the urban strip that hugs Interstate 2 is sparse. And mistrust of the government is epidemic.

“It’s a horrible time here,” said Christina Patiño Houle, an organizer with the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network. Between the controversy over counting noncitizens and the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, “fear of anyone affiliated with the government who could tear apart a family on a moment’s notice is pervasive.”