LAREDO, Texas — Jeanette Silva still hasn’t decided what she will do when a census packet arrives at her home a few miles from the banks of the Rio Grande.

The 40-year-old pastor feels conflicted — torn between what she sees as the benefits it could offer her community, including her daughter, along with the potential risks for her undocumented husband.

“My little girl will have more support,” said Silva of the couple’s 4-year-old, Deborah. “But there is always an uneasiness, a fear — especially right now — of federal officials.”

Last month, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, President Trump abandoned his efforts to add a citizenship question to next year’s census. Now activists nationwide are campaigning to assure immigrants it is safe to participate in the once-a-decade tally that determines how federal money and power is apportioned.

But many here fear that irreparable harm already has been done, and they are bracing for a record undercount.

Among the groups most at risk of not being fully tallied are children younger than 5. For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has struggled to count that demographic. In 2010, roughly 2 million were omitted, more than any other age group.

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CROWNPOINT, N.M. — Leonard Jones doesn’t remember a survey packet on the porch or a knock on his front door during the last census count.

But that doesn’t surprise him — not out here. Only family and close friends make the dusty 10-mile trek from the paved road, down dirt switchbacks lined by sandstone mesas, to his secluded home in northwestern New Mexico. There is no electricity, no running water, in the single-level sandstone structure.

“Few people know we’re out here,” Jones, who lives on the Navajo Nation reservation, said on a recent morning as his son Brett trimmed his hair. “We live in nature.”

“The thought of people coming out here and making us a part of any official count seems like a stretch, you know?”

As the 2020 census nears, concern about an undercount of Native Americans is gaining traction here and across the country.

Approximately 600,000 Native Americans live on tribal reservations, semi-sovereign entities governed by elected indigenous leaders. Here on the Navajo Nation — the country’s largest reservation, spanning portions of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah — roughly 175,000 people live in a mostly rural high desert area bigger than West Virginia.

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LEXINGTON, Ky. — The headstones — cracked, chipped, crumbled — rise sporadically across eight acres of dried grass. Mold and wind have eaten away at the slabs of stone, but if you kneel close enough, maybe wipe a palm across the faded inscriptions, family names emerge.

Lewis

Perkins

Murphy

Tucked off a quiet two-lane road lined by towering oak trees in Lexington, you’ll find African Cemetery No. 2, the burial site of many of Kentucky’s first — yet often least remembered — jockeys and horse trainers.

Every May, racing fans from around the world flock to Churchill Downs in Louisville, eager to watch thoroughbreds — many of them reared in the rolling hills nearby — tear around the track. The horse racing industry brings billions of dollars and infinite pride to the Bluegrass State each year. This Saturday will mark the 145th running of the Kentucky Derby.

But as with the cemetery that houses the remains of some of the sport’s pioneers, little attention is paid to the critical role black equestrians played in forming the industry in the late 1800s. In the years after the Civil War, most horse trainers and grooms were black men — so, too, were jockeys. Of the first 28 winning jockeys of the Derby, 15 were African American.

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GREENSBORO, N.C. — Pilar Hughes watched students crisscross the wide quad at the center of campus, remembering her first year at Bennett College.

The tiny classes. The soul food lunches served on Wednesdays. The sisterhood and the overwhelming sense of self-worth the all-women’s black college offered.

“There is so much love and community here,” the freshman said on a warm spring morning. “I’m sure the experiences here will help me in life.”

And yet, she plans to transfer.

Bennett, one of two all-women’s historically black colleges in the country, could be on the verge of closure. Years of financial woes have led recently to a federal court battle over its accreditation, without which the future of any college is dim.

Meanwhile, students like Hughes flee. Ten years ago, nearly 800 students roamed Bennett’s campus; now there are fewer than 500.

Bennett’s story reflects that of many of the nation’s 102 historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, most of which formed after the Civil War.

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CYNTHIANA, Ky. — Brian Furnish studied the thick, tan stalks dangling from wooden trellises inside his towering, pitched-roof barn. After years of practice, the eighth-generation Kentucky tobacco farmer knew to check for even the earliest signs of mold on his plants.

But this wasn’t tobacco. Above Furnish was another plant with a long, complicated history in the state.

“This is about evolving,” the 43-year-old said, gingerly pinching stalks of hemp that dangled like light fixtures.

A steady morning rain pattered on the tin roof and slivers of light shone through the plank siding. The sweet smell of tobacco leaves dried here over generations lingered in the air. With it mingled the pungent odor of the new hemp harvest.

“Tobacco here is very much the past,” Furnish said. “Hemp is the future.”

For centuries, tobacco barns dotted the central Kentucky landscape, but as health risks from smoking became clear, sales of the state’s longtime top crop plummeted. Farmers searching for an alternative focused on another crop with a long history here, stretching back to the 1700s. And it’s one that’s grown and dried similarly to tobacco.

Now the conservative state is on the front lines of what is expected to be a booming hemp industry nationwide. Some say the crop is as ingrained in the state’s culture as bourbon and thoroughbreds.

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CHILLIWACK, British Columbia — Bill Powers flipped through the sworn statement he gave to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the printed pages taking him back to that August afternoon — back to the border checkpoint into Washington state where agents asked if he had ever smoked marijuana.

Yes, he answered, not initially thinking much of the question. The 57-year-old Canadian has a license for medical marijuana, and pot had been legal in Washington for six years. Like that, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents turned him away with an extreme decree: He had been banned from the United States.

“It’s absolutely out of control. Here I am being honest with the United States and I get the boot,” Powers said on a recent afternoon as he stood in his driveway in this farming town an hour east of Vancouver. “I have a license … yet they’re turning people away for pot? It makes not a single bit of sense.”

With Canada set to legalize recreational marijuana nationwide on Wednesday — only the second country to do so, following Uruguay — many Canadians, especially those who live near the border, face growing anxiety over what to say if U.S. customs agents ask them if they’ve ever consumed marijuana.

Lying to a border agent can result in a person being denied entry. But so too can being honest about past marijuana use.

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WEST JORDAN, Utah — Brian Stoll faced a dilemma as his wedding day approached. For more than a year, he had been smoking marijuana to treat severe back pain, but to remain in good standing with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and get married in the temple, he had to stop using pot.

Since marijuana was illegal under Utah law, church leaders told him, it was forbidden. Stoll turned to an opioid painkiller and has continued using it since his marriage three years ago, despite unpleasant side effects and its inability to match the soothing qualities of marijuana.

“This was devastating … I had to choose between my health and my fiancee,” Stoll said recently. “It seemed asinine that if I lived in another state, I wouldn’t have to make such a difficult decision.”

Perhaps soon, Stoll said, that could all change for him and his fellow Mormons in Utah.

In November, voters here will consider a ballot measure to legalize medical marijuana and possibly join 30 others states that allow its use.

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DETROIT — His pager buzzed three times with a message: level one gsw pediatric. Life-threatening trauma. Gunshot wound. Child.

Ray Winans swiped his key card and opened the doors to the busiest emergency room in one of the deadliest U.S. cities.

“Where’s the GSW?” he asked a security guard.

“Back over there.”

Winans sidestepped a cluster of empty wheelchairs and strode down a long corridor.

“Where is he at?” he asked a nurse.

“Room 2.”

Winans, a broad-shouldered 39-year-old who speaks with the confidence of a stage actor, took a long breath, then pulled back the beige curtain. The child, Mario Brown, who had just turned 17, had yet to arrive from a CT scan of his abdomen and the .22-caliber bullet lodged in it.

Slumped in chairs against one wall were his sister, whose clasped hands rested on her lap, and his cousin, who had Mario’s blood on his pants. Both had tears in their eyes.

“I’m not the police,” Winans told them. “I’m here to help you all. I’m here for you.”

They stared at the empty bed and said nothing.

As a counselor trying to steer boys and young men away from violence in his native Detroit — which has the third-highest homicide rate in the country behind St. Louis and Baltimore — Winans knows the difficulty of getting them to take his message seriously. Danger resides in the abstract until it becomes real. And in the moments and days after somebody takes a bullet and survives, it is very real.

He views each case as an opportunity that might never come again.

Winans would wait for Mario.

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