CERES, Calif. — Last weekend, 3,000 miles west of the marble edifices of the nation’s capital, Cindy Quezada, the field research leader for the San Joaquin Valley Census Research Project, was wending her way past false-eyelash vendors, mountains of chiles and peanuts, bright jumbles of farm-worker bandannas and triumphal displays of booty-lifting jeans. She and a colleague, Jorge San Juan, were at El Rematito, a popular flea market, to talk with fellow immigrants about their willingness to participate in “el censo” — the 2020 census.

Only a few days later, on Wednesday, President Trump blocked the release of documents about that census. His administration has added a question about citizenship to it, and the House Oversight Committee wants to know why. Democrats believe that the move is an attempt to frighten immigrants into avoiding the census — and indeed, it could lead to an estimated 6.5 million people not being counted. That could cause states with big immigrant populations like California to lose House seats and money for everything from infrastructure to food stamps. A challenge to it has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, and a decision is expected any day now.

El Rematito flea market is presumably little-traveled by Supreme Court justices. But they might want to give it a try. Because if anywhere in America will be harmed by the 2020 census, it is here in the San Joaquin Valley, where about half of the 4.2 million people are Hispanic.

Ms. Quezada, who has a Ph.D. in biology, left El Salvador with her family in the 1980s and became an American citizen in her early 20s. She worked for the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development in Egypt before logging 9,338 miles for the census research project. She has an upbeat, easygoing manner that puts people at ease. Since last fall, she and her team have had conversations and held focus groups in 31 communities with some of the country’s most overlooked and vulnerable people — the so-called hard to count. They hope to harness what they’ve learned to devise better strategies for census outreach.

At the flea market, Mr. San Juan, who is of Indigenous Mexican origin, tried to snag people to answer a questionnaire. Many seemed afraid to engage — they “reeked of no,” as Ms. Quezada put it. That’s understandable: Even if they are citizens or hold green cards themselves, many live with undocumented family members whom they fear exposing. The census does not share responses with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or any other agency, but most people here don’t know that or don’t believe it.

The project, which was sponsored by the San Joaquin Valley Health Fund, is in effect a census about the census. Its premise is that researchers who are immigrants themselves stand the best chance of getting honest and nuanced insights about the census from fellow immigrants.

For many respondents, the desire to be counted is overshadowed by fear. And yet, “If we don’t fill it out, they’ll know we’re immigrants,” one woman told Ms. Quezada. Her friends saw that as risky too, because people have heard that census workers might question their neighbors if they don’t respond. “The next thing I know I’m deported because somebody talked,” another woman said.

At the flea market, Mr. San Juan asked a 34-year-old farm maintenance worker what he thought about the citizenship question. “It’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable,” the man said, as his son tried to shoo Mr. San Juan away.

Ms. Quezada called the addition of the question “a brilliant strategy” because “it’s a great way to undercount Latinos and other immigrants and people of color.”

The census is a constitutionally mandated exercise in democracy. Every 10 years, every person in the country — whether a citizen or not — is to be counted “once, only once, and in the right place,” as the bureau’s slogan puts it. But even without the Trump administration’s change, the census is flawed.

In both 2000 and 2010, by the bureau’s own estimates, it failed to count around 1.5 million people of color. A recent report by the Urban Institute projected that the 2020 census could fail to count anywhere from 900,000 to four million people, with Hispanics, blacks and young children being most at risk.

Last week, the Census Bureau announced it would randomly distribute questionnaires with and without the citizenship question to ascertain how many census takers will be needed to follow up with “nonresponding households.” Whatever they come up with, it will be too late to inform the Supreme Court.

The way the census counts “households” is also frequently at odds with the way people live. Almost a quarter of Latino immigrants in the San Joaquin Valley reside in so-called complex households, in which multiple people who may or may not be related live under the same roof or in unconventional dwellings, like sheds and garages.

The number of such units is probably going up here in California, given the state’s housing crisis. “It’s unlikely that someone who rents out substandard housing is going to say, ‘Oh, by the way, there are six other people living here,’” said Ilene J. Jacobs of the nonprofit group California Rural Legal Assistance, who has served on an advisory committee for the census.

Many use post office boxes, and the census doesn’t deliver to post office boxes. If a housing unit doesn’t appear on the bureau’s master address file, its occupants don’t officially exist.

What the census really needs to be effective is more people like Ms. Quezada and her fellow immigrant researchers, who know how to reach and gain the trust of the hard-to-count residents who have the most to lose from a skewed and politically motivated census.

Last weekend, a photographer and I joined Ms. Quezada as she demonstrated the challenges of this work by wandering down a weedy, forlorn-looking alleyway. She spied ventilation pipes coming out of a shed, pink insulation poking out of a closed garage and a rusty camper parked in a backyard — telltale signs of the dwellings that enumerators miss.

She and her colleagues meet immigrants where they are — quite literally. She is particularly fond of laundromats for their bored and captive audiences. In the past nine months, she has held focus groups with Indigenous Mexicans, Dreamers and “mixed households” in which some family members have papers and some don’t. She has even held a focus group with gang members, for whom the link between an accurate count and local resources was abundantly clear (“Does that mean there are going to be more cops?” one wanted to know).

In Planada, a small farm-worker community, we listened while Ms. Quezada held a frank, alfresco focus group over carnitas with about two dozen members of Líderes Campesinas, an organization of female farm workers. Some had come straight from work picking cherries, strawberries and purple cabbages in 90-degree heat. Others held wriggling toddlers.

This census will be the first ever to be largely conducted online, and yet the notion of a digital census, in which a postcard arrives with a unique code to be entered on the bureau’s website, demonstrates a Looney Tunes disconnect between the Beltway and the poor. When Ms. Quezada asked the women how many had access to the internet, a whopping six raised their hands. A national study by the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown Law found that a quarter of rural residents don’t have internet access at home.

Pesticides were a more day-to-day concern for these women than the toxicity emanating from Washington. But the group was worried about the citizenship question. They want to do right by their community without endangering their families. More than anything, they want to be seen.

Edward Kissam, who designed the San Joaquin Valley study and who is a trustee of WKF, a social justice philanthropy, estimates that about 12 percent of the Valley’s first- and second-generation Latinos will go uncounted if the citizenship question is allowed to stand. That could represent a loss of $2 billion over the decade beginning in 2021 in federal funding for infrastructure, health care and other services on which the region depends.

Manuel Pastor, the author of “State of Resistance” and director of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California, notes that more than two-thirds of California’s undocumented population have been in the country for a decade or more, and many have American-citizen children. “Not counting them doesn’t disappear those kids in these communities,” he said.

That’s why California is spending an unprecedented $100 million on outreach to persuade residents to fill out the census form, with an additional $30 million on the table. Some of that money is heading to Ms. Quezada’s new employer, the Center at Sierra Health Foundation, where she will be building on her research to help community groups come up with strategies for reaching people. “We need every household to participate,” said Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state and the recently appointed chairman of the California Complete Count Commission.

Arturo Vargas, the head of Naleo, a national organization of Latino policymakers, said that when individuals aren’t counted, “it’s not personal harm — it’s community harm.”

“We need to dig deep with immigrants,” he said, “to find out ‘Who do you need to hear from?’ It may be your teacher, your health care provider, the lady in the lunchroom, your pastor.” These are the trusted voices who can persuade frightened people to participate.

His group is also encouraging schools to incorporate the census into their curriculums. “Oftentimes,” Mr. Vargas observed, “children are the most important messengers for bringing information home.”

Counting the hard to count is a herculean task, and the Trump administration is trying to make it even harder. It will require honest conversations at beauty parlors and carwashes, at Sunday family dinners and in third-grade classrooms. And it will take thousands of Cindy Quezadas and Jorge San Juans — intrepid souls who firmly believe that every 10 years, this country has the opportunity to inch closer to equity.

Patricia Leigh Brown, a former reporter for The New York Times, writes on culture and community from California.

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