We hired him to translate for us and to show us around Nogales. He works with migrants and deportees there and was once deported himself. Frank lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years before being deported to Nogales. Needless to say, he had a point of view.

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We did not exactly feel welcome when we walked into the Nogales bus depot. A woman at the front desk stared at us with a blank expression. A man in a dress shirt and black pants glared from a stuffed chair. But Frank led us in without hesitation and we followed.

He walked straight into a back room of the bus depot, pushing aside a bed sheet that served as its door.

The smells hit us first — those of lots of displaced people living in close quarters.

It was a makeshift home, right there in the back of the bus depot — microwave, TV, couches, a cross on the wall and a few mattresses on the floor.

We found out later that many of the people staying there were working to save enough money to pay the bus fare back to their hometowns. One woman had been working for a month to save the 70 pesos it would cost her to get back to Mexico City. That’s less than $6.

In the middle of that room full of men, two women agreed to be interviewed. They had both been deported in the last few weeks.

They told us why they came to America, how they crossed the desert, how they were caught and what happened to them after they were detained — courts, judges, sentences, papers, buses and then a bus depot in Nogales, so far from where they began.

But they didn’t tell us everything. They seemed hesitant, in that situation and environment, to be completely open.

Example One

During my pre-reporting and attempts at setting up interviews for a trip to South Carolina, I was turned down by a business that had received a violation for not following state law.

“With everything going on in Arizona and this request coming from an ASU student, I’m going to respectfully decline,” the potential interviewee stated in an e-mail.

In this situation I was dealing with a PR person as the intermediary between me and the person I was trying to interview. This did not allow for direct communication. I called her back asking her to let the business owner know that I was trying to learn about South Carolina’s law, not Arizona’s. However, the effort was futile and failed. No interview took place.

Example Two

A group of migrant workers lived in the hotel where I was staying. I approached them to explain my project and my desire to share their stories. At first, they said that they couldn’t speak English well or that they were fearful of their boss seeing the final product, which could mean losing their jobs.

'Johnny' -- a migrant worker we met in South Carolina.

After speaking to my News21 editors, we came up with another approach. The goal was to gain their confidence by stressing the importance of sharing their stories so that the public could obtain a better understanding of the situation of migrant workers in the United States.

After many casual conversations with the workers at the hotel over a two-day period they gained enough confidence to speak to me. One of the men, Mr. Flores, who is from Mexico City and received his citizenship a year ago, agreed to a video interview. Thereafter, many of his colleagues approached me to just talk about their situation and answer my questions. They realized I was sincerely interested in their stories.

Eventually, I found myself speaking with “Johnny” who freely shared his opinions. He did ask for my views on occasion, but I learned to just turn the question back around, asking him “What do you think of that?” At the end of our interview, I had gotten to know Johnny so well that I was allowed to take a few pictures of him.

It is important to note that the two men mentioned above are documented workers who are in the country legally. Speaking with undocumented workers can be even more challenging.

In the end, during my time out in the Palmetto State I realized that, as a journalist dealing with a very touchy subject, I must be willing to approach sources in sincere and open way — and be patient while building relationships. By taking the time to get to know these people, I was eventually able to do the reporting I wanted to do.