![]() She had first applied to work at the IRS because she believed the words “government employee” would give her clearance into a different kind of life. “We are hoping to be able to work with you as a loyal, long-standing government employee,” one letter read. If she didn’t pay, the bank would resell her car to someone else and charge her the difference in price, possibly as much as $10,000. The bank was giving her nine more days to pay $3,200 for her car – the accumulation of missed payments, late penalties, interest and repossession charges. She ate a packed lunch from a food bank, stayed after work for a voluntary training session, and then came back home to find more bills waiting in her mailbox. She straightened her hair, drained the last $7.80 in her savings account to buy gas and made it to work five minutes before her shift. Johnny Ibarra, 15, his girlfriend Liz Mata, 16, Vicki Ibarra and her friend Ernie Delgado walk to church on Sunday, Feb. She thought about all of the things she had already forfeited to the shutdown, and how much she’d always valued being able to provide for herself. She thought about telling him how the deal in fact only promised federal funding for the next three weeks, at which point she could be out of work again. She thought about telling him how her back pay, whenever it arrived, would cover less than half of what she now owed in overdue payments and late charges. “They actually made a deal? You’re getting paid back for all of this?” “So I guess this is congratulations,” he told her. ![]() “Hey, you got my text?” she said, and then her friend said he had just read about the end of the shutdown. She spent her workdays checking line items in strangers’ tax returns and then brought that meticulousness back home, keeping spreadsheets of her own finances and a binder of laminated certificates commemorating her “loyal government service” for five, 10, and then 15 years. Her co-workers sometimes joked that she was the perfect fit for the detail-oriented IRS, always at her desk with a cup of coffee five minutes before her shift began. She picked out earrings for the next morning and set her alarm. Vicki Ibarra looks into her refrigerator as she searches for something to take to work for lunch on Monday, Feb. Every other Wednesday, she could count on about $900 being deposited into her bank account after deductions, so she could pay down her debts before catastrophe came. It was a high-wire act that unfolded each two-week pay cycle, and she was able to pull it off because of the predictability of her government job. Ibarra’s own financial margin had usually been measured down to the hour even before the shutdown – making payments up against deadlines, borrowing from one credit card to pay down another, spending exactly what she earned to cover essentials for her son and her niece. She’d sold her bed to a friend a month earlier, after she heard President Donald Trump say the shutdown would last until Congress paid for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, whether that took months or a year. She went into her bedroom to choose her outfits for the upcoming week, laying out possibilities on a blowup mattress. “Let’s catch up sometime!” she wrote finally, before hitting send. ![]() ![]() Any way you can help?” she wrote, and deleted it again. “You know I’m proud, so it kills me to ask you this,” she wrote, and then deleted it. ![]()
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