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As immigrants in southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi braced for this month’s U.S. Homeland Security operation, Cristiane Rosales-Fajardo received a panicked phone call from a friend.

The friend’s Guatemalan tenant, who didn’t know she was pregnant, had just delivered a premature baby in the New Orleans house. The parents lacked legal residency, and the mother refused to go to a hospital for fear of being detained by federal immigration officers.

“There’s blood everywhere, and the baby’s dead,” Rosales-Fajardo recalled her friend saying.

Rosales-Fajardo put on her sandals, grabbed surgical gloves, and rushed to the house.

Rosales-Fajardo, herself an immigrant from Brazil, is a grassroots organizer and advocate in the New Orleans East community, where many immigrants live. She has no formal medical training, but she has experience with delivering babies.

She scanned the room when she arrived. A 3-year-old child stood to one side while the mother sat on the edge of the bed. The father held their swaddled newborn son, who wasn’t breathing and was wrapped in blood-soaked towels.

“The baby was completely gray,” Rosales-Fajardo later said.

Rosales-Fajardo wiped fluid away from his small mouth and rubbed his back before performing tiny chest compressions and breathing air into his lungs.

She told the parents she had to call 911 to get the mother and newborn to a hospital for care. The baby was out, but the delivery wasn’t over.

“I assured her. I promised her that she was going to be safe,” Rosales-Fajardo said.

Fear hung over the room. Still, she made the call and continued performing CPR. Finally, the newborn revived and squirmed in Rosales-Fajardo’s arms. When the ambulance arrived, the mother tried to keep her husband from riding with her, terrified they would both be arrested. He went, anyway.

“These are hard-working people,” Rosales-Fajardo said. “All they do is work to provide for their family. But they were almost at risk of losing their child rather than call 911.”

Nearly two weeks into the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Catahoula Crunch, which launched Dec. 3, health professionals and community advocates in Louisiana and Mississippi report that a significantly higher-than-usual number of immigrant patients have skipped health care appointments and experienced heightened stress levels.

According to a press release, DHS said it had arrested more than 250 people as of Dec. 11. Though federal officials say they’re targeting criminals, The Associated Press reported that most of the 38 people arrested in the first two days of the New Orleans operation had no criminal record.

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, immigrant families nationwide have become more likely to skip or delay health care, due in part to concerns about their legal status, according to a recent survey by KFF and The New York Times.

The survey found that nearly 8 in 10 immigrants........

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