Call 911 or risk losing the baby? Raids force some immigrants to avoid care

By Halle Parker, Verite News, KFF Health News

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 newb...