New Orleans (CNN) — This city’s new mayor-elect prays many times a day, for big things and small ones and often, she says, to a holy guardian known for helping defy lost causes.

“My favorite patron saint is St. Jude,” Helena Moreno explains. “I don’t know what that says about me.”

More than 40 days before she is due to take her oath, Moreno faces a double-barrel of city crises that indeed may seem impossible.

The first is crushing and categorically local: a projected $222 million city budget deficit left by a term-limited mayor largely absent from public view since she pleaded not guilty this summer to federal conspiracy and fraud charges.

The other is unfolding on a far bigger stage: the expected arrival of the nation’s top Border Patrol official and some 250 of his agents as

See Full Page