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Róger
Calero wins victory in fight
to end deportation
• U.S. gov't
requests termination of exclusion proceedings
BY
MICHAEL ITALIE
On May
1 the campaign to stop the deportation of Róger
Calero won a signal victory in the effort to secure
his right to live and work in the United States. On
that date the immigration police announced its
intention to drop their effort to exclude him from
this country. Calero and his supporters among
unionists, immigrant rights fighters, defenders of
civil liberties, and others have been waging this
fight since Dec. 3, 2002, when he was detained by
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) cops at
Houston Intercontinental Airport.
"This
is an important victory in the fight for workers'
rights," said Calero in an interview with the
Militant. "It is especially significant coming
just two days after the April 29 Supreme Court
decision permitting the federal government to hold
legal immigrants like myself without bail during
their deportation proceedings" (see U.S.
Supreme Court mandates the detention of immigrants
without bail).
The
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, under which
the INS has been reorganized, informed Calero May 1
that it was requesting the Immigration Court to
"terminate the instant Removal Proceedings
predicated on the Notice to Appear dated December 3,
2002, issued in Houston, Texas." Without
further explanation,
Assistant District Counsel Alan Wolf of Homeland
Security based his motion to drop the case against
Calero on two sections of the Immigration
Regulations: "The notice was improvidently
issued, or, "Circumstances of the case have
changed after the notice to appear was issued to
such an extent that continuation is no longer in the
best interest of the government."
Calero’s
attorney, Claudia Slovinsky, is now contacting the
Justice Department in an effort to get a final
ruling on the motion to terminate the deportation
case. She will also take steps to secure the return
of his permanent resident card and his passport for
international travel, which are still in the
possession of
the immigration police.
‘The
fight is not over’
"The
fight is not over," Calero told the Militant.
"We will continue to need help from supporters
of immigrant rights, the labor movement, and
defenders of freedom of the press. And we need to
raise funds for our legal and publicity
expenses."
On the
evening of December 3, Calero, a staff writer for
the Militant and associate editor of the
Spanish-language monthly magazine Perspectiva
Mundial, which are published in New York, was
detained by immigration agents at the Houston
airport on his return from a reporting trip in Cuba
and Mexico, and locked up in an INS prison.
After
learning of his arrest, Calero’s colleagues at the
Militant and Perspectiva Mundial and others launched
a public campaign to demand that the INS release the
journalist and drop its exclusion proceedings
against him.
Calero,
34, has lived in the United States for 18 years,
since 1985, when his family moved here from
Nicaragua. He has been a permanent resident since
1990. When he filed his application for residency in
1989, he specifically included the information about
his plea-bargain conviction in high school on
charges of selling an ounce of marijuana to an
undercover cop--which immigration officials waived
in order to grant him a green card giving him the
right to live and work in the United States. In the
year 2000, INS officials renewed Calero’s
permanent residency card, again waiving the full
written record of his conviction.
In a
Militant interview in January of this year, Calero
said, "I have found that my case strikes a
chord with a lot of people. There are thousands and
thousands of immigrant workers who are being picked
up by the INS as they return from visits
abroad." In 2001 the INS formally removed
almost 177,000 people. More than 70,000
immigrants were summarily deported for
"criminal violations."
While
in the INS prison Calero wrote articles for the
socialist publications telling the truth about the
conditions and the stories of others behind prison
walls. In "Inside an INS jail in Houston,"
first published in the December 23 Militant, Calero
reported that the jailers were moving people in and
out so quickly that everyone
was known by their bunk number and the letter T or
B, to indicate whether they have a top or bottom
bunk. Calero was 804B.
Letters
of protest poured in to the INS. They came from
outraged journalists like Jeremy Dear, general
secretary of the National Union of Journalists in
the United Kingdom, from union officials such as
Bill Pearson of the United Food and Commercial
Workers (UFCW), and from petitions signed by
hundreds of workers, including 50 meat packers at
the Dakota Premium Foods meatpacking plant. Before
his current job as an editor of Perspectiva Mundial,
Calero was a member of UFCW Local 789 and worked at
the Dakota Premium plant in South St. Paul,
Minnesota, where he was part of a ground-breaking
union-organizing
drive.
The
public protest campaign paid off. On December 13,
ten days after he was locked up, Calero was released
from detention in Houston and put on parole the
first important victory in the fight.
As
John Studer, executive director of the Political
Rights Defense Fund (PRDF), said at a December 15
meeting to celebrate Calero’s release, "The
INS made a calculated counter-move."
The
government was trying to "defuse, confuse, and
slow down the defense campaign" by removing
"the rawest aspect" of the INS’s
actions, "the fact that he was thrown in jail
and faced a threat of immediate exclusion."
PRDF,
which has a decades-long history of participation in
civil liberties campaigns, took responsibility for
initiating Calero’s fight immediately after his
jailing.
Calero
defense committee formed The Róger Calero Defense
Committee was formed in January, with Studer as the
coordinator. The chairpeople of the committee are
José Oliva, director of the Interfaith Workers’
Rights Center in Chicago; Martha Olvera, coordinator
of the Coalition for Dignity and Amnesty in Houston;
Bill Pearson, president of UFCW Local 789; and
Pamela Vossenas, national grievance officer for the
National Writers Union.
The
antideportation campaign kicked off a national
speaking tour for Calero. Having won his release
from the INS jail, Calero hit the road from
Christmas 2002 through April of this year to speak
out about his case and to link up with others in
struggle in the United States.
The
kickoff of the tour coincided with other struggles
against increasing government attacks on immigrant
rights from "special registration" imposed
on immigrants from 20 Mideast and Asian countries to
stepped-up deportations of workers for convictions
on petty criminal charges.
The
fight received valuable media coverage. La Opinión,
the principle Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles,
published the story, "Latino journalist fights
deportation," in its January 15 edition. New
York Newsday wrote about Calero’s case February 9
in an article titled, "Rallying immigrants over
rights:
Facing
deportation, reporter speaks out to educate
public."
Calero
was interviewed on radio stations across the
country. On March 13, Univisión, the largest
Spanish-language television network in the United
States, featured an interview with Calero and
Perspectiva Mundial editor Martín Koppel at the
publication’s offices in New York in the TV show
Aquí y Ahora (Hear and Now).
After
hearing about the case in the media, immigrant
workers came to defense committee events in St.
Paul, Chicago, New York, Tampa and other cities to
hear about the case and to reach others with their
own stories about the abuses of the immigration
cops. After attending a program at the University of
Utah in Salt Lake City, a student from Turkey
volunteered to translate defense committee
literature into Turkish. Defense committee materials
have also been translated into Spanish, French,
Arabic, Greek, Swedish, Catalan, and Urdu.
Soon
after Calero was released from the immigration jail
in December, the INS set a March 25 hearing in
Houston to rule on his case. Calero’s attorney
filed a motion to move the location for the hearing
from Houston to the New York area, where he lives
and works. On March 4, INS officials filed a letter
with an immigration
judge stating they had "chosen not to
oppose" the change in venue. A new hearing date
was set for September 10 in Newark, New Jersey.
After this second victory in his fight, Calero told
the Militant, "This will encourage supporters
of my defense campaign to step up their
efforts" to demand that deportation
proceedings be dropped altogether.
Many
workers involved in strikes and other struggles in
the Midwest, especially meat packers, took on Calero’s
fight as their own. UFCW Local 789 hosted a
fund-raiser January 11 and its members helped take
responsibility for building and organizing the
event.
Workers
make fight their own In Chicago unionists and other
workers put their stamp on a program attended by
some 90 people. Workers who are part of the
struggle against the American Meatpacking Corp.,
which closed down in November 2001, helped on
security and mounted a display on their fight to
gain back wages owed by the company.
Members
of Latino Union, an organization of temporary
workers and day laborers, participated in the
program. Elvira Arrellano, an aircraft cleaner,
spoke on the fight she has helped lead against a
December 2002 INS raid at O’Hare Airport that
placed 46 workers under arrest.
"Faced
with a crisis in their economy, and worldwide
depression conditions, employers are on the
offensive against all working people," Calero
told the Chicago gathering. "They want to make
us bear the burden of their crisis so they can
maintain their profits. This is why we see the
brutal conditions in the workplace, the police
brutality, and the massacre they are preparing
against the
people of Iraq."
Calero’s
national tour was supplemented by speaking
engagements by other defense committee leaders and
supporters. Bill Pearson, for example, carried out a
two-day tour of Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha,
Nebraska, in mid-March to win
support for the case of his local’s former member.
Support
for the case extended around the world. On March 6,
at its 16th general assembly in Havana, Cuba, the
World Federation of Democratic Youth passed a
resolution endorsing Calero’s defense campaign.
Representatives of 31 youth groups from 30 countries
including Algeria, South Africa, Paraguay, El
Salvador, India, China, Korea, Japan, Germany, and
Palestine endorsed the campaign as well. High school
students and others in Iceland, Sweden, and the
United Kingdom became partisans of the fight during
a speaking tour in these countries by Young
Socialists leader Lawrence Mikesh, who is based in
Miami, Florida.
Victory tour on the horizon The May 1 motion by the
Department of Homeland Security to end deportation
proceedings "encoura es me to go on with the
struggle," said Calero. "I will continue
to speak out against the outrageous jailings of
Farouk Abdel-Muhti, Sami Al-Arian, Omar Jamal, the
five Cuban revolutionaries imprisoned in U.S. jails
on frame-up charges of ‘conspiring’ to spy, and
others. The victory in my fight helps to expose the
violations of
immigrant and workers’ rights that go on every
day."
Calero
said he especially looks forward to refocusing his
energies on what he was doing before the INS
detained him on December 3--writing for Perspectiva
Mundial and the Militant, telling the truth about
the resistance of workers and farmers to the
employers’ offensive against their rights, and the
worldwide fight for socialism.
"When
we nail down the final pieces of this fight, and my
green card and passport are returned to me, I’ll
be going on a victory tour," said Calero.
"I want to share this accomplishment with those
who have joined me in this struggle. I look forward
to meeting again the hundreds of workers and others
who helped beat
back the government--from meat packers in the
Midwest, like those on strike against Tyson Foods in
Wisconsin now, to garment workers who carried out a
successful strike against Point Blank near Miami and
are pressing ahead their fight for a union and a
contract. I want to find out from them where they
are at with their
struggles and what I can do to help. I intend to
describe this victory for what it is: a weapon that
others can use to press for their rights in the
United States and around the world."
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