Miguel Olvera, a meat packer at Dakota Premium in South St. Paul and a leader of a successful union-organizing fight there, was addressing a meeting of 50 people held in Minneapolis December 27. The public event, held at the Resource Center of the Americas, was called by the Twin Cities Committee to Stop the Deportation of Róger Calero.

"If we are able to stop Róger from being deported, it will be a victory for everyone. To this end, we need to maintain unity and move forward," Olvera added.

The meeting was part of the first stop in a national speaking tour organized by the Róger Calero Defense Committee, which is spearheading a broad, nonpartisan campaign to stop his deportation. After Minnesota, Calero spoke before audiences in Des Moines, Iowa, and then in Chicago, where 111 people, mostly workers, attended a public meeting.

Róger Calero, a Militant staff writer and associate editor of Perspectiva Mundial, a Spanish-language newsmagazine published in New York, was returning home to the United States on December 3 from a reporting assignment in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Havana, Cuba, when he was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at Houston Intercontinental Airport. Calero was told he was being denied entry to the United States and carted off to an INS jail in Houston.

Calero was paroled December 13 after the INS district director in Houston was flooded with protest messages. The INS has now set a March 25 hearing for Calero to institute "removal proceedings" against him.

Calero has been a permanent resident of the United States for the past 12 years. To try to deport him to his native Nicaragua, the INS is using a 1988 conviction--when he was a high school student in Los Angeles--on a charge of selling an ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop. Faced with a possible jail term, Calero copped a plea and received a suspended 60-day sentence, three years’ probation, and a $50 fine.

When Calero applied for permanent residence in 1989, he explicitly included information about his conviction. In granting him resident status, the INS waived the conviction. In 2000 the INS renewed his green card. Today Calero, who is married to a U.S. citizen, lives in Newark, New Jersey.

Prior to starting his job as an editor and staff writer for the New York-based publications, Calero worked as a meat packer in Des Moines, Iowa, and then at the Dakota Premium plant in South St. Paul, where he took part in a ground-breaking fight that succeeded in organizing Local 789 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union there.

It is not surprising that many of Calero’s fellow unionists and former co-workers immediately joined the campaign to defend his right to live and work in this country. One of the first to send a protest message to the INS was Bill Pearson, president of UFCW Local 789. Dozens of unionists in the plant immediately signed petitions demanding his release from the INS jail and an end to the exclusion proceedings against him. This made the Twin Cities a good place for Calero to kick off his speaking tour.

One of the speakers addressing the December 27 meeting here was Jorge Flores, director of the Immigrant Workers Center, a project of the Resource Center of the Americas. He explained that Calero is like millions who are in this country seeking to improve their lives and that of their families. Flores said he receives calls every day from immigrants who face problems in their workplaces or have to deal with various immigration questions.

Flores told the story of a worker who has been married to a U.S. citizen for 17 years and has three children who are citizens. When he applied for his permanent residency, the INS found he had been in jail for three days when he was young--he had been a passenger in a car that was reported stolen. The charges had been dropped when the full story showed that the car was reported stolen during a domestic dispute.

The INS, however, sent the worker a letter on a Friday telling him to report for deportation Monday. He received the letter Tuesday. His troubles were then compounded because he was late for his deportation proceedings. He has had to pay thousands of dollars in INS penalties and lawyers’ fees and is still under threat of deportation.  
 
Fight to defend Somalis
Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Center, an organization that defends the rights of Somali immigrants living here, told the audience that he had already been writing letters on behalf of Calero before he knew who he was. He had received information about the defense campaign from an Internet message to an amnesty group he is a member of. Jamal said that thousands of residents of Somalia, especially those living today in refugee camps, are dependent on remittances from their relatives in the United States. He pointed out that the government of Somalia collapsed in 1991, and with it the banking system. In late 2001, federal agents, accusing Somali-run businesses in several U.S. cities of "financing Al Qaeda," raided and shut down the businesses in the Twin Cities and elsewhere that wired money to the camps.

Jamal reported that as a result of these raids, 40 Somalis remain in prison in Minnesota, and 20 are jailed in Louisiana. He said they were about to be deported back to Somalia when a judge in Seattle ruled that their deportation was illegal.

Jamal announced his organization was starting a "National Tour Against Hate." He plans to go to Seattle, one of the cities where the Somali community has been under attack by the U.S. government. He will also go to Maine, where the mayor in the town of Lewiston wrote an open letter demanding that Somalis discourage friends and relatives from moving there. A rightist outfit, the World Church of the Creator, is calling a "national" march of its white supremacist supporters in Lewiston demanding the expulsion of Somalis from that city.

Calero explained, "I am on tour to join together with others who are itching for a fight" against attacks on basic rights such as the cases cited by all the other speakers on the platform. He said he was able to be present that evening thanks to the immediate response from people across the country and internationally who had sent messages to the INS in Houston demanding he be released from the immigration jail there. His case has received broad support because "my case is just like so many others," he noted.

Calero pointed to the INS registration of "special aliens"--immigrants from certain countries targeted by Washington--that led to hundreds of people being arrested in Los Angeles and other cities. In face of an angry protest by thousands of people against the arrests of those who had gone to the INS offices to comply with the law, U.S. authorities released some of those detained.

"We need to sound the alarm to protest these attacks," Calero said. He noted that immigrants are not the only ones whose rights are under attack today. He pointed out that the U.S. government has already "indefinitely" imprisoned two U.S. citizens without charges--denying their constitutional right to due process--by labeling them "unlawful combatants."

Calero pointed out that under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the number of deportable offenses was significantly expanded. "A good number of people have been deported for minor offenses committed many years earlier--cases similar to mine. Many working people in this country have a friend, a family member, or a co-worker who has been arrested and who faces deportation by the INS."

In this context, he said, "the campaign against my deportation can reinforce other fights. We are seeking to mobilize the broadest possible forces to stop this deportation. Many organizations and individuals will understand that they have a stake in the outcome of this fight and other fights against deportations: unions, organizations of journalists and writers, Black and Latino rights organizations, civil liberties groups, student organizations, antiwar groups, and many more."

A representative of the Twin Cities Committee to Stop the Deportation of Róger Calero urged all those present to inform others about the defense campaign, to seek more messages to the INS in support of Calero, and to raise funds to help cover the legal and other costs of the defense effort. At the meeting itself, a fund collection brought in almost $600.

In addition to those speaking, the meeting received many endorsements. These included Mark Nowak, chair of the Political Action Committee of the National Writers Union; August Nimtz of the Minnesota Cuba Committee; Pablo Tapia, a community leader and immigrant rights activist; David Riehle, chairperson of United Transportation Union Local 650; Gladys McKenzie, business agent of American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees District 6; and Gary Poferl, national business agent of the American Postal Workers Union.

During his tour in this city, Calero met with officials of UFCW Local 789 and visited with some of his former co-workers at Dakota Premium Foods. He was interviewed by two radio stations.

Local 789 is sponsoring a fund-raiser for Calero’s defense campaign, to be held January 11 at the union hall, at 266 Hardman in South St. Paul.