BY RUDOLFO CASTILLO
"Although this case is not unique, it does present a good opportunity to demand that the INS stop its deportation campaign against thousands of Latinos," said Nicaraguan journalist Róger Calero on Wednesday during a visit to Hempstead.
Calero, who has lived in the United States for 15 years, says that his deportation would be a big blow, since his whole family lives in this country. "My mother, my aunt, and my wife are all U.S. citizens and I have been a permanent resident for 12 years."
Besides his work as associate editor of Perspectiva Mundial magazine, Calero is a writer for the Militant, an English-language weekly in New York--a job that has allowed him to travel to different places in the United States and Latin America, writing about politics and issues in the labor movement. Last year he traveled to Havana to cover a conference on the Free Trade Act of the Americas in which unionists and other delegates from Latin America, the United States, and Canada participated.
On December 3 Calero was held at the Houston airport when he returned to the country from carrying out a writing assignment in Guadalajara, Mexico, reporting on the International Book Fair and an international student conference.
"After holding me for three hours, they told me they were beginning deportation proceedings," said Calero, who says that he was arrested for selling marijuana to an undercover cop in 1988, when he was a high school student in Los Angeles. "At that time, facing the danger of going to jail, I decided to plead guilty because they told me it would not affect me in the future.
"The immigration service is trying to deport me now on the grounds of a 14-year-old conviction, basing this on a law enacted in 1996, just as they are doing to thousands of immigrant workers," Calero said.
The campaign against his deportation includes numerous organizations and individual defenders of freedom of the press, immigrant rights activists, and hundreds of unionists, who compelled the INS to parole him.
On the first Saturday in February, beginning at 7:00 p.m., a public meeting will be held. Organized by Calero s defense committee it will take place at St. Mary s Episcopal Church, 521 W. 126th St. in Manhattan. The organizers invite "supporters of this cause to join the fight to support his right to live and work in the United States."