Attended by some 90 people, the event was organized to build solidarity for the fight of Róger Calero against deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has indicated that it will not contest a motion by Róger Calero that his immigration hearing be held in Newark, New Jersey, the area in which he lives and works.

Calero’s attorney, Claudia Slovinsky, told the Militant on March 4 that agency officials had filed a letter with an immigration judge in Houston--the original venue--stating that they had "chosen not to oppose" the change. "This will encourage supporters of my defense campaign to step up their efforts," said Calero.

Zitoun, a member of the Arab-American Community Coalition, was one of several speakers who joined Calero at the front of the meeting, held in the Bethany United Church of Christ. "Róger and thousands like him should stay," he said. Zitoun also denounced the special registration and detention of immigrants based on "nationality, ethnicity or religion," calling this practice a "form of racial profiling that is a violation of human rights."

Calero, who is an editor of Perspectiva Mundial and a staff writer for the Militant, was jailed by INS agents in Houston on December 3 as he returned from a reporting trip to Cuba and Mexico. They instituted deportation proceedings on the grounds of his plea-bargain conviction on a charge of selling one ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop while in high school 14 years earlier. INS representatives had known about the conviction when they granted Calero permanent residency in 1990.

Inundated by protest letters and petitions, officials paroled Calero ten days after his detention. A hearing on the case is scheduled for March 25 in Houston.

Seattle was the latest city in a series of speaking engagements organized by the Róger Calero Defense Committee in the two and a half months since his release. The meeting was chaired by Asha Mohamed of the Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington. The campaign was launched in 2001 to defend immigrants who were targeted in the police roundups that followed September 11. It played an important part in the recent successful effort to block the deportation of four Somali residents of the city.

Other speakers declared support for Calero’s defense campaign and described their own involvement in other fights.

Cecile Hansen, the Duwamish tribal chairperson for 27 years, recounted this indigenous people’s long fight for recognition. To cheers from the audience she presented Calero with a key chain and a flute.

Anabel Chavez and her sister, Lucil Jimenez, who live in Yakima, described their campaign for the dropping of charges against Jimenez’s husband, Ricardo. On August 31 of last year, police attacked a baptismal party for the couple’s two-year-old child. After beating up Ricardo they charged him with assaulting a police officer. Chavez and her family have organized picket lines outside the police station to protest this assault. Jimenez faces possible deportation as well as jail.

Mike Barker, the chair of the fightback committee of the Hospital Employees Union (HEU) at Vancouver General Hospital, told the meeting of health-care workers’ protests against the provincial government’s moves to privatize health care and institute mass layoffs. Many of the workers in the HEU were born overseas, he said, explaining that "the goal of the bosses and their governments in attacking immigrants is to create a layer of workers who live in fear, but they are meeting resistance, as the experience of my union shows."

The union president has sent a letter to the INS protesting its attempt to deport Calero. Copies were sent to all HEU locals.

Jesus Garcia from Local 6 of the Service Employees International Union; Rogelio Montes, an organizer for the Western Council of Industrial Workers in Yakima; and Tom Warner, of the Seattle-Cuba Friendship Committee, also spoke.

"His fight is ours, ours is his," said Asha Mohamed in introducing Calero. The latter thanked participants and all those who had sent letters of protest. Their efforts, he said, had "allowed me to be here on this side of prison walls."

Thousands of other immigrants are threatened by similar moves, he said, under 1996 legislation that retroactively expanded the list of offenses considered grounds for deportation.

"Attacks on immigrant rights are openly aimed at union members and workers who are defending their rights and incomes, as the rulers of this country move to secure their wealth and make working people at home and abroad bear the burden of the economic crisis," said Calero.

Others are also resisting, he said, pointing to the defense campaign of Farouk Abdel-Muhti, who has been moved from New Jersey to a high-security prison in York, Pennsylvania (see article page 6).

Calero urged participants to both write letters and solicit them from others, and to collect signatures on petitions to the INS demanding that the deportation proceedings be dropped.

A collection for the defense campaign netted $1,500. Several people said they attended the meeting after reading a prominent article in the calendar section of the Seattle Weekly. Two community newspapers also publicized the event.