Calero, 34, is an editor of Perspectiva Mundial, a Spanish-language monthly published in New York, and a Militant staff writer. A native of Nicaragua, he has lived in the United States since 1985 and has been a permanent resident for 13 years. On December 3 of last year he was returning home to the United States from reporting trips to Cuba and Mexico. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents seized Calero at Houston Intercontinental Airport, told him he was denied entry to the United States, and imprisoned him at an immigration jail. He was released 10 days later after scores of people poured messages of protest into the INS office in Texas. He now faces exclusion from this country.
Immigration officials began deportation proceedings against Calero based on a 1988 plea-bargain conviction, when he was a high school student in Los Angeles, for selling an ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop. The INS waived this conviction twice, when it granted him permanent residency in 1990 and then when it renewed his status a decade later.
Faced with a continuing international protest campaign against its attempts to deport Calero, the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement (the recently reorganized INS) did not contest Calero’s motion to move his hearing from Houston to Newark, New Jersey, where he lives and works. The immigration cops also changed the date of his deportation hearing from March 25 to September 10.
"The work force in many meatpacking plants has changed in its composition from being mostly native born in 1995 to a majority being immigrants a few years later," Pearson said at the March 19 fundraiser. He described his own evolution as a UFCW official trained in business unionism. "I have gone through an evolution as a UFCW representative in those few years," he said, "and have become convinced that a social movement is needed to transform the labor movement and society in general."
Pearson pointed to the role of Calero and other class-conscious workers in taking steps in this direction, as part of a fighting working-class vanguard. "Calero and others like him helped win the union organizing drive" at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, he stated.
Held at the Holy Family school in Des Moines, the fundraising event was sponsored by Iowa supporters of the Róger Calero Defense Committee. It was cosponsored by Jim Oleson, president of UFCW Local 1149 in Perry and Marshalltown, Iowa; the Drake University chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; the Iowa Civil Liberties Union; and two Spanish-language weekly papers, El Enfoque and El Latino. New endorsers signed up to back the Calero defense campaign at the meeting. Participants contributed $420 in donations and pledges toward the effort.
"The support for Calero is important because I know a Latina woman who was deported in 48 hours and separated from her family by the Immigration Naturalization Service," said José Ramos, 27, a former meat packer at the IBP plant where Róger Calero worked in Perry, Iowa.
Ramos, now a journalist and editor of El Latino, has covered the Calero defense case since he heard Calero speak in Des Moines in late December. He said he "will urge others to write letters of protest to the INS and support Calero’s fight not to be deported."
Eugenia Hernández, an attorney for legal services to the immigrant community in Iowa, told participants about the impact of the 1996 immigration laws signed into law by Clinton.
Hernández described the obstacles which immigrants increasingly face, pressures which force workers to use dangerous methods to enter the U.S. One example she cited was the death of 11 immigrants from heat and dehydration after being locked in a railroad grain car in Mexico and found months later in Denison, Iowa, last October.
Ed Leahy, coordinator of the Immigrant Rights Network of Iowa-Nebraska, also spoke on the panel to support Calero’s fight against deportation.
In introducing Pearson, Donna McDonald, president of the Nebraska UFCW Local 271, said her local "is strong in support of Róger Calero. These injustices have to stop."
Eleven meat packers participated in the Omaha defense campaign event. Many of them helped to organize various aspects of the meeting, such as the fund collection, and the "activity table" where people wrote letters, signed petitions and got information on the case. A dozen participants wrote letters of protest to the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement. Several letters drew on personal experience with the brutally unjust immigration policies of the U.S. government. "My father was deported due to a crime he committed in the past," one person wrote. "He had to leave his eight children and his wife. Mr. Calero and many others going through the same situation do not deserve this treatment."
Several young people and others learned about the event at a demonstration against the U.S. war on Iraq that took place the previous weekend. One young packinghouse worker told the meeting that he had been part of a team that won support for the campaign at the antiwar rally. He reported that 70 people had signed the petitions to support Calero at the rally.
Pearson recounted the fight of workers at Dakota Premium Foods, where Calero worked and was part of the struggle for a union contract. It began when two hundred workers in the factory organized a sitdown strike in June 2000 to protest the speed of the production line and the rising injury rate in the plant. The strikers refused to return to work unless the line speed was slowed down and the company agreed to put an end to its practice of forcing meat packers to work their line jobs while injured. Six weeks later the workers won a union election, which management tried unsuccessfully to challenge with the National Labor Relations Board. In the fall of 2002, after two years of determined struggle by the workers, during which the company maintained it would refuse to give in to their demands, Dakota Premium signed a union contract.
Pearson said he agreed immediately upon being asked to write a letter to the Immigration and Naturalization Service demanding Calero be released and charges dropped. He added that he initially hesitated when asked if he would be a co-chair of the Róger Calero Defense Committee. He said he "was afraid that I would be attached to the Socialist Workers Party." Calero is a long-standing member of the SWP. After thinking about it for a few days, Pearson said, he asked himself, "Am I going to say no to this? When Róger Calero spends his life fighting for justice?"
At a reception held before the meeting several packing house workers from Omaha exchanged experiences with Pearson about common struggles that they are involved in across the Midwest to organize unions and resist the attacks of the meatpacking bosses on line speed, wages, and other working conditions. One worker raised the importance of building solidarity with the 450 members of UFCW Local 538 on strike to push back the concession demands of Tyson Foods in Jefferson, Wisconsin.
Alison Brown, a regional attorney with Justice For Our Neighbors, said that she was grateful that Calero has decided to fight back against the injustices being done to immigrants.
Musa Al-Hindi of the Palestine Right to Return Coalition spoke against "Patriot Act II," which is currently being considered by U.S. lawmakers. The new act would give the government the right to strip anyone of U.S. citizenship if convicted of supporting "terrorist" organizations.
"We are gathered here to denounce these practices, this action [against Calero] and this law," said Ed Leahy, coordinator of the Immigrant Rights Network of Iowa-Nebraska and an organizer of the event. The program was planned by a committee of supporters of the Róger Calero Defense Committee in Omaha, which includes several area activists and unionists, including a number of packinghouse workers.
At the end of the meeting participants signed a banner to be given to Calero as an expression of support for his fight, demanding "Stop the deportation of Róger Calero!"
Jacob Perasso is a member of UFCW Local 271 at Swift & Co. in Omaha, Nebraska
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For more information or to send a contribution:
Róger Calero Defense Committee, c/o PRDF, Box 761, Church St. Station, New York, NY 10007; phone/ fax, (212)563-0585. On the web: www.calerodefense.org Send messages demanding exclusion moves against Calero be dropped to: Demetrios Georgakopolous, Director, Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement. Fax messages to: (973) 645-3074; or mail to: 970 Broad St., Newark, NJ 07102. Copies should be sent to the Róger Calero Defense Committee. |