On Dec. 3, 2002, Calero, an associate editor of Perspectiva Mundial and staff writer for the Militant, was arrested by immigration agents when he arrived at Houston Intercontinental Airport on his way back home from a reporting trip to Cuba and Mexico. He was thrown in an immigration jail where he was held for 10 days until a campaign of protest won his release. While Calero was locked up in Houston, the government began deportation proceedings against him, using a conviction on his record for selling an ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop while he was in high school in 1988. The immigration service was fully aware of this conviction and waived it when it granted Calero permanent residency in 1990, and again when it renewed his green card 10 years later.

Since last December, Calero remained under the threat of deportation until the government moved to drop its case against him in early May, saying that circumstances had changed since his arrest and it was no longer in Washington’s interest to pursue deportation. What changed in the ensuing five months was the swelling of public support for his fight against the government’s effort to exclude him from the country.

On May 22 an immigration judge in Newark, New Jersey, where Calero lives, ruled that he “is not deportable,” formally closing the case.

Calero met with more than 40 people at a gathering sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 789. Before becoming a journalist, Calero had worked in the Midwest as a packinghouse worker. In South St. Paul, Minnesota, he had been part of a groundbreaking union organizing drive that won the union at Dakota Beef. UFCW Local 789, which now represents workers at the plant, took up Calero’s fight from the beginning.

Local 789’s former president Bill Pearson signed on as one of the co-chairs of the Róger Calero Defense Committee. The union local organized a fund-raiser at the union hall that brought in over $2,000. “His coworkers saw him as a person to turn to for help. So did I,” Pearson wrote to immigration authorities on Calero’s behalf. “Making him leave the country would be an injustice.”

José Estrada, a Mexican worker on the kill floor at Dakota Premium, said, “I am happy that Róger won, a brother like us.” Estrada recounted that he had been deported many times when he worked in Brownsville, Texas, in 1949 when he was 17 years old. “I crossed the border when I had to, since I needed to work,” he said. “Each time when I was deported to Matamoros across the border I regarded it as a brief vacation, a chance to do some shopping. Mexican people had lived in these areas many years before they were taken over by the United States and we instinctively feel it is right to be here. The deportations have been going on for a long time. We need to change the laws and change the borders.” He was among 10 Local 789 members at the meeting.

Local 789 president Don Seaquist also addressed the meeting. “Róger helped to educate us in Local 789 about struggles of workers around the world,” he said. “The fight for the rights of immigrant workers has just started. To us in UFCW Local 789 it doesn’t matter the color of your skin, your language, or your country of origin, if you are abused as a worker you get our support.”

Bernie Hesse, a Local 789 organizer, who has helped to raise thousands of dollars for the defense effort, greeted participants and said, “Immigration policy in this country is used to keep working people down. Immigrant workers are picked upon. Róger Calero and Omar Jamal are heroes. They don’t duck. They are ready for a fight.”

“The government has ruled me ‘not deportable,’” Calero said in his remarks. “I wear that title as a badge of honor. I wear it proudly for the thousands of immigrants facing deportation. While I want to thank all of you who helped me win this victory, I’d like to share the lessons of the victory so that we can continue to use them to make the government, their agencies, and bosses pay the highest political price every time they try to victimize one of us.

“We won because we reached out broadly—to immigrant workers, to trade unionists, to defenders of democratic rights. We explained that the attack on me was part of a broader assault on working people—that by attacking immigrants like myself the bosses and their government are seeking to deepen divisions among workers, as part of their attempt to shift the burden of their economic crisis onto our backs.”

Calero explained that his defense campaign had been nonpartisan, open to anyone with any political views. It reached out to those fighting against the death penalty, police brutality, organizing unions, to workers on strike. He explained that some advised him to not fight, saying “you can’t win, don’t provoke them, leave it to the lawyers, talk to your congressman.” But, he emphasized, “You have to show no fear. The only way to win justice is to fight back.”

The defense effort was based on the work of many supporters and on decades of experience of the Political Rights Defense Fund, which helped to organize his fight nationally, according to Calero. “It was also based on the decades of experience of the communist movement and the cadre of the Socialist Workers Party that spearheaded this campaign,” he said. “Together with other vanguard workers they participate in fights against the bosses in their factories and in other social protests and this is where we took this fight.”

The rulers are not as omnipotent as they’d like workers to believe, he said. “They can be defeated if we organize a fight to win.” He encouraged his supporters to take the lessons of his struggle to others who are fighting, citing the example of meat packers in Jefferson, Wisconsin, who have been on strike against Tyson Foods for four months.

On June 22, Calero joined a Local 789 delegation to a strike solidarity rally in Jefferson, where he also spoke.

Omar Jamal said when he heard of Calero’s victory he thought to himself, “This is our victory. I won, too.” He told the meeting that last year when he was on the “National Tour against Hate” that took him to Seattle and to Portland, Oregon, as well as Lewiston, Maine, he ran into Calero’s supporters in each of those cities.

Calero and Jamal also spoke the following night at a forum at a community center in the Somali community in Minneapolis. Some 25 people took part. One Somali said that the employers in Owatanna, a city just south of St. Paul, depend on immigrant workers to help pick crops for part of the year. She explained that the government is fully aware that undocumented workers are depended upon those employers, but they allow them to work and then push to deport them. She wanted to know why the government did that.

Calero answered that the government did not really want to deport all immigrants, but they want to victimize them in order to create a layer of pariahs that can be superexploited. “In addition,” he said, “the bosses push to blame immigrant workers for job losses and low wages to deepen the divisions within the working class in order to crush solidarity that allows working people to unite to defend ourselves.”
 
 
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