BY CINDY GONZALEZ  
A former Iowa meatpacker-turned-reporter who waged and won a public fight against U.S. government efforts to deport him came to Omaha on Thursday to thank supporters.

The celebration tone was tempered, however, when an immigrant painter stepped up and described his recent Omaha arrest and ongoing battle to stay in the country.

Many of the nearly 35 people attending the program at a downtown United Food and Commercial Workers union hall said the cases of New York-based journalist Róger Calero and the Omaha painter reinforce the work yet to be done on immigration reform.

“It’s time to speak up,” said Clemente Velasco, a local union representative who is a Mexican native with permanent residency status. “What happened to them can happen to me, too.”

Both Calero and the painter were thrust into deportation proceedings as a result of a 1996 law that penalizes lawful immigrants for past run-ins with the law.

Calero is a Nicaraguan native who has been a permanent resident 12 years and is married to a U.S. citizen.

His plight began Dec. 3, 2002, when federal agents arrested him at the Houston airport as he returned from a reporting assignment in Cuba and Mexico. He is associate editor of Perspectiva Mundial magazine and writer for the Militant newspaper.

The basis for the arrest and deportation attempt was a 1988 conviction for selling one ounce of marijuana to an undercover officer while he was a high school student in Los Angeles.

Immigration officials say that a law passed by Congress in 1996 makes an immigrant with a past offense such as Calero’s deportable.

In May, following a six-month public campaign that included a January stop in Omaha, an immigration judge signed an order dropping Calero’s case, saying he was not deportable.

Like Calero, the 48-year-old painter who did not want his name used for fear it would hurt his case, is married to a U.S. citizen. The couple said they began his residency process two years ago and he was issued a work permit. What they thought was to be his final interview in late March turned into an unexpected arrest and three-month jail stay.

“I was devastated,” the wife said. “I had to leave the INS without my husband. I was in tears.”

The couple said the deportation proceedings are based upon an arrest 12 years ago in California. They said he had been at a bar where a deadly fight broke out. The woman said her husband was never charged. She said he didn’t commit a crime.

Family and friends helped pay bail and he was released a few weeks ago pending a hearing in July 2004 to determine his fate.

Calero said he’ll continue his victory tour and will speak on worker and immigrants rights elsewhere in this and other countries.

The victory party was coordinated by the UFCW Local 271 and the Iowa Nebraska Immigrant Rights Network.
 
 
Related articles:
Packing locals in Nebraska, Iowa, host ‘fight to win’ tour against deportations  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home