The Young Socialists join in the fight to demand that the Immigration and Naturalization Service immediately drop its efforts to deport Róger Calero, the associate editor of Perspective Sundial and staff writer for the Militant. The INS arrested Calero December 3 when he arrived at the Houston Intercontinental Airport from a reporting assignment in Latin America, jailed him for 10 days, and is seeking to revoke his permanent residency status and deport him to Nicaragua.

Calero was returning from Havana, Cuba, where he covered a conference on the Free Trade Area of the Americas attended by trade unionists and others; and in Guadalajara, Mexico, reporting on the Guadalajara international book fair and the congress of the Continental Organization of Caribbean and Latin American Students, both held in that city. Members of the Young Socialists took part in these events. We appeal to the students and others who attended those conferences to join us in the fight to stop Calero’s deportation.

To try to deport him, the immigration cops are using a 1988 conviction on Calero’s record, when as a high school student in Los Angeles he copped a plea to charges of selling an ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop--a victimization many young people are familiar with. Yet the INS itself granted him permanent residence with full knowledge of that record, in effect waiving the conviction.

The federal government is seeking to deprive Calero of his right to live and work as a journalist here. Many young people can identify with his fight--from the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who face INS terror in workplaces and neighborhoods, to those who confront police harassment and harsh laws used to criminalize working people and youth.

These attacks show the true face of the capitalist "justice" system. They are part of a war that the billionaire rulers of the United States are waging against workers and farmers at home, which is tied to the wars of plunder they are preparing abroad to defend their declining empire. The YS is committed to the fight to overturn this dog-eat-dog system of exploitation and to join with working people and the oppressed around the globe in creating a world based on human solidarity.

The publications that Calero helps produce--the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial--are ours. We will continue to get out these political weapons at campuses, street tables, workplaces and plant gates.

We pledge to campaign vigorously across the country against the INS efforts to deport Calero--working together with the broadest possible forces. We know that many will see this fight as their own.

Stop the INS deportation proceedings against Róger Calero now!
 
 
Related article:
Defenders of Calero campaign to stop move to deport him
Inside an INS jail: the U.S. ‘justice’ system at work
Houston daily reports on INS detention of ‘Militant’ writer
U.S. private prisons: brutal and profitable
Meatpackers plan defense fund raiser
Calero case is latest fight for Political Rights Defense Fund
Stop deportation of Róger Calero  
 
 
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