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Hundreds Turn Out in Portland For May Day Rally

Fred Bever
/
Maine Public
About 200 people rally in support of workers' and immigrants' rights in Portland Monday evening.

PORTLAND, Maine - Some 200 people turned out in Portland last night for a rally to support workers’ rights and the rights of immigrants.

Speakers included the wife of a Naples man, Otto Morales-Caballeros, who was detained by federal immigration agents just over two weeks ago, when he was on his way to work at a lobster packing company.

“I fell in love with a sweet, kind, humble and grateful man: The light of my life," said Sandra Scribner Merlim.  "He just happened to be undocumented.”

Merlim says her husband’s detention is just one example of radical, Gestapo-like tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities under the Trump administration.

 “In their efforts to round up the people that they deem as undesirables, violent criminals, and as Mr. Sessions put it, ‘the filth from our country,’ many people like my husband simply do not fit into this category. It’s morally unacceptable.”

Merlim says her husband is being held in a New Hampshire jail, and faces likely deportation on what Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say was a judge's order from 2010.

Other speakers called on the crowd to contact local and congressional lawmakers to advocate for the immigrant community, and to resist efforts in Augusta to restrict benefits for recent immigrants, or to sanction so-called “sanctuary cities” that do not actively enforce federal immigration laws.

 

A Columbia University graduate, Fred began his journalism career as a print reporter in Vermont, then came to Maine Public in 2001 as its political reporter, as well as serving as a host for a variety of Maine Public Radio and Maine Public Television programs. Fred later went on to become news director for New England Public Radio in Western Massachusetts and worked as a freelancer for National Public Radio and a number of regional public radio stations, including WBUR in Boston and NHPR in New Hampshire.