By Sam Shaw, The Waco Bridge, The Texas Tribune.

Early Tuesday, March 25, Sergio Garcia heated the pinto beans, rice, the fragrant carnitas and barbacoa at his Austin Avenue restaurant kitchen for the last time.

He headed out the alley door, where Sergio’s Food Truck was waiting to be loaded for the morning downtown crowd.

Then, as he recalls, a man in plain clothes approached him at the truck; another man with a vest reading “Police” lingered some distance away.“They asked me if I’m Sergio, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m Sergio,’ “ Garcia told The Bridge in a phone call from Monterrey, Mexico, last week.

“Then they said, ‘You gotta come with us.’ ”

He complied, assuming there was some kind of mix-up. He had no criminal record, only a two-decade-old deportation order for illegal re-entry that immigration agents had never attempted to enforce.

He was a well-known business owner who had won an international following in the years when President George W. Bush brought hordes of journalists and politicians to Waco.

Within 24 hours, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had Garcia deported across the border into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He was separated from his four U.S.-born adult children and wife, Sandra.

Sandra Garcia, also undocumented, would reunite in July with her husband in Monterrey.

The detention and deportation abruptly cut short an American dream 36 years in the making. It came as a shock to customers and fellow business leaders.

The news rippled through Waco’s immigrant community and brought a sense of fear and vulnerability, said Mito Diaz-Espinoza, president of the Cen-Tex Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

“Deportations like Sergio’s — to fixtures of the community — are making people think, ‘This could be me next, or my favorite place next, or somebody who I talk to every day’,” he said.

Garcia, originally from Veracruz, Mexico, rose from selling ceviche in Styrofoam cups to earning writeups in Texas Monthly and catering events related to President Bush’s Western White House in the 2000s.

A box of thank-you notes at the family’s Waco home includes signed letters by a Baylor University athletic director, Waco Independent School District and countless customers through the years.

The shock of the deportation was only the beginning of the ordeal for Garcia and his family, said his daughter Esmeralda, who lives in Waco.

Over the course of three months, she said, he was held captive in Nuevo Laredo by a murky group demanding money, caught by U.S. Border Patrol agents on the American side of the border, then flown to Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost border state.

Esmeralda and her older sister, Astrid Garcia, ran the food truck until Sept. 27, when it closed. News of the closure prompted an outpouring of grief and community support on the business’s Facebook page .

“I had a lot of friends, my family, my business, my church in Waco,” Sergio Garcia said. “Truly, I miss everything.”

The couple’s family is continuing to explore legal options for their return to the U.S.

Starting from the bottom

Sergio Garcia was 29 in 1989, when he decided to take his future into his own hands. His boss at a construction company in Veracruz declined several requests for a pay raise. And his heart was in regional cuisine, not construction.

“A coctelería serving ceviche, that was my dream,” Garcia said.

He got his passport and visa and drove with a friend to a city they had heard of but never seen: Waco, Texas.

At the time, visa overstays were considered a minor administrative violation in the United States, local immigration attorneys say. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor its sub-agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, existed yet.

“I didn’t plan to stay for a long time anyways,” Garcia said.

But as he made friends and found work in local restaurants, his dream began to feel attainable.

“I just had to get my money up first,” he said.

He worked in the kitchens of Czech Stop in West and on the Brazos Queen II riverboat restaurant.

The riverboat was where he met his future wife, Sandra, who was visiting Waco with a dance troupe from Monterrey. It was also where head chef Geoffrey Michaels let him stay late in the kitchen to prepare shrimp cocktails and ceviche, or marinated chopped fish.

Garcia seized the opportunity, building a small following selling ceviche out of Styrofoam cups to pick-up soccer players in the fields beside St. Francis on the Brazos Catholic Church.

“Then I bought the van, sold out of that, and was doing everything on night shifts,” Garcia recalls.

In 1995, Sandra and Sergio opened their first brick-and-mortar location, El Siete Mares, on Webster Avenue. The two often worked seven days a week at what was little more than a hole-in-the-wall joint attached to Santo’s Paint and Body Shop.

Upturned buckets became seats and food was handed off in plastic pails with tin foil lids. Soon the menu expanded and the ceviche’s finely tuned balance of fish, lime, salt and spices turned customers into regulars. The Garcias’ warmth turned many of those regulars into loyal friends.

Sergio Garcia’s former employers became some of his biggest fans and referred friends and customers to the humble seafood shop.

“And that’s when my business started growing with white people,” Garcia said with a laugh.

As the restaurant dream glowed like a small ember, the couple’s long hours were the oxygen keeping it lit.

“Three days after my mom had me, I was at the restaurant under a desk as a newborn,” said Esmeralda, now 27, reciting a well-worn family story. “They were so devoted to working because that was really the only way they could provide for us.”

She remembered late Friday evenings and falling asleep with her siblings in a booth as her parents finished out the night’s shift.

“They were crazy hours, honestly,” she said.

Catching fire

But like so many times in Sergio Garcia’s life, hard work was rewarded.

In 1999, El Siete Mares found a new, larger home at 1915 Dutton Ave. and word spread that Waco had a restaurant serving regional delicacies such as pescado a la Veracruzano, red snapper smothered in a spice-rich tomato sauce.

“I thought El Siete Mares was the greatest restaurant in Waco,” said Blake Burleson, a retired Baylor University professor and deacon at Seventh and James Baptist Church. “When we had guests in town, we’d always take them there.”

After George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, the Garcias’ restaurant captured the eye — or more likely the palates — of the press corps covering the “Western White House” in Crawford, some 25 minutes west of Waco.

“They made reservations to eat afterwards at the restaurant, maybe 40 or 50 people,” Garcia said.

Soon, Garcia was catering the White House press corps, offering a sprawling Mexican breakfast buffet at Crawford Middle School as reporters waited to be transported to press conferences at the nearby Bush ranch. That relationship lasted through Bush’s two terms in office.

The Garcias closed El Siete Mares in 2011 amid a nationwide economic downturn but rebounded in 2013 with a restaurant on Austin Avenue and a food truck nearby that developed a following for its ample burritos.

Even after the restaurant itself closed during the pandemic year of 2020, Garcia estimated the business netted around $100,000 annually before shuttering in September.

But through all the ups and downs of the business, the Garcias faced a risk that hard work and tenacity couldn’t solve.

Struggle for citizenship

Sandra and Sergio Garcia were well-known in Waco by the early 2000s, raising a family, running a thriving business and staying active in church life at St. Francis on the Brazos.

But to the United States government, the couple were still undocumented immigrants.

Garcia said he and his wife have spent more than 25 years trying to obtain legal status, hiring immigration attorneys in Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Florida most recently.

“It was so bad. We spent so much money hiring different lawyers and different lawyers,” Garcia said.

The Garcia family alleges that an attorney in Houston mishandled their case and inflamed the situation, leading an immigration judge to issue a deportation order in 2002.

Esmeralda said the family’s most recent attorney in Florida, Melissa Trujillo, had reassured them early this year that their case was being reviewed by a judge and to expect word by April. Garcia’s arrest and deportation in March meant they never found out. Trujillo did not respond to multiple Waco Bridge requests for information.

Longtime Waco immigration attorney Susan Nelson said authorities traditionally had discretion in treating old deportation orders, but that ended when President Donald Trump began his second term in January.

“In other words, they’re no longer considering whether someone is contributing to the community, making great burritos […] or not committing crimes.”

And, she added, “The ICE office here in Waco no longer has the authority to disregard old deportation orders,” based on the context of an individual’s case. “Now, they’re going out and looking for people with those old orders.”

In a statement Wednesday to The Waco Bridge, ICE described the deportation as follows:

“Sergio Garcia, a 65-year-old twice-deported criminal alien from Mexico, illegally entered the U.S., was afforded full due process under the law, and was ordered deported by an immigration judge at great taxpayer expense. In complete defiance to our nation’s system of laws, he fled from authorities and remained an immigration fugitive for more than 23 years. After law enforcement finally caught up with him earlier this year, he was arrested and deported to Mexico on March 25.”

The regional ICE office in Waco is located at the federal courthouse on Franklin Avenue, four blocks from where Sergio’s Food Truck plied its trade for 12 years.

Lost in an underworld

Much of what transpired in the three months following his deportation remains hazy, even to Garcia and his family.

Garcia’s wife and children were unable to talk to Sergio directly for 36 days.

Garcia’s plan was to travel by bus from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey, where his wife’s family resides. However, the bus didn’t depart for Monterrey and instead took Garcia and nine other deportees to a compound where their phones were taken, family members said.

“These people barely fed us and wanted money to take us back across the border,” Garcia said. The captors threatened to turn anyone who refused that offer over to “worse people.”

“They kept saying, ‘This is not personal, it’s just a business,” Garcia recalled.

Garcia’s story is impossible to verify, but local immigration attorneys say that extortion of deportees is rampant and growing in border cities .

Meanwhile, Garcia’s family was in the dark as to his whereabouts: “We weren’t able to contact my dad for a really long time when he was with those people, and we had no idea where he was,” Esmeralda said.

Garcia said that after 36 days in captivity, the group was moved across the Rio Grande on a rubber boat, then marched for several hours through the South Texas brush country before they were apprehended by Border Patrol agents.

Garcia said he spent the next month in a detention center before being flown to Chiapas, on the southern tip of Mexico. Sandra’s family arranged to buy him a plane ticket to Mexico City and finally to her hometown of Monterrey, the family said.

ICE’s statement to the Bridge countered Garcia’s account of his border crossing in April, depicting it as his own decision:

“On April 30, Garcia once again showed that he thinks he’s above the law, by illegally reentering the U.S. near Laredo, Texas. U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested him that same day and he was criminally prosecuted for illegal entry. On June 3, he was convicted of illegal entry and deported to Mexico June 4.”

Sergio and Sandra Garcia have maintained contact with their four children through daily WhatsApp calls, but the deportation has caused pain and disruption for the tight-knit family. In Waco, Sandra frequently took Esmeralda’s two young children to school and helped with childcare, while her father, an avid cyclist, took them on adventures to Cameron Park.

“My kids were just really attached to my mom and dad,” Esmeralda said. Other family members had suspended their work to steward the food truck business.

Sergio Garcia said the family is pursuing a Form I-212 application, which allows immigrants who have been deported to reapply for admissions into the United States.

Ripple effects

Disbelief was the near universal reaction to Garcia’s deportation among those who knew him.

“At first I thought somebody had made a mistake, that they got the wrong guy,” said Floyd Colley, who owns and operates the Brazos Bike Lounge on Austin Avenue. Garcia leased part of his old restaurant space to Colley to start his bike shop. Before that, he said Garcia was one of his first supporters as a young bike mechanic doing business out of his car.

“I wouldn’t have a shop if it weren’t for Sergio,” Colley said. “You heard all this stuff about rounding up dangerous criminals, but it’s like, ‘Well, he’s one of the best people I know.’ I certainly don’t believe he’s a dangerous criminal. There were months where Sergio didn’t even charge me rent.”

When Colley married his wife in 2022, Garcia catered the wedding.

Stuart Smith, cyclist and retired Waco attorney, had one question when he heard of Garcia’s arrest: “Why Sergio?”

“If they’re deporting him, it could be anybody,” Smith said.

Diaz-Espinoza, the Hispanic chamber president, said Garcia’s deportation is part of a troubling pattern, as ICE agents arrest people at immigration hearings and are empowered by a September Supreme Court decision to detain people based on appearance, speaking Spanish or even accented English.

“The protection of ‘Just do the right thing, put your head down, work hard, don’t get caught drunk driving’ – that’s no longer a safety net,” he said. “That’s no longer going to protect you.”

Undocumented immigrants and their families have already begun to alter their lives in response, he added, avoiding work and church, pulling children from school and cutting out shopping and dining, which is having spillover effects on the local economy.

Starting over

In late September, Garcia called The Bridge from a crowded Monterrey bar awash in the sound of a soccer game. “I wish I could go back to the USA, but it’s not up to me,” he said.

In the meantime, he and his wife are relying on the formula that built their life in Waco more than 30 years earlier.

“I’m making some ceviche and cocktails, cooking some salmon, chicken. The people ask me for it and we make deliveries to the people. It’s like when I started my business in Waco,” he said.

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