Texas residents were taken aback when a highly acclaimed chef, known for catering events for former President George W. Bush, faced deportation after illegally crossing the border in 1989.

Sergio Garcia, a fixture in Waco due to his immensely popular Mexican food truck, was initially detained in March because of a deportation order from over 20 years ago.

The chef was busy with Sergio’s Food Truck when a plainclothes officer approached, accompanied by another officer in a ‘POLICE’ vest standing nearby, as reported by The Waco Bridge.

‘They asked me if I’m Sergio, and I said “Yeah, I’m Sergio,”‘ Garcia recounted to the outlet. ‘Then they said “You gotta come with us.”‘

At first, Garcia thought it was just a mix-up as he had no criminal record – just a two-decade old deportation order for illegal re-entry that immigration agents never before attempted to enforce.

Within just 24 hours, though, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported Garcia to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico – separating him from his four US-born adult children and his wife Sandra, who would later reunite with him in her hometown of Monterrey.

As the news rippled throughout the city of more than 146,000 people, many were left trying to understand what had happened.

‘At first I thought somebody had made a mistake, they got the wrong guy,’ said Floyd Colley, who owns and operates Brazos Bike Lounge.

Garcia had leased part of his old restaurant space to Colley to open the bike shop, and before that, Colley 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,’ the business owner 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,’ Colley noted.

But as Garcia rose in the Waco business community from selling ceviche out of Styrofoam cups to catering events at Bush’s ‘Western White House’ in the early 2000s, he was living in the United States without proper documentation.

He and a friend had crossed into the central Texas city in 1989 at the age of 29, after growing frustrated that his boss at a construction company in Veracruz repeatedly refused to increase his salary.

Garcia had gotten his passport and a visa before he and his friend drove into town.

At the time, visa overstays were considered a minor administrative violation in the United States – and neither the Department of Homeland Security or ICE existed.

Still, Garcia said: ‘I didn’t plan to stay for a long time anyways.’ 

But as he made friends and found work at local restaurants, he realized his dream of becoming a chef may be attainable.

‘I just had to get my money up front,’ Garcia recounted.

So he worked in the kitchens of Czech Shop and Brazos Queen II riverboat restaurant, where he first met Sandra as she was visiting Waco with a dance troupe from Monterrey, Mexico.

It was also where head chef Geoffrey Michaels let him stay late in the kitchen to prepare shrimp cocktails and ceviche – marinated chopped fish.

He then seized opportunity to build a small following selling ceviche out of Styrofoam cups to pick-up soccer players nearby.

From there, Garcia bought his first food truck, working nights.

By 1995, Sandra and Sergio opened their first brick-and-mortar location, El Siete Mares, often working seven days a week.

Soon, the menu expanded and Sergio’s former employers started referring friends and customers to the seafood shop.

‘And that’s when my business started growing with white people,’ Sergio joked. 

By 1995, El Siete Mares found a larger home, and after George W. Bus was elected president in 2000, the Garcia’s restaurant became a favorite of the press corps. 

But amid the economic downturn in 2011, the Garcias were forced to close El Siete Mares.

Fortunately, they were able to rebound in 2013 with a new restaurant and his food truck, raking in around $100,000 annually before shuttering in September – after his daughters tried to keep it open without him.

 

Throughout that time, Garcia said he and his wife tried to obtain legal status, hiring immigration lawyers in Austin, Houston, San Antonio and even recently in Florida.

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

He claimed that one attorney in Houston mishandled their case and inflamed the situation – prompting an immigration judge to issue a deportation order in 2002.

For more than two decades, the ICE agents disregarded the deportation orders, but immigration attorney Susan Nelson said authorities are no longer able to consider whether someone is contributing to the community.

‘Now they’re going out and looking for people with those old orders,’ she said.

ICE officials, though, noted in a statement to The Waco Bridge that Garcia is a ‘twice-deported criminal alien from Mexico’ who 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.’ 

It remains unclear what exactly happened to Garcia after he was deported, but his family said they were unable to talk to him for over a month.

Garcia claimed he had planned to travel by bus from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey, where his wife’s family still lives, but the bus never left for Monterrey – and instead took him and nine other deportees to a compound, where their phones were seized.

‘These people barely fed us and wanted money to take us back across the border,’ he alleged, claiming that the captors threatened to turn anyone who refused the offer to ‘worse people.’

‘They kept saying, “This is not personal, it’s just business,”‘ he recounted.

Meanwhile, his family was left in the dark about 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,’ his daughter, Esmeralda, said.

After 36 days in captivity, Garcia said he and the others moved across the Rio Grande on a rubber boat, then were marched for several hours through the South Texas brush before they were apprehended by Border Patrol.

Garcia then spent the next month in a detention center before being flown to Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost border state. From there, Sandra’s family arranged to buy him a plane ticket to Mexico City and finally to her hometown of Monterrey.

ICE officials also said Garcia ‘once again showed that he thinks he’s above the law by illegally re-entering the US near Laredo, Texas’ on April 30.

Now reunited with his wife, the couple are trying to explore legal options to return to the United States, where Garcia said he ‘had a lot of friends, my family, my business, my church.’

They are even pursuing a Form I-212 application, which allows immigrants who have been deported to reapply for admission into the United States.