Sergio Chaparro, shown Saturday at Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline in Richmond, spent a week in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody before he was released Friday.
Godofredo A. Vásquez/For the S.F. Chronicle
Sergio Chaparro had just cleared security at Oakland International Airport on the morning of Aug. 28 and was thinking about a preflight coffee when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped him. They had a warrant for his arrest, they said, and demanded to know his immigration status.
Chaparro and his girlfriend had planned to fly to Las Vegas to celebrate their first anniversary.
“I was excited,” Chaparro said. “I was about to ask Estefani what she wanted for breakfast, and then, boom, the nightmare starts.”
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Agents shackled the 47-year-old Richmond man and whisked him to a truck waiting outside to take him to ICE’s regional headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
Over the next week, Chaparro pingponged between four ICE offices and detention centers in California and Washington state as his friends and family scrambled to get him access to needed medical care, prevent his deportation and free him.
“I thought it might be a bad idea,” Chaparro said of the Vegas trip as he sat in a park in Point Richmond on Saturday, the day after being freed from ICE custody. “But I’d heard stories from other people who’d done it that nothing happened to them … but I had bad luck.
“I was so scared,” he continued. “I was shaking.”
Sergio Chaparro, a Berkeley restaurant manger and father of two young boys, was freed by a judge Friday after spending a week in ICE detention.
Godofredo A. Vásquez/For the S.F. Chronicle
ICE’s arrest report shows that agents received a referral from the Transportation Security Administration for visa overstay. The arrest came amid a surge of airport arrests by ICE of foreign citizens with expired travel visas, who have traditionally not been targets for deportation. In Chaparro’s case, the government acknowledged that he did not have a criminal history but said he overstayed a tourist visa after entering the U.S. in August 2019.
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ICE officials did not respond to a request for comment Saturday afternoon. They previously told reporters that Chaparro entered the U.S. legally in August 2019, overstayed his visa and remained in the country illegally since then, and would stay in ICE’s custody until he went through removal proceedings.
After Chaparro was taken to ICE’s downtown offices at 630 Sansome St., he said, the officers who detained him showed him some papers they said he needed to sign.
“I’m not going to sign anything without a lawyer present,” Chaparro recalled answering. They told him he would be taken to the Central Valley Annex, an ICE detention center in McFarland (Kern County) six hours away.
But Chaparro, a restaurant manager and father of two young boys, had severe sleep apnea and needed a device called a CPAP machine to help him breathe while he slept. Without it, he could suffocate or have a heart attack.
Back at the airport, Estefani had called a rapid response network and then drove to San Francisco. The next day, she drove down to the Central Valley Annex and called the facility more than a dozen times as staff told her they had to get authorization to accept the equipment.
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“I had to call the detention center so many times to follow up,” she said. “This is a serious matter. He needs the machine.”
Chaparro was put in a room with stacked bunk beds — and no power outlets.
Sergio Chaparro was preparing to board a flight to Las Vegas with his girlfriend when he was detained by immigration agents at Oakland International Airport.
Godofredo A. Vásquez/For the S.F. Chronicle
“You don’t understand,” Chaparro recalled telling them. “If I don’t use my machine, my life is at risk.”
Detention officers ultimately told him to sleep in the room where new detainees are processed, he said.
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On Monday, while Estefani was visiting Chaparro at the detention center, the facility’s staff told him he was being transferred to another location. They drove him to the Mesa Verde Processing Center in Bakersfield, but were turned away because the facility was full, he said.
ICE returned him to McFarland, where he reentered the facility, a process that took more than six hours, he said.
The next day, he said, ICE agents told him they planned instead to transfer him to the Tacoma Northwest Processing Center in Washington. They drove him back to San Francisco on Wednesday to put him on a flight to Tacoma.
“I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about Washington. I didn’t know if it was a good location, or a bad one. I didn’t know anything.”
Back in the Bay Area, Chaparro’s case had received significant public attention, and Chaparro’s colleagues at the Oceanview Diner in Berkeley contacted Alameda County’s rapid response network Wednesday.
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“He had such a strong presence and following with staff,” said Will Bishop, co-owner of the diner, which hired Chaparro six years ago. “People would come to the diner in the morning just to see Sergio. … He was a natural leader and people just wanted to be around him.”
When attorneys accepted the case, they learned that Chaparro was sitting in ICE’s San Francisco’s offices waiting to be taken to the airport out of the jurisdiction of the Northern District of California, which immigration attorney Nikolas De Bremaeker said would make securing his release much more difficult.
“We had to, within minutes, file something,” De Bremaeker said. “Normally these are filings that we want to work at least several hours on, to properly review everything.”
De Bremaeker and his colleague, Jazmin Preciado, called ICE’s downtown office repeatedly trying to speak to Chaparro, only to be told that he was already en route to the airport.
“They moved him to the airport shortly after we had started asking to meet with him, which was very striking,” De Bremaeker said. “We needed to speak with him for his representation, and we were denied the chance to do that. … It felt intentional, that they were keeping our client away from us.”
After filing a habeas petition, a formal request for a court review of his detention, the two lawyers then sought a temporary restraining order, filing it early Thursday.
The two lawyers argued in legal filings that ICE had violated Chaparro’s due process rights by not holding a hearing in which they explained why they wanted to detain him.
In Chaparro’s case, De Bremaeker said, he didn’t have a criminal history and the government had never previously targeted him for deportation.
“Folks in this situation have certain due process rights that need to be met, and they were violated by ICE,” he said.
In court documents, federal attorneys argued that the law did not need to provide any hearings in advance of Chaparro’s arrest and said he had “ample” administrative options to protest his detention.
Sergio Chaparro and his girlfriend, Estefani, discuss his weeklong detention at ICE facilities in California and Washington state.
Godofredo A. Vásquez/For the S.F. Chronicle
On Friday, however, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Chaparro should be released immediately and barred ICE from re-arresting him before he is able to challenge his detention.
Breyer noted that detention before a removal proceeding is “only justified where immigrants pose flight risks or dangers to the community.”
Chaparro, Breyer said, showed “continuous and long-term residency in the area, sustained employment, local ties, and both minor children and a partner who live in the community,” and “had no criminal record, either in the United States or elsewhere.”
De Bremaeker, who lives in Berkeley, rushed over to the Oceanview Diner to give Chaparro’s colleagues the news.
“Everyone was overjoyed,” said Bishop, the co-owner. “I didn’t realize how stressed out and how down everyone in the restaurant was, how much we had internalized what was happening.” When they learned the news, “everyone, including the customers, cheered. Everyone felt a lot lighter.”
About 720 miles north of San Francisco, ICE officers released Chaparro from the Northwest Processing Center to the street a few hours later Friday, without his drivers license or a way home. He ended up buying a ticket back to San Francisco on Alaska Airlines using documents ICE provided him that confirmed his identity and allowed him to travel back to the Bay Area.
At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Chaparro found himself looking over his shoulder, checking for ICE agents, wondering whether they would stop him again.
“It was so, so scary, so weird,” he said. “This is a joke.”
Chaparro landed at San Francisco International Airport shortly before midnight. His girlfriend was waiting for him inside the airport. They hugged, through tears, for what seemed like five minutes.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” he told her. “I want to get out of here.”