It was a bright, bustling morning on Aug. 28. Sergio Ivan Chaparro Ayala, known to most as Sergio Chaparro, and his girlfriend, Estefani Montes, had just arrived at the Oakland San Francisco Bay International Airport. She was excited — this was their first anniversary trip, a surprise Las Vegas excursion she planned for them both to celebrate the life they were building.
“I planned a trip to Las Vegas, and I surprised him with that trip. Initially, we were gonna drive. However, because it was such a short time that we were gonna be there, we decided to fly, “ Montes said.
As the pair made their way through airport security it was business as usual: passports and IDs were scanned, security was a breeze, and they were on their way to their terminal until two men approached them.
“Sergio Chaparro?” one said, brandishing his Immigration and Customs Enforcement badge. “What’s your legal status here?”
“No digas nada,” Montes told Chaparro in Spanish. “Don’t say anything.”
“This is immigration. You have a warrant for your arrest, and we have to take you,” the agent replied, shackling Chaparro and escorting him out of the airport.
Chaparro’s detainment led to a flurry of calls, long-distance drives to detention facilities, and frantic efforts to find him legal representation, as Montes and others in Chaparro’s orbit raced against the clock to find out how to help him.
Chaparro is a Richmond resident and manager at Oceanview Diner in Berkeley. He has two children, plays in a local soccer league each Friday and Sunday, and many would describe him as responsible, empathetic and passionate. Oceanview Diner co-owner William Bishop says he hired Chaparro in 2022, right after he purchased the restaurant from its previous owners. When he’s serving patrons fresh herb omelets or challah French toasts, he wears a smile, and permeates a kindness that Bishop called “unshakeable.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen him get upset. He’s always smiling and always seems to be in good spirits,” Bishop said.
This led him to promote Chaparro to a supervisory role at the restaurant. When Bishop and his girlfriend caught news of Chaparro’s detainment, they sprang into action, reaching out to their local networks, posting on Instagram, and starting a GoFundMe for his legal expenses that raised over $25,000.
“If you look on the GoFundMe page, one of his regular customers who comes in every morning and talks to him donated $5,000. That gives you an idea of how important he is to the people around him and the community,” Bishop said. “You know, to turn Donald Trump’s words against him, he is actually the type of person that is making America a great country.”
Chaparro came to the United States in 2019 on a tourist visa, which expired in 2020. Immigration agents received a referral from the Transportation Security Administration for Chaparro’s visa overstay. Chaparro’s detention is the latest in a surge of arrests ICE has conducted at airports of foreign citizens with expired U.S visas, a newer detention strategy employed by the Department of Homeland Security.
Nosh reached out to the ICE immigration office regarding Chaparro’s arrest. In an email statement, Jason B. Sweeney, a spokesperson for ICE, stated that Chaparro, who has no criminal history, was arrested due to his expired visa.
“Chaparro-Ayala lawfully entered the United States as a nonimmigrant on Aug. 22, 2019, and violated the terms of admission by not departing by Feb. 21, 2020. Chaparro Ayala has remained in the United States illegally since then in violation of our nation’s laws. He will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings,” Sweeney said.
After his arrest, Chaparro was held at the San Francisco ICE field office. Montes reached out to a rapid response network and recalls frantically calling various [lawyer offices] to find Chaparro legal representation, spending over $1,000 in consultations. She was panicked as Chaparro suffers from severe sleep apnea and requires a CPAP machine to breathe at night. Without it, he could have a heart attack.
“And at that point my mind was more about I need to find him because wherever they take him, he needs this machine to sleep. Like he cannot sleep without the machine, you know?” Montes said.
That morning, Montes attempted to go to the San Francisco ICE field office to try and give Chaparro the CPAP machine, but he was already gone, transferred to a detention center 270 miles away in McFarland called the Central Valley Annex. Montes called the detention center multiple times to get permission to bring his CPAP machine, a request that was eventually approved.
On Aug. 31, while Montes was visiting Chaparro, guards informed them that he was being moved again.
“We were in the visitation when they came up to him and they were like, “Oh, Chaparro, you know, you’re getting released,” Montes said. “We both stood up and were like, ‘What do you mean?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, you’re getting out.’ And I was like, ‘Out, as in like out of detention? Or out of where?’ And then they were like, ‘Well, no, they’re taking him. We just don’t know where.’”
Chaparro was driven 25 miles south to the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, but he was soon returned to McFarland due to the facility being full. The next morning, Chaparro called Montes, and told her that he was being moved to the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center in Washington.
“I’m sure this is like a tactic for them to separate people,” Montes said. “I don’t want to overthink, but you know it was just like so random, the fact that he got transferred over to Washington.”
That same day, Lourdes Martinez, an attorney from Oakland’s Centro Legal de la Raza and co-director of the Alameda County Immigration Legal and Education Partnership (ACILEP), contacted Montes. Martinez heard about Chaparro’s case through Montes’ call to the rapid response network hotline in Contra Costa County.
“Estefani did the right thing by contacting the rapid response hotline. She’s a resident of Contra Costa, so she actually contacted a different hotline than ours, but I had been alerted to this arrest, and I knew that it was being attended to because I just happened to have personal connections,” Martinez said. “ A hotline had been activated, and we are in collaboration and in community with all those attorneys.”
Martinez and her colleagues followed up on Chaparro’s situation, and found that he had a strong case for a habeas corpus petition, a legal procedure that allows people who have been detained by the government to challenge their detention in court.
“[O]ur attorneys determined differently from the initial attorneys who had looked at the case. The attorneys determined, you know, that this is clearly a violation of the Constitution,” Martinez explained. “It’s true that there’s not a lot of law exploring these situations because, historically, these kinds of detentions have not been happening. ICE has not traditionally been detaining people who overstayed their visa, so people who came into the country and stayed past the expiration of their visa. And ICE had also not been detaining people at airports. So these types of detentions are new.”
Chaparro’s attorney Nikolas De Bremaeker and his colleague, Jazmine Preciado, filed the petition on Sept. 2, and sought a temporary restraining order, arguing that his detention violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment by not holding a hearing to explain his detention.
“And so our attorneys responded by filing a habeas petition, and it was so important to file it when they did because that same day Sergio was being transferred out of our state, and he would have been transferred out of the jurisdiction of the federal court of the Northern District. So timeliness is of the essence, you know,” Martinez said.
On Sept. 4, U.S District Judge Charles Breyer ruled in favor of Chaparro, ordering his immediate release and barring ICE from arresting him again before he could challenge his detention. Chaparro was subsequently released from the Northwest Processing Center by ICE agents, and has since returned to the East Bay.
Martinez believes that this surge of arrests of foreign citizens with expired visas, and increased immigration action at airports, will continue, and cautions immigrants in similar situations against flying domestically.
“They are using collaboration and cooperation from TSA at the airport, and when TSA scans your ID, whether it’s your passport or otherwise, it alerts ICE. Actually, it might even be at the moment where you buy a plane ticket and you register with the airline. The point is that ICE has access to databases that let them know that somebody who is, for example, with an expired visa, is traveling, and so they will be at the airport and they are detaining people this way and they are being very open about it,” Martinez said.
She encourages all foreign citizens and their loved ones to have an immigration emergency action plan, and recommends all plans to include one’s immigration history or status, a list of ACILEP hotline numbers, and an Alien registration number (A-number), a unique number assigned to noncitizens by the Department of Homeland Security to track their immigration records. Martinez also recommends families with mixed-status members to have hard conversations about family planning in case of detention.
“All of us can encourage immigrants who might be at risk to have some level of preparedness because when these crises hit, it is really helpful if you already know your immediate next step,” Martinez explained. “In addition to having the safety plan and knowing your hotline number, talk to your family and your community, such as your employer, about their role, or whatever role they might have in a family plan. Like, in some cases, it could be, ‘Hey, if I get detained, who takes care of my children? Who picks them up from school?’”
