Marion is distraught. The manager of Café Mirabelle, located in the 11th arrondissement, doesn’t know what to do to bring back her former chef, Boubou, who was sent back to Mali last Friday. She made a plea for help on social media on Monday, September 25.
“I don’t understand, he was deported just when Emmanuel Macron mentioned on the 8pm news of France 2 the precarious situation of certain workers in high demand professions. In the restaurant industry, we all know people who work with or without residency permits, and luckily they are here. Boubou has never taken a sick day. And I contributed to URSSAF for him all these years. I contributed to his retirement,” she laments.
Born in France, Boubou returned in May 2017 after following his parents to Mali, their country of origin, when he was six years old. But an error made by his father in his birth declaration means that the 31-year-old chef has been unable to have his papers recognized.
“I first employed him as a dishwasher. Initially, he gave me the papers of someone else, but as soon as he told me that those papers were not his, I declared him under his name, with his social security number, even though he wasn’t in regular situation,” explains the café manager.
From dishwasher, Boubou moved to the kitchen, where the chef taught him everything. Starting in 2022, he had a full-time permanent contract in the kitchen. “He tried to regularize his situation, but his request for a residency permit was rejected,” Marion continues. In the spring, he left Café Mirabelle for another establishment that offered him a slightly higher salary. The former chef and his boss remained on very good terms.
At the end of July, the thirty-year-old was arrested in front of a Parisian bar where a fight had just taken place. In an illegal situation, he was taken to the administrative detention center in Vincennes. Two days before the end of the 60-day legal detention period, he was deported to Mali.
“It’s tough. I wasn’t prepared, neither mentally nor psychologically, to be deported like that overnight. I have my life in Paris. I enjoy working in the restaurant industry,” he says, reached via WhatsApp. “Today I’m stuck, I will apply for a visa at the French embassy in Bamako, but I don’t know what to do.”
Desperate, his former boss is now exploring all possible solutions. “The restaurant industry is a stressful job. I have never seen him get angry. He is super calm and everything has always gone well. And I’ve experienced difficult situations in the kitchen before,” adds the devastated café owner.
During a visit to the detention center this summer, she offered him the opportunity to work as a pastry chef for her parents’ restaurant in Alsace as soon as he got out, but Boubou was unable to seize this opportunity, and deportation was inevitable.
“We manage to regularize a young Russian tennis player or a young undocumented immigrant who climbs a façade to save a child, but what do we do for all those who work every day, who have monthly pay slips?” Marion asks. In Paris, Boubou’s lawyer is continuing the necessary steps to help him obtain a residency permit.
