“It makes me feel like I’m not alone,” says Ricardo Guzman, who used a copy of EJP’s A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges & Opportunities After Deportation to prepare for his release from prison and deportation to Mexico. “Other people went through this. They made it. I can also make it.”
Education Justice Project (EJP) researched and released the first issue of our deportation guide in 2018 after hearing stories from our students at Danville Correctional Center who, after serving lengthy prison sentences, were deported from the country. Since then we have sent copies of the guide to people across the US, and indeed around the world. Therefore, we were gratified to hear from Ricardo that A New Path had helped him advocate for his parole from a prison in New York and adjust when he was deported to Mexico. Without this vital information, he may still be serving a life sentence in prison.
EJP strongly condemns deportations. In no way is it our intention facilitate the much-touted “mass deportations” of the current presidential administration. Instead, we want to provide resources to help people who are forced to go through it navigate the difficult and traumatic experience of being deported.
Ricardo was a student in John Jay College’s Prison-to-College Pathways program at Otisville federal prison in central New York when one of his professors gave him a copy of A New Path. He knew he had an order of deportation, so he quickly familiarized himself with the book. He first used it to make the case that he should be released by the parole board.
“I read the book, and it was very helpful,” Ricardo said. “It was a guide for building experiences, how to write resume letters, things like that, which I put in my parole packet. Because they want to know how are you going to cope with these things when you face society? The guide has information on how to conduct yourself in an interview, how to fill out your curriculum (resume)—which is very important over here in Mexico. If you want to apply for a job, they ask you for your curriculum. The book A New Path has all the information. It made it easier. I took some of those things out of the book and applied them to my parole packet.”
He was able to put together a strong parole plan to convince the board he should be released. Ricardo had a 25-year-to-life sentence, so it was not easy. A New Path gave him ideas of industries where he could apply for jobs in Mexico. He had a list of non-profit organizations he could seek for assistance. He had a plan for housing. He was able to show how he was going to be successful.
Remarkably, after 25 years of being incarcerated Ricardo was granted parole. On June 26, 2024, he was released from custody. ICE agents were waiting for him at the prison doors. They took him to the ICE field office in Buffalo where he was held for ten days, after which he was put on a plane to Louisiana. He was then flown to Texas. A bus picked him up at the airport and drove him to the border at Matamoros, Mexico, the far southern tip of Texas. Immigration agents took the handcuffs off and he walked through a gate into Mexico. It was the first time he had been in the country since he was 11 years old when his parents brought him to the US.
Ricardo was met by Mexican immigration officials who took him in and gave him a mattress on the floor with others who had been deported. The next day he took a 16-hour bus ride to Mexico City. On July 11, 2024, he arrived in Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world with 22 million people. His mother flew down from New York to meet him. She drove him to Pachuca where he now lives. They stayed with an aunt, but it was “difficult” reconnecting with family. “You just landed from New York to a city you don’t really know,” Ricardo remembered.
“Thank God I had education, the tools to socialize, to be friendly, to think outside the box,” he said.
When he heard his mother was flying to Mexico to meet him, Ricardo told her, “bring my book.” He had sent A New Path to his mother from prison. “I told her, when you come to visit me, bring my book.” So when she showed up to meet him in Mexico, she brought A New Path with her. He needed the guide to help him make the transition in a new country. “I have it with me now,” he said. (Ricardo is pictured here with his copy of A New Path.)
“It was a great resource, from putting together my parole packet, to landing in Mexico. I keep going back to the book, the interviews, the curriculum, the job application.”
For now, Ricardo is working a factory job in the garment industry, “which I hate, because it reminds me of prison.” He is trying to find a job teaching English as a second language.
Ricardo met Lee Ragsdale, director of EJP’s Reentry Resource Program, at Building Bridges: A Conference on Incarceration, Deportation, and Higher Education which they both attended in Mexico City this past April.
“He told me his story of using A New Path not only to assist with his deportation, but also to develop his parole plan,” Lee says. “It gave me chills. I had never thought about someone using our reentry guides to actually secure their release from an unjustly long prison sentence.”
“I’m so glad that I met Lee,” Ricardo said, “it’s so awesome that everything came full circle.”
Ricardo has recently joined the Advisory Committee of the Reentry Resource Program so that he can give back to the organization that supported him by sharing ways to improve A New Path from his own lived experience.
Thanks Ricardo for becoming a part of the “EJP Universe”! Best of luck in forging your new path!
