Because he was viewed as an overprivileged American, Charles said he wasn’t welcomed in Guyana and had trouble getting work. 'You got kicked out from the place where everybody really wants to go.”
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2023.Lorenzo Charles, born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, was deported in 2003 following what he described as a wrongful conviction for attempted burglary.
He felt out of place almost as soon as he arrived. Instead of a shower, there were buckets. “I was like, yo, what is this?” he said, laughing. “I thought it was the end of the world.”Because he was viewed as an overprivileged American, Charles said he wasn’t welcomed in Guyana and had trouble getting work.
And his family back in Brooklyn always believed he’d be back. “It's just a feeling like you knew that he was gonna get a chance to come back up here,” Charles’ nephew, Darren Charles Edwards, said. “Ask anybody in our family — we knew he was gonna come back up here.” He also networked with legal advisers from around the globe. Eventually, in 2020, he connected with a team of students and attorneys at the Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo Law School, who reopened his case file. They found Charles got subpar representation and pleaded to offenses he said he didn’t do.
Incredibly, over the course of two years, Charles won a cascade of legal victories: The Brooklyn district attorney’s office agreed to allow Charles' first conviction at 16 to be downgraded to a juvenile offense, which he could not be deported for. Then prosecutors downgraded the second conviction to something more in line with what James took responsibility for — trespassing.
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