Broken Story: Fu Ping's "Deportation" to New Mexico

The Original Story:
In the early profile by Inc. magazine, Fu Ping's "deportation" to New Mexico was described as a purely passive affair:

...Instead she was being deported to the United States. 

Two weeks later, Ping boarded a United Airlines flight from Shanghai to San Francisco. She was being sent to the University of New Mexico--she didn't know why New Mexico, any more than she knew why she wasn't dead--to study English as a second language.

The Changed Story:
To her credit, in Bend, Not Break and other interviews, Fu Ping has been consistently telling a different story on her own: that her family helped her obtain admission to the University of New Mexico through a former student of his father's. She applied for a visa to the US herself specifically for the purpose of going to that school.

The Debunking:
It's not clear how John Brant of Inc. got this fact so wrong -- among the many other dates and facts in that story that are no longer consistent with the current version of Fu Ping's story. Did Fu Ping tell a different version to John or did John fill in blanks with his own imagination? We shall never know until one or both of them speak up to clarify.