JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and activist who has chronicled his life as an immigrant living illegally in America, was detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas, on Tuesday while attempting to board a plane to Los Angeles.
Border Patrol spokesman Omar Zamora said Vargas was in custody, but he had no other details about the case, according to The Associated Press. "Our understanding is that he is currently being questioned by Border Patrol," Ryan Eller, campaign director for Define American, a group launched by Vargas, told
reporters. Vargas, 33, had traveled last week to the border in McAllen for a vigil to draw attention to the
ongoing crisis involving thousands of refugees, many unaccompanied children, flooding into the United States from Central America.
But a day after he arrived, Vargas — who now lives in New York — wrote that he did not know about the checkpoints and Border Patrol agents at the airport and feared he might be detained there."In the last 24 hours I realize that, for an undocumented immigrant like me, getting out of a border town in Texas — by plane or by land — won’t be easy," Vargas wrote in a piece for Politico published on Friday. "It might, in fact, be impossible." More from Vargas' piece:
When my friend Mony Ruiz-Velasco, an immigration lawyer who used to work in the area, saw on my Facebook page that I was in McAllen, she texted me: “I am so glad you are visiting the kids near the border. But how will you get through the checkpoint on your way back?” A curious question, I thought, and one I dismissed. I’ve visited the border before, in California. What checkpoint? What was she talking about?
Then Tania Chavez, an undocumented youth leader from the Minority Affairs Council, one of the organizers of the vigil, asked me the same question: “How will you get out of here?” Tania grew up in this border town. As the day wore on, as the reality of my predicament sunk in, Tania spelled it out for me: You might not get through airport security, where Customs and Border Protection (CPB) also checks for IDs, and you will definitely not get through the immigration checkpoints set up within 45 miles of this border town. At these checkpoints, you will be asked for documentation.Vargas says, like most immigrants living illegally in the U.S., he does not have a government-issued ID.
On Monday, Vargas wrote on Twitter that he was heading to the airport:
A video of Vargas presenting his Philippine passport and pocketbook U.S. Constitution to security was posted on YouTube:
United We Dream, an immigrant youth group that Vargas visited in McAllen, condemned his arrest.
“We stand in solidarity with Jose
Antonio and demand for his immediate release," Cristina Jimenez, United
We Dream's managing director, said in a statement. "But we must
remember that there are thousands of people along the border that live
with this same fear every day.”
In 2011, Vargas, a former Washington Post reporter, revealed he was an "undocumented immigrant"
in an essay for New York Times Magazine. Vargas came to the United
States from the Phillipines in 1993, when he was 12. He used a fake
green card, fake passport and a friend's Oregon address to remain in the
United States.
In 2012, he wrote a cover story for Time magazine about his life as an illegal U.S. resident:'Why haven't you gotten deported?'
That's usually the first thing people ask me when they learn I'm an undocumented immigrant or, put more rudely, an "illegal."
Vargas' documentary — "Documented" — aired on CNN last month. He was headed to Los Angeles to host a screening of the film.
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