Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist, Immigration Advocate and Illegal Immigrant, Detained Near Border
While trying to depart via McAllen airport in Texas.
Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize with The Washington Post in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting and in 2011 revealed in a New York Times Magazine article that he was an illegal immigrant, was arrested at the airport in McAllen, Texas after visiting the border.
Vargas, who has become an immigration activist and visited the border before, in California. According to USA Today, Vargas was warned about a checkpoint near the border from a friend. In a tweet this morning Vargas said he was about to go through security at McAllen airport and didn't know what was going to happen. In a subsequent tweet he said his only form of ID is a (presumably expired) Phillipines passport and a pocket book Constitution.
Vargas founded the immigration advocacy group Define American in 2011 and insists illegal immigrants be called "undocumented Americans." Two years of feckless negotiating and horsetrading between the White House and Congress led to no new immigration legislation, just as the process at the end of the Bush administration did not lead to new legislation.