Jose Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who in 2011 revealed his status as an undocumented alien in a New York Times essay. He recently directed a documentary for CNN about his fellow undocumented, ‘Documented.’ Of course, there are some drawbacks to coming forward as an illegal alien, namely that you might get arrested if you try to go to Texas.
From the New York Times:
McALLEN, Tex. — Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented Filipino immigrant who is arguably the most high-profile leader of the immigrants’ rights movement, was detained Tuesday morning at a Border Patrol checkpoint in the airport here before he could board a flight to Houston.
He was handcuffed and taken for processing to the McAllen Border Patrol station, which has been teeming in recent weeks with undocumented immigrants from Central America, part of a wave of migrants who have been streaming over the border.
Mr. Vargas, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, came last week to McAllen, a city just a few miles north of the border with Mexico, for a news conference and vigil organized by United We Dream, an undocumented youth organization, outside a shelter downtown for recently released Central American migrants. Mr. Vargas wrote recently that he did not realize until he was here that he would have to cross through a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint to leave the Rio Grande Valley.
I don’t want to get into a whole thing about immigration, but if the goal is keeping out undesirables, you’d think you could show the authorities your Pulitzer Prize and they’d be like “You know? I think this one’s good.”
How does it go again? “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, but especially give us some college graduates because we’re all gettin’ pretty sick of these god damned ‘Transformers’ movies.”