An Interview With Jose Antonio Vargas, Undocumented Immigrant Who May Soon Be Documented

Jose Antonio Vargas was born in the Philippines in 1981, on Feb. 3, as it says on his forged green card. In 1993, his mother sent him to the Bay Area to live with his grandparents. He didn’t realize there was anything illegal about that until he went to get his driver’s license (a ruder awakening at the DMV than most, we must concede). In the years since, Vargas became a distinguished journalist, profiling Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker and working on the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for his work as part of the Washington Post team that covered the 2007 school shooting at Virginia Tech. Vargas reported on technology and video games, HIV/AIDS in the capital, and the 2008 presidential campaign. In 2011, the reporter became his story; The New York Times Magazine published, on its cover, Vargas’s essay “My Life As An Undocumented Immigrant.” The phrase trended on Twitter across the globe. Even Bill O'Reilly has conceded that Vargas should be allowed to stay in the United States.

But on July 15, he was arrested and briefly detained, on the Texas border. Writing on the experience this fall for Politico, he said, “A month later—in lieu of Congress passing fair and meaningful immigration reform, and in the now-dashed hope that President Obama would be taking executive action soon—I turned myself into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), joining 10 other undocumented immigrants in launching a campaign called #1of11Million.” As Obama prepared to take executive action on immigration tonight, I spoke with Jose Antonio Vargas. This interview has been edited and condensed.