Correction appended.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker and immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented immigrant, will speak at AU on Oct. 6.
Vargas will speak about his life in the U.S. and his work as an immigration activist as the second Kennedy Political Union speaker of the year, according to a KPU press release.
“With immigration as one of the issues at the forefront of the midterm elections, KPU is glad to host Jose Antonio Vargas in order to maintain this discourse,” Director of KPU Tyler Bowders said in the press release.
Born in the Philippines, when Vargas was 12 his mother sent him to the U.S. to live with her parents. Unbeknownst to him, he was an illegal immigrant. Vargas discovered his green card was fake when he tried to get a driver’s permit at age 16.
In 2011, Vargas made public his status as an undocumented citizen in a New York Times Magazine article. The same year he founded a nonprofit project called Define American, “a media and culture campaign using the power of story to transcend politics and shift conversation around immigration, identity, and citizenship in America,” according to its website.
Previously, he has worked at the Washington Post, where he shared a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Virginia Tech shooting, and the Huffington Post, along with earlier jobs at the San Francisco Chronicle and Philadelphia Daily News.
Today, his work centers around immigration activism with Define American. In collaboration with CNN, Vargas wrote, produced and directed the documentary film “Documented,” which released in 2013. The film documents his life story and relationship with his mother.
During the peak of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis over the summer, Vargas made headlines after officers detained him at an airport Border Patrol checkpoint in McAllen, Texas as he tried to board a flight to Houston. Due to the proximity of McAllen to the border, Border Patrol officers check travelers’ immigration status, and Vargas only has a Philippine passport, the New York Times reported. Homeland Security released him within the day.
The only IDs I have for security: Philippine passport and my pocketbook US Constitution DefineAmerican</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/MAC_UTPA">MAC_UTPA pic.twitter.com/IFH0Vb4oX7
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) July 15, 2014
A previous version of this article described the title of Vargas’ film as “Undocumented.” The film’s title is “Documented.”
