'Illegal are your laws': Jose-Antonio Vargas misses in bid for sympathy for illegals

Brett T. | 7:14 PM on July 11, 2014

The last time Twitchy covered “Pulitzer Prize-winning, document-faking, law-breaking, deportation-evading journalist-turned-activist” Jose-Antonio Vargas, CNN was broadcasting his documentary “Undocumented” and holding an informal (and obviously non-binding) Twitter poll: JOSESTAY or JOSEGO.

Jose has stayed, and he’s currently writing from the Rio Grande Valley for Politico Magazine. “I flew into the valley Thursday morning to visit a shelter for unaccompanied Central American refugees and participate in a vigil in their honor,” he writes. Something he didn’t think through, though, quickly came up:

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.

Despite his travels, Vargas admits that he doesn’t have a single U.S. government-issued ID. Whatever sympathy he had built up over the course of the article, however, was lost upon a number of readers with his closing paragraphs:

As Tania and I sat together in a circle holding unlit candles, a crowd of about 30 people—mostly undocumented youth, a few citizen allies—started chanting something in Spanish, a language I don’t speak. Her head on my shoulder, with tears in our eyes, she translated the chant for me:

“No me digas illegal”/Don’t call me illegal
“Porque eso no lo soy”/Because I am not
“llegal son sus leyes”/Illegal are your laws
“Y por eso no me voy”/And that’s why I’m not leaving