This is an accepted version of this page Jose Antonio Vargas (born February 3, 1981) is a journalist, filmmaker, and immigration rights activist.

Born in the Philippines and raised in the United States from the age of twelve, he was part of The Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting online and in print.

[7] After 31 years of living in the US without legal status, Vargas announced in January 2025 that he had obtained a 3-year O-1 "extraordinary ability" visa after receiving a waiver of his 10-year bar and prior false claim of US citizenship.

[10] He did not learn of his immigration status until 1997 when, at age 16, he attempted to obtain a California driver's license with identity documents provided by his family that he then discovered were fraudulent.

[3] His high school English teacher introduced him to journalism,[11] and in 1998 he began an internship at the Mountain View Voice, a local newspaper.

[13] In 2004, immediately after graduation from San Francisco State, he was hired by the Style section of The Washington Post to cover the video game boom.

[10] In 2007, he was part of the Washington Post team covering the shootings at Virginia Tech, whose work earned a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

[2] When Vargas made a pitch for an assignment as a politics reporter for the Post, he told his editor, "You need someone to cover the presidential campaign who has a Facebook account and who looks at YouTube every day."

[16] Vargas authored or contributed to three Washington Post articles about the Virginia Tech shootings that were awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

Albarghouti returned to his apartment to find 279 new Facebook messages, Vargas recounted, and another student, Trey Perkins, faced a similar inundation.

Directed by Susan Koch and co-produced by Sheila Johnson, the documentary premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival[24] and aired on Showtime.

[25] In February 2015, Vargas launched a venture called #EmergingUS that will use video and commentary to explore race and the "evolving American identity.

The "disco-pop" stage musical, dramatizing the life of Filipino politician Imelda Marcos and set to preview in June 2023, is notable for being the first Broadway production to feature an all-Filipino cast.

I take full responsibility for my actions, and I'm sorry for the laws that I have broken.In 2011, Vargas wrote an essay for The New York Times Sunday Magazine in which he revealed that he is an undocumented immigrant.

[39] In June 2012, Vargas wrote a cover story for Time magazine about the uncertainty of his life "in limbo" during the year following his revelation that he was an undocumented immigrant.

The film chronicles his rise as an outspoken advocate for the undocumented, while portraying the personal pain his circumstances have caused him and his family, especially the separation from his mother whom he has not seen in more than 20 years.

He referred to the growing collaboration between Silicon Valley leaders and immigrant activists as a "marriage of unlikely allies" that bodes well for the passage of reform.

[48] Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who generally maintains a low public profile, spoke before the screening of Documented to introduce Vargas and to lobby House members to keep up reform momentum.

[50] The panel selected Push4Reform, a web application developed by a team of DREAMers to connect supporters to Congress, as the winning advocacy tool.

Vargas later wrote that he did not realize until he was there that he would have to cross through a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint in order to leave the Rio Grande Valley.

[57] In June 2018, Vargas received criticism for circulating an image of a little boy crying behind a fence on Twitter, using the caption "This is what happens when a government believes people are 'illegal.'

It was later discovered that the image was sourced from a private Facebook account and was taken out of context, as the photo was actually from a staged protest against U.S. President Trump's immigration policy in Dallas, Texas, on June 10, 2018.