Filtered By: Pinoyabroad
Pinoy Abroad

Driver's license of Pinoy Pulitzer winner Vargas revoked


The driver's license of Jose Antonio Vargas, the Filipino Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who publicly said he was an illegal immigrant in the United States, has been cancelled by the state of Washington. According to a report of Manuel Valdes on HuffPost Media on July 21, American authorities began an investigation after Vargas' essay about his background was published in the New York Times Magazine in June. The HuffPost report said the cancellation of Vargas' driver's license was first reported in the Seattle Times. The HuffPost report quoted Department of Licensing spokeswoman Christine Anthony as saying, "We conducted an investigation and concluded that he wasn't residing at the address he provided us." The report said the Washington Licensing Department earlier sent Vargas a letter asking for proof of residency, and the letter was returned to the sender. The state then canceled his license on July 18. In his essay on the New York Times, Vargas said he obtained a driver's license in Washington earlier this year after his Oregon license expired. "Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th birthday, I won a small reprieve: I obtained a driver's license in the state of Washington," he wrote. "The license is valid until 2016. This offered me five more years of acceptable identification – but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I respect and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am," he added. In the HuffPost report, Anthony said Vargas did not surrender his driver's license. Anthony said if Vargas gets pulled over while driving, a background check will show that the license is not valid, the report said. Vargas' tell-all article In his tell-all article in the New York Times in June, Vargas wrote about being an undocumented immigrant in the US and expressed hope that his hard work and love for his newfound country would be enough to grant him citizenship. Vargas was a 12-year-old boy in 1993 when his parents sent him to the US. At that time, he did not know that he would become one of the 10 million illegal immigrants in the US. At least 280,000 of the illegal immigrants are Filipinos, according to recent data from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics. To live a somewhat normal life in the US, Vargas had to fabricate lies and produce counterfeit documents with the help of his grandfather, who emigrated legally from Zambales in the Philippines in the 1980s. Using a fake passport, Vargas obtained a Social Security number, among others. In 2008, at age 27, he won the Pulitzer Prize in the breaking news category. He shared the award with his fellow Washington Post reporters for a package of nine stories, two of which he wrote. - GMA News

LOADING CONTENT