Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

  Jake loved nature. Every time he asked me to go hiking, camping, fishing—or anything active that had to do with anything outdoors—I declined. One afternoon, after a fund-raising meeting at my apartment, he started asking more personal questions about my family life and dating life. As usual, I brushed it all aside. “You know, you’re gonna have to open up sometime,” Jake said. “You can only push people away so many times.”

  He added: “Don’t worry. You’ll never push me away.”

  Jake was hit by a car while participating in a bike ride to raise money for cancer research. The last time I saw Jake in person was at our dear friend Christina Bellantoni’s wedding. One night months later, she called me in a panic. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. “Jose, Jake is gone. Jose, Jake died.” I was so sure it was mistake that I texted Jake. “Hey you there?”

  That’s the thing: he was always there, even when I didn’t want him there, even when I kept pushing him away. On the night of the day he died, September 19, 2015, I stayed up all night waiting for him to show up, like an apparition. He was only thirty-four, just a few days older than me. I wanted to apologize for the all the times I was not present enough to see him, to thank him, to tell him I loved him. Since Jake’s passing, Ryan and Christina, in their own ways, have tried to get closer, to fill some kind of space that Jake left.

  Christina gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, Maxwell. Around his first birthday, I planned a visit to see him and spend time with Christina and her husband, Patrick. But I kept canceling and making up excuses. After a particularly terse and tense phone call, after yet another cancellation, Christina sent me an email:

  “These years have not been easy for you, Jose. I know that. You are strong for others, and project strength day in and day out. But I know what you’ve lost, what you’ve given up, and how hard it is to live with such uncertainty.

  What I can do is be there for you. Push you to let me—or someone—in, to help. Jake would want that, and you know he wouldn’t back down, either, even if you got mad at him.

  The only gift I ever want from you is to have you in my life. And you’re going to love this kid. He delivers pure joy and makes it look easy.

  Your friend always, CB.”

  I don’t know how many times I read that email. Each time I asked myself: When will I stop hiding and running away from people? What am I afraid of? Myself?

  4.

  Leaving

  A few days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the building manager in the apartment complex I was living in—a nice guy named Mel, who cheered me on whenever he saw me on MSNBC, Fox News, or CNN—told me that if immigration agents showed up, he wasn’t sure the building could hide me. He felt ashamed to say it, but tension had been building since the election. In a text message, Mel wrote: “It may be safer for you to move out.” A lawyer friend of mine—I’ve collected a handful of lawyer friends since disclosing my status as an undocumented immigrant in 2011—suggested I prepare for the worst-case scenario. When I relayed that my building manager had asked that I consider moving out for my own safety, another lawyer friend replied, “Well, the man has a point. It’s not a good idea for you to have a permanent address.”

  All around me, everyone issued warnings and raised red flags, especially after Trump signed executive orders on immigration, further confusing an already chaotic enforcement system and declaring every “illegal” a priority for deportation.

  One lawyer friend warned me against flying around the country, especially in the South and the Midwest. “God forbid you get detained in Ohio.” Another lawyer friend insisted that I stop flying even within California, since news was spreading that immigration agents were checking the immigration status of domestic passengers. “Can you just stay put in one place,” a lawyer friend asked, “and not fly around the country?”

  Then Mony Ruiz-Velasco, a close friend and, yes, another lawyer, told me she didn’t want me to stop flying, then made a bold suggestion: “What if you flew to Canada?” She texted me an article headlined, “Way More Migrants Are Now Sneaking Across the U.S.-Canada Border.”

  “Imagine the message you would send if you, of all people, decided to say, ‘If you don’t want me here, I’m moving to Canada!’ ”

  I entertained the idea for about two weeks.

  I love Canada, or at least the Canada of my imagination, which is wrapped in all things Anne of Green Gables. I entertained the idea enough to look for apartments in Toronto, and was surprised that rent in Canada’s biggest city seemed far more affordable than rents I’d paid in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I took it seriously enough that I told Ryan and Bích Ngọc Cao, the top two leaders at Define American, that they should prepare for a scenario in which I am not physically somewhere in the U.S. to help run Define American. (Whatever reservations Ryan and Bích Ngọc had, personal and professional, they never shared them. In a conference call discussing the possibility of my moving to Canada, Ryan suggested we think about reaching out to the office of Justin Trudeau.) I took it seriously enough that I told Ate Gladys. Gladys is that relative in your family that you trust with everything—every secret, every fear, every insecurity. She has witnessed how difficult and disorienting the past few years have been for me, the cost of the relentless pull from all kinds of people.

  And what exacerbates the whole situation is the constant worrying of my Filipino family. If Trump ordered my deportation, I would not be safe in the Philippines, led by President Rodrigo Duterte, whose hatred of journalists is just as notorious as Trump’s. Shortly after the election, Ate Gladys was browsing through tweets directed at me and found a troubling image. Someone actually took the time to Photoshop the famous photograph of a South Vietnamese police chief killing a Vietcong suspect into Trump pointing a gun to my face as a smiling Duterte looks on.

  Ate Gladys’s reaction to the idea of my moving to Canada unnerved me. Above all, she seemed relieved.

  “I want you to relax, to build a home,” she said. “I want you to stop running around.”

  My thirty-sixth birthday was approaching, another year of being stuck in America. Since many assume I’m Mexican, I figured I should at least see Mexico, which is less than three hundred miles away from my apartment in downtown Los Angeles. But of course I couldn’t go. I tried not using the word “stuck,” but a careful review of my thesaurus yielded no suitable alternative. The word was “stuck,” and I was stuck. Anne Shirley’s Canada seemed like a way out.

  Three days after my birthday, on the morning of Monday, February 6, 2017, an email landed in my inbox. In all caps, its subject line read: “LEADER NANCY PELOSI INVITATION - JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS.”

  Dear Jose,

  Good morning! Leader Nancy Pelosi invites you to be her guest at the Joint Session of Congress by the President on Tuesday, February 28th, 2017 at the United States Capitol.

  I first met Nancy Pelosi when she was Speaker of the House and I was a political reporter for the Washington Post. While I was a student at San Francisco State, I lived in Pelosi’s district. Her invitation did not come lightly. Pelosi knew what she was asking for and what my presence inside the Capitol would mean.

  I forwarded her invitation to a few lawyer friends, all of whom advised against accepting it. (“What would be the point? Aren’t you thinking about Canada?” many wondered.) Alida Garcia, another lawyer friend, who had worked for the Obama campaign, was so strongly against accepting that she fired off an email in the early hours of the morning:

  Jose,

  I’m not saying don’t do it, these are just things worth considering:

  Their goal is to scare people to self-deport, a part of that is deporting someone that sends chills down people’s spines to encourage them to leave. If you can’t find a way out of enforcement, others can’t.

  Nancy Pelosi is arguably the most GOP antagonizing figure in the entire United States Congress and you would be her guest. People aren’t trying to work
in collaboration with Nancy Pelosi should something bad happen.

  You’ll be on federal property, in a publicized defined place, and while DC is moving to a sanctuary I’m pretty sure jurisdictionally they could just get some kind of warrant and have someone come grab you at the Capitol.

  You may provoke them in a way that doesn’t result in harming you but harms others because they don’t want the community to feel proud.

  Raids are already happening all over the place.

  General Kelly [then the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security] believes in enforcing the law. I don’t think he wants to unnecessarily harm people or have big public blowouts of things, but if the law says you should be deported, he’s going to use that as an excuse to deport you is my instinct.

  You are poking the bear. I recognize you poke the collective bear for a living but this is a different bear.

  It took .25 seconds for the Breitbart website to pull up 725 articles under the search “Jose Antonio Vargas.” Breitbart runs immigration policy in the United States.

  You don’t have to be a hero. You don’t owe people shit. If this feels in your heart that this is what YOU have to do for YOU as well—then it’s worth considering. But just because an opportunity arises to be defiant doesn’t mean you’re the only one out of 11 million people who has to do it.

  5.

  Staying

  The first time I understood what Washington, D.C., represented—the physical and symbolic distance between the White House and the U.S. Capitol—was when I watched The American President. Michael Douglas, playing the fictional President Andrew Shepard, gave a galvanizing speech that I committed to memory: “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight.”

  Pelosi’s formal invitation, and Alida’s carefully considered note, put my predicament in sharp focus. It was clarifying. I came to the realization that I refuse to let a presidency scare me from my own country. I refuse to live a life of fear defined by a government that doesn’t even know why it fears what it fears. Because I am not a citizen by law or by birth, I’ve had to create and hold on to a different kind of citizenship. Not exactly what President Shepard described as “advanced citizenship”—I don’t know what that meant—but something more akin to what I call citizenship of participation. Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience.

  I accepted the invitation. And in the spirit of “radical transparency,” I wrote an essay for the Post, the same newspaper that had killed my coming-out essay six years before. This time, the essay was published a few minutes after I entered the Capitol and sat down in the gallery of the House’s hallowed chamber.

  I explained why I showed up:

  I decided to show up tonight because that’s what immigrants, undocumented and documented, do: We show up. Despite the obvious risks and palpable fear, we show up to work, to school, to church, to our communities, in big cities and rural towns. We show up and we participate. This joint session of Congress is a quintessential American moment at a critical juncture in our history. I am honored to attend and remind our elected leaders and everyone watching that immigration, at its core, is about families and love—the sacrifices of our families, and the love that we feel for a country we consider our home although it labels us “aliens.” We show up even though we’re unwanted, even when most Americans don’t understand….why we come here in the first place….We show up even though many Americans, especially white Americans with their own immigrant backgrounds, can’t seem to see the common threads between why we show up and why they showed up, at a time when showing up did not require visas and the Border Patrol didn’t exist yet.

  After attending the joint session—and after many conversations with lawyer friends—I moved out of my apartment in Los Angeles. I put most everything I own in storage and started giving away furniture to relatives and friends. For the first time since leaving Lolo and Lola’s house after my high school graduation, I don’t have my own apartment. I don’t have a permanent address. I’m staying at hotels, Airbnbs, and in spare bedrooms of close friends.

  I’ve decided to keep my travel schedule as is, fully aware of the possible consequences.

  I don’t know what it’s like to be deported.

  But I do know what it’s like to be arrested and detained.

  6.

  Detained

  Of all the ways I imagined the inevitable, I never envisioned sitting on the cold cement floor of a jail cell in south Texas surrounded by children.

  It was July 2014. The cell, as I remember it, was no bigger than twenty feet by thirty feet. All around me were about twenty-five boys, as young as five years old, the oldest no more than twelve. The air reeked of body odor. A boy across the room from me was crying inconsolably, his head buried on his chest. I tried to make eye contact to no avail. Most of the boys wore dazed expressions. It was clear they had no idea where they were or why they were there.

  The only source of wonder came from Mylar blankets, the flimsy metallic sheets that were supposed to keep us warm, the same blankets that were first used in outer space, which must be as desolate as this cell. By the look of it, the boys had never seen these blankets before and didn’t know what to do with them. Three boys played with a blanket like it was a toy, crunching it up into a ball, passing it back and forth.

  A window faced a central area where a dozen or so patrol agents were stationed, but there was no view of the outside world. All I could do was stare at the boys’ shoes. My shoes were shiny and brand-new, theirs dirty, muddy, and worn down. The only thing our shoes had in common was that none of them had laces.

  “Jose Antonio Vargas,” said an agent as he walked in.

  Startled, I sprung up, unsure why my name was being called.

  “I don’t need you. Not yet,” the agent said. “But we’re gonna move you.”

  Before he could hear me ask why, the agent shut the door as another detainee, a young woman with a wide-eyed baby on her hip, walked by, unaccompanied.

  The moment the agent said my name, one of the boys playing with a blanket started speaking to me. I had no idea what he was saying. The one word I could make out was “miedo.” Something about “miedo.”

  If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys not to be scared.

  If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys about Ellis Island. About how the very first person in line on the opening day of America’s first immigration station—an unaccompanied minor named Annie Moore who traveled on a steamship from Ireland—was someone just like them. Except she was white, before she knew she was white.

  If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys that none of this was their fault. I could have made sure they understood—even if most Americans do not—that people like us come to America because America was in our countries.

  I could have explained, in the clearest, most accessible way I could, the connection between the irreversible actions of the United States of America and the inevitable reactions in their countries of birth. How the push-and-pull factors of our migration are way more complicated than the need to take a picture at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. How the largest groups of people who migrate to the U.S.A.—voluntarily, forcibly, unknowingly, like them—do so because of what the U.S. government has done to their countries. How a trade agreement, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, drove millions of Mexicans out of jobs and led parents to cross borders and climb up walls so they could feed their kids. How six decades of interventionist policies by both Republicans and Democrats brought economic and political instability and sowed violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. If I spoke Spanish, I could have explained, in the clearest, most accessible way I could, the connection between the dirty, muddy, worn-out Reeboks and Nikes they were wearing inside that cell and the inherent American need to expand its econ
omic and political empire. I could have drawn a line between what used to be called “imperialism”—justified by “Manifest Destiny,” “the White Man’s Burden,” and America’s desire to “discover” new “frontiers”—to what is now known as “internationalism” and “globalization.”

  I first encountered Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” while reading Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, not knowing that the “silent, sullen peoples” whom Kipling describes as “half devil and half child” were Filipinos. I didn’t know that Kipling wrote the poem to urge Americans to do what the British, the Spanish, and all the European countries had already done: take the “burden” of empire. The subtitle of the poem, in fact, is “The United States and the Philippine Islands.”

  I don’t understand Spanish. The only Spanish thing about me is my name. Aside from asking “Dondé esta la biblioteca?” (“Where is the library?”), one of a few phrases I know is “No hablo español.” (“I don’t speak Spanish.”) I told the boy: “No hablo español.” Quickly, I added, “Soy filipino.” I am Filipino: a declaration that seemed to cause more confusion to the young boy holding the crunched-up blanket. I’m not sure he heard me when I said, almost in a whisper, like a prayer, “Pepeton ang pangalan ko.” My name is Pepeton.

  It’s my nickname, combining the nicknames of Jose (Pepe) and Antonio (Ton). But it’s more than a sobriquet, more than a term of endearment. It’s the name of my past: what Mama and everyone in the Philippines who knows me calls me. It’s the name I don’t tell people about, certainly not after I found out I was in America without proper documents. It’s the name I’ve avoided so I could construct a different kind of identity, not the “illegal immigrant” you see and hear about in the news, but a successful journalist who breaks news and writes about the news. It’s the name I’ve escaped from so I could escape whatever and whomever I needed to escape: my past and Mama, the U.S. government, myself. But there was no place to hide now, nothing to run away from, no role to play.