Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and a panel of eight additional speakers addressed immigration issues with Hope for Peace & Justice on Saturday afternoon at Cathedral of Hope.
“Nothing can be changed until it’s fixed,” Vargas told the audience he learned from James Baldwin. He said that coincidentally, it was Baldwin’s 90th birthday.
Vargas said much of the leadership of the immigration movement was LGBT and that the immigration movement has co-opted the term coming out as a way to describe disclosing one’s immigration status to others.
Rainbow LULAC President Juan Contreras told the group it’s estimated there are 11.7 million undocumented people in the U.S. right now. Of those, about 267,000 are LGBT adults. As many as 15,000 to 50,000 are transgender.
Vargas said before coming out for the second time, as undocumented, he considered returning to his native Philippines.
“But that would have been the cowardly thing to do,” he said.
He talked about his recent experience in McAllen where he was filming in an immigration detention center and was arrested before leaving the city. He ended up sharing space with some of the people he had been there to document.
“How many of you have been to the Rio Grande Valley,” he asked. “If you’re undocumented, don’t go.”
Brent Wilkes, national executive director of LULAC, came from D.C. to participate in the panel discussion. He said despite a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives the day before to limit the president’s power to authorize deferred action, as the president did in his executive order known as DACA, and reform legislation getting nowhere in the House since the 2012 election, he’s still hopeful some form of immigration reform will pass before the end of the session.
