JOSE ANTONIO Vargas, a former Daily News intern and Washington Post Pulitzer Prize winner, was on a New York subway last summer when a Hispanic woman yelled out to him: "El Chino!"
"She told me she also doesn't have papers," said Vargas, who outed himself as an undocumented immigrant in a 4,600-word article in June in the New York Times Magazine.
And at a Starbucks near his Greenwich Village apartment, a young white girl also recognized him, saying: "You're the Asian guy on Colbert!"
(Vargas, by the way, isn't Chinese; he's Filipino.)
Since his Times piece, Vargas has been interviewed on ABC's "Nightline," CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, by Stephen Colbert and in numerous print and Web outlets.
He realizes that, at any moment, he can be arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and deported back to the Philippines.
"I am prepared for that," he said as we sat last month on red-leather seats inside his one-bedroom New York apartment tucked inside a tan-brick building above a shoe store.
"Yeah, I'm fearful just like any undocumented person is fearful," he said. "I've always been looking over my shoulder. I've always had this nagging feeling that someone could pick me up."
No one from ICE has contacted him, though.
Luis Martinez, ICE spokesman in the New York field office, did not recognize Vargas' name or his story when asked by the Daily News. He said he could not discuss an individual case because of the agency's privacy policy.
Ross Feinstein, an ICE spokesman in Washington, said the agency focuses its enforcement efforts on people who present the most significant threats to public safety, including "those convicted of crimes" and "egregious immigration-law violators."
Vargas, who does not fall into those categories, said: "In some ways, I think what I've basically done is kind of just dared the entire system. I don't think you could have been more public; it's as public as one could get."
Vargas was in Florida this week, ahead of the state's critical primary. On Monday night, he spoke to an audience of more than 120 at the University of Florida's Bob Graham Center for Public Service in Gainesville about his immigration story and about the country's record deportation levels under President Obama.
He also touched on the Republican presidential candidates' race, commenting on a statement made by Mitt Romney, who suggested that illegal immigrants who couldn't find work under his plan would "self-deport."
