House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will bring two guests to President Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday evening: the father of a victim of gun violence and a reporter who writes about living in the U.S. illegally.
“Tonight, President Trump will deliver his address to a chamber Democrats have filled with the victims of his assault on America,” said Pelosi in a statement.
“It is my honor to have two exceptional San Francisco constituents as my guests. Mattie Scott turned her grief at her son’s murder into a decades-long fight to confront the tragedy of gun violence that President Trump will not address. Jose Antonio Vargas personifies the courage and patriotism of the immigrants who now face a cruel deportation dragnet from an Administration blind to their vast contributions to our country.”
Scott lost her youngest son, George Scott, in a shooting in San Francisco in July 1996. Following her son’s death, Scott founded and still runs Healing 4 Our Families & Our Nation and is the president of Brady Campaign’s San Francisco chapter.
Vargas was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Washington Post that was awarded for their coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. Vargas became known for an essay he wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 2011 in which he came out about his life in the U.S. as an illegal alien. He then filmed a documentary about his experience called “Documented.”
