Jose Antonio Vargas, an admitted illegal immigrant from the Philippines who works as a journalist, has long argued that workers inside the country illegally contribute to the tax base, but Vargas was hit with a tax lien in January for almost $42,000 in unpaid taxes, Red Alert Politics reports.

According to the document filed Jan. 7, 2015, the lien for $41,945.44 was for nonpayment of taxes in 2010. The date of the assessment was Sept. 23, 2013."Vargas, the current host of MTV’s "White People," has bragged time and time again that he has been paying federal taxes since he was 18, 19, or 22, depending on the recounting of the story," Red Alert noted.The website quotes Vargas' various times since outing himself as being in the country illegally as talking about how illegal immigrants pay taxes while receiving none of the benefits of citizenship."Undocumented workers pay taxes. I’ve paid income taxes, state and federal, since I started working at 18," Vargas wrote in Time magazine in 2012. "The IRS doesn’t care if I’m here legally; it cares about its money."Vargas told Red Alert by email that he has paid off the debt."After outing myself in that article, I stopped using the doctored card my grandfather gave me — including filing my taxes with it," Vargas said. "As I noted in the Times essay — and as I’ve repeated in many interviews — I paid state and federal taxes using that card in the prior years, which I started using when I began working as a teenager."Vargas sent Red Alert a copy of a check, dated Feb. 11, 2015."To my knowledge, the lien payment I made this year fulfills my tax liability," he said.