A California father who lost his 19-year-old daughter in a drunk-driving crash caused by a twice-deported illegal immigrant took his fight to Capitol Hill, and says Democratic lawmakers still refuse to face the full story.
Anatoly Varfolomeev testified before Congress on September 15, recounting how his daughter Anya Varfolomeeva and her childhood friend Nicholay Osokin were killed in a 2021 crash on Interstate 405 in Seal Beach, in Orange County, California. The driver, Oscar Eduardo Ortega Anguiano, was under the influence and did not hold a valid California driver's license. He had already been deported twice, once in 2016 and again in 2021, and had previously served time in prison.
The day after his testimony, Varfolomeev appeared on Fox & Friends and directed his anger squarely at the lawmakers who, in his view, have refused to act.
During the hearing, Democratic members steered the conversation away from the specific failures Varfolomeev described. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state pushed for what she called "real solutions that fix an immigration system that has not been modernized to meet the needs of our country in over 30 years." Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, according to Fox News Digital, accused corporations and what she characterized as fearmongering politicians of benefiting from mass immigration enforcement.
Varfolomeev was not persuaded.
"I don't believe what they say because they say only part of the story that they were presenting one part, not the whole story," he told Fox & Friends. He added that lawmakers "should have agreed a long time ago on a united sort of action on how to proceed and to make Americans safer."
Jayapal's framing, that the immigration system simply needs modernizing, sidestepped the central fact of Varfolomeev's testimony: the man who killed his daughter had already been removed from the country twice and came back both times. No amount of system modernization addresses a policy environment where a twice-deported individual with a prison record can drive drunk on a California freeway without consequence until two teenagers are dead.
Varfolomeev drew a sharp distinction between his own family's path and the man who destroyed it. His family came to the United States legally, and Anya was born after they became citizens. She was, in her father's words, "a regular American girl that was killed."
He pushed back against what he saw as a deliberate conflation by some lawmakers of legal immigrants and illegal immigrants, a rhetorical move that, in practice, shields people like Anguiano from accountability by lumping them in with families like the Varfolomeevs.
"And it's absolutely their responsibility... California politicians and [the] Biden administration."
Varfolomeev laid blame on both state and federal officials. He told Fox News that when he reached out to California state officials seeking answers about the crash and the driver's history, he received nothing. "There was nothing, no response," he said. Fox & Friends contacted Gov. Gavin Newsom's office for comment and received no reply either.
It took three years, Varfolomeev said, before his family learned the full background of the man responsible for Anya's death.
The legal aftermath underscored the pattern Varfolomeev described. Anguiano received a 10-year state prison sentence for the crash that killed two 19-year-olds. He served just three and a half years before his release in July. Upon leaving state custody, he was immediately taken into federal custody on charges of illegal re-entry into the United States.
U.S. District Judge John Holcomb sentenced Anguiano to 46 months, three years and 10 months, in federal prison, plus three years of supervised probation, the New York Post reported. Deportation is expected to follow.
In court, Anguiano addressed the victims' families directly. "I pray for your forgiveness every day," he said. Varfolomeev's father responded with a statement that cut to the core of the family's grievance:
"We came to the United States 35 years ago legally. We are legal immigrants. He is not."
So the full accounting looks like this: a man deported in 2016 returned to the country. He was deported again in 2021 and returned again. He got behind the wheel drunk, without a license, and killed two young people on a California interstate. The state gave him 10 years and released him in fewer than four. The federal government then added another four years for the crime of being in the country illegally in the first place, the same crime that, had it been enforced earlier, would have kept Anya Varfolomeeva alive.
What stands out beyond the sentencing math is the silence. Varfolomeev said no California state official contacted his family after the crash. No one from the governor's office responded to Fox News's request for comment. For a state that frequently trumpets its compassion and its commitment to immigrant communities, the absence of even a form letter to a grieving legal-immigrant family is difficult to square.
Varfolomeev called the situation "outrageous." Given the facts, a twice-deported felon driving drunk, a 19-year-old killed, a state government that went silent, and a sentence cut by more than half, the word seems measured.
Democratic lawmakers at the hearing chose to talk about modernizing the immigration system and warning about fearmongering. Anatoly Varfolomeev buried his daughter. The gap between those two positions is the entire argument.
When the people who create the laws cannot look a father in the eye and answer for the consequences, the system is not broken, it is working exactly the way its defenders built it.
