Thread: “Angel families” support Trump’s crackdown | A. Varfolomeev, P. Corcoran, R. Jones

Grieving “angel families” support Trump’s immigration crackdown

Parents and siblings who lost loved ones to illegal immigrants say media have ignored their voices

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From left: Anya Varfolomeev, Pierce Corcoran, and Rocky Jones died as a result of illegal immigrant crime. Photos courtesy of The American Border Story



Anatoly Varfolomeev learned at 3 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 14, 2021, that his daughter, Anya, and her boyfriend, Nicholay Osokin, had died in a car accident just hours before. Both were 19 years old.

Anya was a ballerina and had a job teaching young children ballet. She also sang in her church’s choir and had participated in scouting while growing up, her father said.

Anya had seemingly had a crush on Nicholay, or Kolya, since they were little, but the two only began dating shortly after her 19th birthday the previous June. It was at her birthday that Varfolomeev suspected that something clicked between them.

“They were sitting in our backyard, talking, laughing,” Varfolomeev remembered. “And then we noticed that she started calling Kolya. He would call her. And they would be on the phone together. Later, he would come to the Bay Area, and they would play chess together, have fun with other friends. So nothing was telling that something can happen to our children.”

On the night of the accident that November, Nicholay and Anya drove to Osokin’s parents’ home. As they were about to exit California’s Interstate 405 onto Seal Beach Boulevard, another vehicle struck theirs at roughly 100 miles per hour. The driver, Oscar Eduardo Ortega-Anguiano, was drunk, high, and driving without a driver’s license or auto insurance.

“Their car basically crossed several lanes after the impact and got on fire and our kids burned in the car,” Varfolomeev said. “To bury the kids, we were given the coffins that were sealed. We didn’t know what the state of the bodies were. We were not allowed to open them. And this is how we buried our children without even saying last goodbye to them.”

Only years later did the Varfolomeev family learn that Ortega-Anguiano was an illegal immigrant.

Since President Donald Trump retook office in January 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security claims it has removed more than 1 million illegal immigrants from the United States, with an additional 2.2 million choosing to self-deport. The agency says it is targeting the “worst of the worst,” immigrants who have committed crimes, including crimes against U.S. citizens and lawful residents. The administration has also taken steps to revoke commercial driver’s licenses from illegal immigrants.

The Varfolomeev family and others who have lost a child, spouse, sibling, or parent to a crime committed by an illegal immigrant have become known as “angel families.” DHS and angel family advocates estimate that thousands of such families across the country hold the label.

Angel families have long advocated for tougher policies toward illegal immigrants, and they’ve found a champion for their cause in President Trump. But the second Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration has garnered criticism from both sides of the aisle for its aggressive approach. With most Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the issue, I asked angel families their view: How would they rate the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown? Those I spoke to explained they supported the work of DHS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump but also asserted mainstream media outlets have mishandled immigration policy coverage.

“The Trump administration has delivered a historic transformation at our border, taking what had become an unprecedented national security and humanitarian crisis and restoring order, enforcement, and consequences,” said Nicole Kiprilov, executive director of the American Border Story, an organization that advocates for angel families. “At the same time, it has relentlessly pursued dangerous criminal illegal aliens, taking predators, gang members, drug traffickers, and repeat offenders off American streets and putting the safety of American families first.”

Kiprilov said her organization strongly supports the Trump administration and is grateful to Trump for including angel families in the conversation.

Agnes Gibboney, an angel mom and the founder of Angel Families of America, echoed that sentiment. An illegal immigrant shot and killed her son, Ronald Da Silva, in 2002. He was 29.

“I, as a mom, don’t have a son anymore. President Trump is the only one that acknowledged, that respected, [and that] gave us a voice. And he’s doing something about it,” Gibboney said. “If President Trump would run 10 times, I would vote for him 10 more times. I voted for him three times, and I would vote for him again if I could.”

Three years before Anya’s death, California police released onto the streets 36-year-old Gustavo Garcia, an illegal immigrant whom federal authorities had deported from the United States twice and who had a record of prior criminal activity. Shortly after local police arrested Garcia in December 2018, ICE requested that law enforcement detain him so that federal agents could arrest and deport him again. But a 2017 California law prevented state or local law enforcement personnel from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, according to Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux. That meant that Boudreaux’s office could not hand Garcia over to ICE.

Authorities instead released Garcia onto the streets. Two days later, he went on a 24-hour shooting spree. Local media reported that during what it called a “reign of terror,” Garcia killed a 38-year-old outside the man’s home and shot several others in multiple locations. Shortly before he died in an automobile crash, Garcia opened fire on Tulare County sheriff’s deputies, killing 51-year-old Rocky Jones.

“He was shot eight times. Point-blank range,” said Rocky’s brother Jody Jones, a retired police officer and Tulare County resident. “They say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But no, the illegal alien was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Jones said governments must prioritize protecting their own citizens over citizens from other countries. Asked whether he thought Trump was doing too much or too little on illegal immigration, Jones said, “I think he’s doing what he has to do with what he has.”

Jones suggested the White House didn’t need to change its immigration policies, and he blamed media coverage criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration policies for swaying Americans’ views. He pointed to mayors and governors who have compared ICE officers to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo and ICE detention facilities to concentration camps. Arresting criminals with warrants is nothing like that, he said, and such arrests wouldn’t escalate into mass protests if local authorities would cooperate.

“If these sanctuary cities and these states … would let our law enforcement, our federal agents go into our jails and arrest them there, it would take one officer—one officer in a controlled environment. They wouldn’t have to go out in the communities,” Jones said.

Less than two weeks after Rocky Jones’ death in California, Wendy Corcoran’s son Pierce was driving in the Knoxville, Tenn., area with his girlfriend to pick up a vacuum cleaner at Walmart.

“He’s 22 years old, just figuring out life, and was excited,” Corcoran remembered. “He’d met somebody I think he felt like was the one. And we would later find out after his death that he had put a ring on layaway for her. … He would have been 30 this month, August the 4th.”

On Dec. 29, 2018, at around 6:30 p.m., illegal immigrant Francisco Eduardo Franco-Cambrany allegedly crossed a double yellow line and hit Pierce’s car head-on. Franco-Cambrany had no driver’s license.

“We were told the car had stopped in front of this gentleman, and he chose to go into the oncoming traffic rather than go to a free lane that was right beside him to the right,” Corcoran said.

The collision killed Pierce instantly. His girlfriend suffered injuries but survived.

The illegal immigrant? “He stayed in his vehicle trying to start it to leave,” Corcoran said.

A public defender claimed a few weeks after Pierce’s death that his killer was a good citizen in his native country of Mexico, Corcoran told me. He’d reportedly served in the Mexican military and worked as a police officer.

“My husband’s a retired firefighter,” Corcoran said. “I don’t know somebody who’s military or a firefighter or anything like that that wouldn’t render aid, even if it’s your fault.”

Before Pierce’s death, Wendy Corcoran explained that she and her family mostly assumed that illegal immigrants were making a good-faith effort to lead peaceful and orderly lives in the United States. They’d met numerous legal immigrants who’d worked hard to come into the United States the right way.

“I guess we just wrongfully assumed that that was the path they were at least seeking, was coming here and assimilating,” Corcoran said. “But I guess the incident, and losing our son, really made us aware of that’s not, really.”

Corcoran explained that after Trump’s 2024 reelection, she felt like many Americans appreciated that having a wide-open border was a problem. But since then, she says, media coverage of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration seems to have swayed some people back the other direction.

“Showing ICE on TV like they have and on the news networks,” Corcoran said, “it has made people feel bad. And so they kind of question how it’s being done.”

Corcoran said that her and her family members’ faith in Christ has allowed them to know that they’ll see Pierce again. But navigating the issue of immigration policy as a Christian can complicate the conversation.

“It is hard because you get accused of being not compassionate toward other people,” Corcoran said. “That’s the people that don’t know us that would call us a name, or call us being racist. If you know us, you know that’s not true. … All we can do is just know that the people that love and care about us know that none of that is the case.”

Corcoran, along with Agnes Gibboney and Anatoly Varfolomeev, acknowledged that they wished they could see more deportations and crackdowns on illegal immigration. But they insisted that they appreciate all that DHS and ICE are doing.

Leading up to Ortega-Anguiano’s sentencing, nobody told Varfolomeev’s family about the immigration status of Anya and Nicholay’s killer, Varfolomeev explained. “I wrote. Requested it through phone calls, emails,” he said. “We were told they don’t know that information, ‘We cannot discuss that,’ not to kind of break his privacy rules.”

But in April 2025, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin presented a story about how the state of California was set to release Ortega-Anguiano from state prison even though he’d only served about 3½ years of a 10-year sentence for manslaughter. Melugin reported that Ortega-Anguiano was in the United States illegally at the time of Anya’s death.

After finding out that his child’s killer was set to be released, Varfolomeev said he reached out to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California attorney general, and Varfolomeev’s representative in Congress, Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-Calif., and received no response.

But Melugin’s story landed higher up. Former Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar called Varfolomeev. ICE agents picked up Ortega-Anguiano and transferred him to the custody of the U.S. Marshals. In January, a federal judge sentenced him to 46 months in prison for entering the country illegally.

“The sentencing and his plea to the judge … were disgusting. He was complaining that he wouldn’t have a chance to be at his daughter’s wedding,” Varfolomeev said. “What about my rights, about my daughter, who is 6 feet under the ground? Would I have a chance to be at her wedding?”

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Josh Schumacher Josh is a WORLD reporter and a graduate of the World Journalism Institute and Patrick Henry College. He resides with his wife in Washington, D.C.


SOURCE LINK
https://wng.org/roundups/grieving-an...own-1787781814