Federal agents arrested a Russian national in Brooklyn on June 9 and are now pursuing his deportation, more than a year after he pleaded guilty to criminal vehicular homicide for a crash that left a Minnesota semi-truck driver dead at the scene.
Georgii Gabiev, who entered the United States illegally in 2022, ran a stop sign at the intersection of Highway 7 and County Road 4 in Minnesota on March 5, 2024, while watching a video on his iPad about how to learn English. His pickup truck struck a semitrailer driven by Tim Tarnowski. A state trooper who arrived shortly after 5 p.m. found the semitrailer on its side and engulfed in flames. Medics declared Tarnowski dead at the scene.
Gabiev was charged with criminal vehicular homicide and reckless driving, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported. He pleaded guilty to criminal vehicular homicide and served 120 days in jail.
Four months behind bars for taking a man's life. Then, apparently, he walked free, free enough that ICE had to track him down in Brooklyn, more than a thousand miles from the Minnesota intersection where Tarnowski died.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not mince words. In a statement released alongside the DHS press release announcing Gabiev's arrest, Mullin drew a straight line from the Biden administration's immigration posture to Tarnowski's death.
"This illegal alien had no business being in our country and on our roadways. If it weren't for the Biden administration's open border policies, this tragedy would never have happened, and Tim would still be alive."
The DHS press release confirmed Gabiev will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings. The timeline tells its own story: Gabiev entered the country illegally in 2022, was released under the prior administration, killed a man in 2024, served a fraction of a year in jail, and was not picked up by immigration authorities until June 2025.
That sequence raises hard questions about how many steps in the system failed, and who was paying attention between Gabiev's guilty plea and his eventual arrest in New York.
The facts of the crash deserve a close look. Gabiev was not merely distracted by a phone notification or a passing glance at a text. He was watching a video on his iPad while driving a pickup truck. He blew through a stop sign. The collision flipped Tarnowski's semitrailer and set it on fire.
Tarnowski, a working truck driver, never had a chance. He was declared dead where he lay.
For that, Gabiev received 120 days. The criminal justice system treated the death of a lawful American worker at the hands of an illegal immigrant who should never have been on the road, or in the country, as something roughly equivalent to a misdemeanor stint. The case fits a broader pattern of ICE tracking down foreign nationals involved in serious crimes long after the initial offense.
No information in the DHS press release or available reporting explains why Gabiev was not flagged for immigration enforcement sooner. His illegal status was apparently known. His guilty plea to a homicide charge was a matter of public record. Yet he ended up in Brooklyn, not in removal proceedings.
The Gabiev case landed at the same time as a separate but related fight over commercial driving and immigration enforcement. Sen. Adam Schiff, Sen. Alex Padilla, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and other California Democrats sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy demanding the restoration of $160 million in FY2027 National Highway Performance Program funds to their state.
That funding was withheld after California delayed canceling roughly 17,000 commercial driver's licenses, according to a press release from Schiff's office. The juxtaposition is difficult to ignore: one arm of the federal government is trying to deport an illegal immigrant who killed a trucker, while California lawmakers are lobbying to restore money that was pulled precisely because the state dragged its feet on revoking licenses that should not have been active.
Seventeen thousand commercial driver's licenses. Each one representing someone behind the wheel of a heavy vehicle on public roads. The federal government withheld the money for a reason, and the California delegation's response was not to fix the problem faster but to demand the consequences be lifted.
The administration's enforcement posture has extended well beyond individual arrests. The Justice Department has moved to strip citizenship from individuals accused of terrorism, war crimes, and fraud, signaling a broader willingness to use every legal tool available to remove people who obtained status through deception or who pose a threat to public safety.
Walk through the Gabiev timeline one more time. In 2022, a Russian national entered the United States illegally. The Biden administration released him. At some point he obtained access to a vehicle, and presumably was driving on American roads without the legal right to be in the country at all.
On March 5, 2024, he ran a stop sign while watching a video on a tablet. He killed Tim Tarnowski. He was charged, pleaded guilty, and served 120 days.
Then he was loose again. Not deported. Not detained by immigration authorities. He made it to Brooklyn before ICE caught up with him on June 9. The gap between his release from jail and his federal arrest is not specified in available records, but it was long enough for him to relocate across the country.
Cases like this are not isolated. The federal government has also been pursuing deportation of a former Iowa superintendent who faked citizenship, and courts have been wrestling with high-profile removal cases involving activists who challenge deportation orders through extended legal battles. The common thread is a system that too often lets enforcement lag years behind the offense.
The DHS press release names Gabiev. The California delegation's letter names highway funding formulas and license counts. The court records name charges and plea deals.
Tim Tarnowski's name appears mostly as a footnote, the man who died so that the system could eventually, belatedly, do what it should have done before he ever crossed paths with Georgii Gabiev.
He was a semi-truck driver. He was at an intersection in Minnesota on a March afternoon. He had every right to expect that the other vehicles on the road were operated by people who were legally present, legally licensed, and paying attention. None of those things were true of the man who killed him.
Gabiev now sits in ICE custody pending removal proceedings. The DHS press release does not say when those proceedings will conclude or when he will leave the country. It says only that he will remain in custody.
That is more accountability than Gabiev faced at any prior stage of this process. But it comes too late for the man whose truck burned at the intersection of Highway 7 and County Road 4.
A country that cannot keep an illegal immigrant off its roads before he kills someone, and cannot remove him after he does, is a country that has stopped taking its own laws seriously. Tim Tarnowski deserved better. So does every other American sharing the road with people the system chose not to track.
