Minnesota Governor Tim Walz sat on a three-person clemency panel that granted a pardon to a 42-year-old Laotian national convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct against a ten-year-old girl, a decision that effectively wiped his record clean and halted his scheduled deportation, the Daily Mail reported.
The man, Tou Lue Vang, pleaded guilty in 2006 to repeatedly sexually assaulting the child over a period of four years beginning in 2002. He admitted the abuse to police when he was arrested in 2005. His plea deal spared him prison time but triggered deportation proceedings. A final order of removal was issued in October 2006.
Nearly two decades later, Vang applied for a pardon in July 2025. The Minnesota Clemency Review Commission voted on June 10, 2026, to grant it, exactly one week before Vang was scheduled to be deported to Laos, the Washington Examiner reported. The vote was unanimous. The panel that approved it: Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minnesota Chief Supreme Court Justice Natalie Hudson.
The Department of Homeland Security responded with open fury. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis both issued public statements condemning the decision. The pardon, DHS said, removes Vang's conviction entirely and wipes his slate clean, stripping the federal government of the qualifying convictions that made him deportable.
Vang entered the United States in 1994 through California. Breitbart reported that he was admitted as a refugee from a Thai refugee camp and eventually became a permanent resident, settling in Minnesota. The Clinton administration granted him legal status.
That status was revoked after his 2006 conviction. The underlying facts are not in dispute. Vang admitted to police that he had repeatedly sexually assaulted the child. DHS stated that he attempted to pay the victim $10 to stay quiet during the abuse.
When arrested, Vang offered a justification that speaks for itself: he claimed it was a "cultural thing" to "marry and have sex with girls as young as 12."
The plea deal he received in 2006 is itself difficult to explain to ordinary citizens. The Washington Examiner reported that Vang was sentenced to 12 years with the sentence stayed, plus 30 years of supervised probation. He avoided prison. The trade-off was supposed to be deportation.
That deportation never happened, until the Trump administration's "Operation Metro Surge" immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota led to Vang's arrest. He was finally facing removal when the pardon intervened.
Walz pointed to a letter submitted by Vang's victim in support of the pardon. He said the letter carried "significant weight" in his decision, a quote attributed to Walz by the New York Times.
Vang himself submitted a letter to the clemency board expressing regret over his crimes and asking to remain in the country with his wife and six children.
The Clemency Review Commission's executive director, Carli Stark, sent Vang a letter after the decision. The New York Post reported its contents: "Being granted a pardon is a notable achievement and a reflection of the work you have done since your conviction."
A "notable achievement." For a man who admitted to sexually assaulting a child for four years.
Attorney General Ellison offered a different defense. He cited President Donald Trump's use of executive pardon power as justification for the panel's decision, a comparison that collapses under the slightest scrutiny. Presidential pardons are a constitutional prerogative exercised by a single elected official accountable to the entire nation. What Ellison's panel did was use a state clemency mechanism to override a federal deportation order for a convicted sex offender. The two are not equivalent in scope, authority, or consequence.
DHS Secretary Mullin posted a statement to X that left no room for diplomatic interpretation. He wrote:
"This evil alien from Laos repeatedly sexually assaulted a ten-year-old child. These are the illegal alien criminals sanctuary politicians like Tim Walz are protecting over American citizens."
DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis was equally direct. She stated that Vang "lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a ten-year-old girl." She called Walz's decision "disgusting."
Bis also laid out the practical consequence in stark terms: the pardon strips the federal government of the qualifying convictions that made Vang removable from the United States. In other words, the clemency panel did not merely express sympathy for Vang. It dismantled the legal basis for his deportation.
The Daily Mail stated it contacted Walz's office for comment. No response was reported.
Fox News reported that Minnesota's Clemency Review Commission also previously pardoned another Laotian citizen, Jai Vang, whose criminal history included armed robbery and DUI convictions. The pattern raises a straightforward question: is Minnesota's clemency apparatus being used systematically to shield criminal illegal immigrants from federal immigration enforcement?
The timeline makes the intent difficult to deny. Vang was arrested during a Trump administration immigration sweep. He was one week from deportation. The pardon arrived just in time to erase the conviction that made removal possible.
This is not a case where a governor showed mercy to someone who committed a minor offense decades ago and rebuilt his life. This is a case where a man admitted to years of sexual abuse against a child, offered a cultural excuse for it, tried to buy the victim's silence for $10, avoided prison through a plea deal, evaded deportation for nearly 20 years, and then received a full pardon from a panel chaired by the Democratic Party's 2024 vice presidential nominee.
Clemency exists for a reason. The pardon power is one of the oldest features of executive authority, and reasonable people can disagree about when it should be exercised. But the purpose of clemency is to correct injustice, not to obstruct lawful federal enforcement against a convicted sex offender.
Walz's defenders will point to the victim's letter. That letter may well be genuine. Victims process trauma in complicated ways, and no one should second-guess a survivor's private choices. But a victim's personal feelings about her abuser do not change the public interest in removing a convicted sex offender who is in the country illegally. The clemency panel's job is to weigh the public interest, not to outsource that judgment to the person least equipped to make it dispassionately.
The New York Post reported that Vang was born in 1983, making him roughly 19 when the abuse began in 2002 and the victim roughly ten. He was not a child himself. He was an adult who preyed on a child and then told police it was his culture.
Ellison's attempt to compare this pardon to Trump's use of executive clemency is a deflection dressed up as a principle. Trump's pardons, whatever one thinks of them, do not override federal immigration law to keep convicted sex offenders in the country. Ellison's did.
Several questions remain unresolved. What specific legal authority does a Minnesota state pardon have over a federal immigration removal order? DHS clearly believes the pardon eliminates the qualifying convictions, but the interplay between state clemency and federal deportation proceedings is a legal question that may end up in court.
What was in the victim's letter? Walz cited it as the decisive factor, but its contents have not been made public. If the letter is going to serve as the justification for pardoning a convicted child sex offender, the public has a right to understand what it said.
And why did this pardon arrive exactly one week before Vang's scheduled deportation? The timing alone suggests this was not a routine act of mercy but a calculated intervention to block federal enforcement.
Walz's office has not answered these questions. The silence is its own kind of statement.
When a governor uses the pardon power to shield a man who sexually assaulted a child for four years from the deportation he was supposed to face two decades ago, the word for that is not compassion. It is obstruction, and the people who pay for it are the citizens whose safety was supposed to come first.
