Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stood at an assisted living facility on Tuesday and publicly defended his decision to pardon a Laotian national convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl, then turned his criticism toward the Trump administration for deporting the man.
Tou Lue Vang, 42, was removed to Laos last week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked his legal status, overriding the state pardon that Walz and the Minnesota Board of Pardons had unanimously granted on June 10. The deportation drew praise from federal officials and condemnation from Walz, who questioned whether removing a convicted child sex offender made anyone "safer."
That question, posed by a sitting governor about a man who admitted to years of sexual abuse against a child, captures the state of accountability in Tim Walz's Minnesota.
Vang entered the United States illegally in 1994 and was granted legal status under the Clinton administration. Between 2002 and 2004, beginning when he was 18, he repeatedly sexually assaulted a girl who was 10 years old at the time. He offered his victim $10 in exchange for her silence.
When arrested, Vang did not express remorse. The New York Post reported that Vang dismissed the assault as "a minor thing" and attempted to blame cultural norms. The Department of Homeland Security attributed to Vang the claim that his actions were "a cultural thing" and that his victim was equally guilty and should also have been arrested.
Vang was convicted in 2006 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. The Washington Examiner reported that he was sentenced to 12 years with the sentence stayed, plus 30 years of supervised probation. His legal status was revoked, and he was issued a final order of removal the same year.
He was never deported. For nearly two decades, Vang remained in the United States despite that removal order, until this year.
As the Trump administration ramped up immigration enforcement, Vang faced the real prospect of removal for the first time. He appealed to Walz for clemency. In his letter to the Minnesota Board of Pardons, Vang wrote:
"What I did was wrong. It was a serious crime. She was a child. If I am sent away, we lose everything. My children will lose their home, and they will lose their education. They will grow up without a father."
Walz's office pointed to a letter from Vang's victim, who stated she had forgiven him and supported the clemency measure. On June 10, the Board of Pardons, consisting of Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, voted unanimously to pardon the convicted child sex offender.
The pardon erased the conviction that made Vang deportable under federal immigration law. The Washington Examiner reported that the pardon came exactly one week before Vang's scheduled deportation to Laos.
The timing alone raises hard questions about the board's intent. This was not a routine clemency review conducted years after a sentence was served. It was an emergency intervention designed to strip federal authorities of the legal basis for removing a convicted child sex offender from the country.
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis did not hold back. As Fox News reported, Bis said:
"Governor Tim Walz's decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting. These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting."
Bis added that the pardon would "take away this child rapist's qualifying convictions that made him removable from the United States."
The federal government did not accept the pardon as the final word. Secretary of State Rubio revoked Vang's legal status, and ICE carried out the deportation to Laos. Rubio announced the action with a statement that drew a clear line:
"Because of our action, this foreign criminal will never pose a threat to any American ever again. Americans must never be forced by their elected leaders to live alongside foreign sex criminals who have no right to begin with to reside in our country."
Laos has no formal repatriation agreement with the United States, but the Asian Law Caucus reported that the country has begun informally accepting deportees amid U.S. diplomatic and economic pressure. More than 100 Laotians, including Vang, have been deported.
A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Mail that under the current administration, "ICE is targeting the worst of the worst. Nearly 70 percent of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the US."
Rather than accept the outcome or stay quiet, Walz chose to defend his decision publicly. Speaking Tuesday at the Minnesota assisted living facility, he challenged the deportation directly.
"They made that choice. I guess the question I would ask is, did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable?"
He went further, framing the deportation as an issue of fairness: "In many cases, their children are citizens, and by just picking them up and taking them out with no due process, it just seems unfair."
Walz also made a factual claim that does not hold up. He told reporters, "Just remember, both were minors." But Vang was 18 when he began assaulting his victim. The girl was 10. One was a legal adult. The other was a child in elementary school. Those are not equivalent categories, and a governor who signed the pardon should know the basic facts of the case.
Walz also asked, "If you think this person should have been gone, why didn't you take them for the last 30 years?" It is a fair question about prior administrations' enforcement failures, but it does not explain why Walz used his own authority to shield Vang from the administration that finally acted.
Documents released about the clemency board's reasoning have only deepened public scrutiny of the decision. The board's process, the timing, and the governor's subsequent defense all point in the same direction: Minnesota's top officials intervened to protect a convicted child sex offender from lawful removal.
Even within Walz's own party, the pardon proved indefensible for some. Minnesota House Republican Speaker Lisa Demuth, who is running for governor, posted on social media: "Deport child predators. Do not pardon child predators. Not sure why that's a hard concept for Tim Walz and Amy Klobuchar to understand."
Democratic U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, also a Minnesota gubernatorial candidate, responded publicly to distance herself from the decision: "As a former prosecutor I have not supported pardons for sex offenders and would not have voted for this pardon."
Klobuchar's statement is notable. She did not defend Walz. She did not defend the board's reasoning. She drew a line and stepped to the other side of it. When a Democratic senator and former prosecutor publicly refuses to stand behind a Democratic governor's most high-profile clemency decision, the political verdict is already in.
This is not the first time the Minnesota Board of Pardons has used its authority to shield illegal immigrants from deportation. Breitbart reported that the board also previously pardoned Jai Vang, another Laotian citizen with convictions for robbery, armed robbery, and DUI, in May. Fox News confirmed that this earlier pardon was part of a broader pattern of Minnesota officials protecting illegal immigrants with violent criminal histories from federal deportation efforts.
The Vang pardon did not occur in a vacuum. Walz's administration has faced mounting scrutiny on multiple fronts, including a federal referral of welfare fraud evidence to the Department of Justice that named both Walz and Ellison, the same attorney general who voted alongside Walz to pardon Vang.
Newsmax reported that DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Bis said Walz "pardoned this sex criminal in an attempt to allow him to remain in our country." That framing, that the pardon was not about justice but about obstruction of federal enforcement, is difficult to dismiss given the timeline. The board acted one week before a scheduled deportation, on a case that had been dormant for nearly two decades.
Walz has not explained why Vang's case suddenly merited emergency clemency after 20 years. He has not addressed the timing. He has not reconciled his sympathy for Vang's children with the fact that Vang's victim was herself a child, a 10-year-old girl assaulted by an adult man who tried to buy her silence for ten dollars.
What Walz has done is stand at a podium and ask whether deporting a convicted child sex offender made anyone safer. The answer, for the people of Minnesota and for every community where convicted predators walk free because elected officials chose ideology over public safety, should be obvious.
When a governor uses his pardon power to shield a child sex offender from deportation, then criticizes the federal government for carrying it out anyway, he has told voters exactly where his priorities lie. They should believe him.
