The Minnesota Board of Pardons granted a full pardon to a 42-year-old Laotian national convicted of repeatedly raping a child, and newly reviewed commission documents show that four of the six clemency commissioners who recommended the pardon cited his immigration status as a key reason to wipe his record clean.
Tue Lue Vang, who sexually assaulted a girl in St. Paul beginning when she was ten years old, received the pardon on June 10 from a three-member board that includes Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson. The pardon erased the criminal sexual conduct conviction that had made Vang deportable under federal immigration law.
It didn't work. Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated Vang's legal status, and Vang was removed to Laos, but not before the case laid bare how Minnesota's clemency apparatus functioned as a shield against federal immigration enforcement for a man convicted of one of the most serious offenses in the criminal code.
Fox News Digital reviewed internal documents from the Minnesota Clemency Review Commission, which voted 4-2 to recommend the pardon before it reached the Board of Pardons. The four commissioners who voted yes each referenced Vang's immigration situation in their written recommendations.
Commissioner Artika Roller wrote simply that "the applicant stated the need for clemency related to immigration issues." Commissioner Nadine Graves listed the reasons for her vote:
"The victim supports this pardon. His [Vang's] wife stayed and has forgiven. He also [has] immigration concerns. He has remorse and was discharged from probation."
Commissioner Zach Linstrom called it a "very tough case" but concluded that "the kids not having a father is not in the best interest of society." Commissioner Perry Moriearty acknowledged "the extraordinary severity of the underlying offense" but wrote that "there is substantial evidence of rehabilitation, remorse and acceptance of responsibility." Moriearty also noted that Vang "is facing deportation."
Two commissioners voted against the pardon, citing the serious nature of Vang's offenses. Their written statements, if any, were not detailed in the reviewed documents.
The underlying facts of the case are difficult to read. Between 2002 and 2004, Vang, then between 18 and 20 years old, had sexual intercourse with the victim four to six times in St. Paul. The abuse began when she was in fourth grade. She was ten.
The criminal complaint states that the victim "did not understand what Vang was doing, so she let him." Her friends testified she was "angry and sad" about the abuse. Vang offered her $10 to keep quiet.
When police arrested him, Vang told them: "I made a mistake, but this is a minor thing. It is a cultural thing in Thailand to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12." He also said the victim "should be arrested also because she was as much at fault." As the New York Post reported, Rubio later cited those statements directly, noting that Vang "even tried to pay his victim for her silence, and called those heinous crimes minor things."
A court sentenced Vang to 12 years in prison, but the sentence was stayed in favor of 30 years of supervised probation with one year of local confinement. He served eight months at a county correctional workhouse. He was discharged from probation early in 2019.
Ramsey County Assistant Attorney Tami McConkey filed a formal opposition to the pardon. She explained that her office had originally offered a dispositional departure to Vang because the then-12-year-old victim experienced pressure from her family not to cooperate with law enforcement after his arrest, a detail that makes the victim's later stated "support" for the pardon worth examining carefully.
McConkey also noted aggravating factors: the abuse stretched over an extended period, Vang drove the victim to his home to assault her, and he did not use sexual protection. Her sharpest observation cut to the heart of Vang's pardon application:
"While Mr. Vang expresses shame and regret about what his children experience when then [sic] learn of the offense, he does not share any thoughts or insight about what the victim must have gone through."
Ramsey County District Court Judge Sara Grewing did not take a position on the pardon.
In his written pardon application, Vang struck a different tone from the one he used at arrest. He wrote that he carried "deep shame and regret for the harm I caused." He said his fear was that "if deported, my children will grow up without a father, like I did." He described the prospect of removal as being "sent to a place entirely unfamiliar to me, with no family, no home, and no future."
Commissioner Graves noted in her recommendation that Vang "retracted his prior statement about this being a result of culture" and "admits this was wrong then and will always be wrong." The retraction came years after the arrest, and after the conviction, the probation, the early discharge, the ICE detention, and the looming deportation order.
The gap between what Vang said to police and what he wrote in his pardon application is worth sitting with. At arrest, the crime was "a minor thing" and the child shared blame. In the application, it was a source of deep shame. McConkey's opposition suggests the remorse was selective, focused on the consequences for Vang's own family, not on the child he assaulted.
Vang entered the United States through California in 1994 and received legal status under the Clinton administration. A federal immigration judge ordered him removed in 2006 after his conviction, as Breitbart reported, and his legal status was revoked at that time. ICE detained him in December, and he faced a final order of removal.
The pardon from the Minnesota Board of Pardons was designed to eliminate the conviction that made Vang removable. The Washington Examiner reported that the pardon came exactly one week before Vang's scheduled deportation to Laos.
But Secretary of State Rubio moved to terminate Vang's legal status independently. In a statement, Rubio said:
"Americans should never have to live in fear that foreign sex predators, shielded from deportation by their own elected officials, could endanger them or their children. That's why I terminated his legal status in the United States. Vang has now been removed from our country and will never pose a threat to any American ever again."
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis was more direct in her criticism of the governor. She called Walz's decision to pardon a convicted child sex offender "disgusting" and added: "These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting."
Just The News reported that Walz himself stated during clemency proceedings: "I can find no reason how Minnesota will be safer or better if Mr. Vang is deported to a country he has not been to since he was a child." That framing, treating deportation of a convicted child rapist as a safety question for Minnesota rather than a question of federal immigration law, reveals the logic that drove the pardon.
The Board of Pardons acted unanimously. Walz, Ellison, and Hudson all voted to grant the pardon. None of the three has been quoted in the reviewed documents offering a detailed public explanation beyond the proceedings themselves.
The case fits a broader pattern of concern about the Walz administration's relationship with accountability. Vice President Vance recently sent evidence of Minnesota welfare fraud to the Department of Justice, targeting both Walz and Ellison for a criminal inquiry.
And a separate Minnesota oversight report found that the Walz administration shielded fraud suspects by branding auditors as racists, a tactic that substituted identity politics for basic fiscal oversight.
In this case, the clemency commissioners who voted yes wrapped their decision in the language of compassion: children without a father, a victim who supports the pardon, evidence of rehabilitation. But the prosecutor who actually handled the case saw something different. McConkey saw a man whose remorse centered on himself, whose victim had been pressured by her own family not to cooperate, and whose original sentence had already been dramatically reduced because of that pressure.
The federal government ultimately deported Vang despite the pardon, but the pardon itself remains on the record, a unanimous act by three of Minnesota's highest officials to erase the conviction of a man who raped a child and then called it a minor thing.
When the system works the way it's supposed to, pardons are reserved for extraordinary cases of injustice or redemption. When the system works the way it worked here, a pardon becomes a tool to override federal immigration law on behalf of a convicted child rapist, and the people who signed it never have to look the victim in the eye.
