Minnesota's Board of Pardons, chaired by Gov. Tim Walz, granted a full pardon to a 42-year-old Laotian national convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a girl beginning when she was ten years old, and newly obtained commission records show that every member who voted in favor cited the man's immigration status as a reason to wipe his record clean.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Friday that he had terminated the legal status of Tue Lue Vang and that Vang had been removed to Laos, overriding the June 10 pardon that Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson awarded unanimously.
The pardon came just one week before Vang was scheduled to be deported, the Washington Examiner reported, and was explicitly designed to strip him of the qualifying convictions that made him removable from the United States. The case lays bare how Minnesota's clemency process prioritized an illegal immigrant's fear of deportation over the gravity of crimes committed against a child.
Vang entered the United States through California in 1994 and received legal status during the Clinton administration. Between 2002 and 2004, when Vang was between 18 and 20 years old, he had sexual intercourse with the victim four to six times in St. Paul. The abuse began when the girl was in the fourth grade, roughly ten years old.
The criminal complaint states that the victim "did not understand what Vang was doing, so she let him." Friends later testified she was "angry and sad" about the abuse. Vang offered the girl $10 to keep quiet.
When police arrested him, Vang showed no contrition. He told officers his conduct was "a minor thing" and called it "a cultural thing in Thailand to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12." He said the victim "should be arrested also because she was as much at fault."
Vang pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct. A Ramsey County court sentenced him to 12 years in prison, but stayed the sentence in favor of 30 years of supervised probation and one year of local confinement. He served just eight months in a county correctional workhouse. He was discharged from probation early in 2019.
Before the Board of Pardons acted, the Minnesota Clemency Review Commission voted 4, 2 to recommend granting Vang a pardon. Documents reviewed by Fox News Digital reveal what each commissioner wrote to justify the vote.
All four commissioners who voted yes listed Vang's immigration situation, his pending deportation, as a factor. Commissioner Artika Roller wrote simply: "The applicant stated the need for clemency related to immigration issues."
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 Nadine Graves cited the victim's support for the pardon, the wife's forgiveness, Vang's remorse, and his immigration concerns. She added that "he retracted his prior statement about this being a result of culture. He admits this was wrong then and will always be wrong."
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."
Two commissioners voted no, citing the serious nature of the offenses. Their names were not included in the records reviewed.
Ramsey County Assistant Attorney Tami McConkey formally opposed the pardon. Her statement cut through the commission's rehabilitation narrative with a pointed observation: "While Mr. Vang expresses shame and regret about what his children experience when then learn of the offense, he does not share any thoughts or insight about what the victim must have gone through."
McConkey also noted several aggravating details. Vang abused the victim over an extended period. In at least one instance, he drove her to his home to assault her. He did not use sexual protection. And the reason the original sentence was lighter than it might have been had nothing to do with the severity of the crime, McConkey's office offered a dispositional departure because the then-12-year-old victim faced pressure from her own family not to cooperate with law enforcement after Vang's arrest.
That context makes the commission's emphasis on rehabilitation ring hollow. The sentence Vang received, eight months in a workhouse for years of sexual abuse of a child, was itself a product of the victim's vulnerability, not a measure of Vang's reformed character.
Ramsey County District Court Judge Sara Grewing, who presided over the case, did not take a position on the pardon.
In his written pardon application, Vang struck a markedly different tone from the statements he made at arrest. He wrote that he carried "deep shame and regret for the harm I caused." He warned that without a pardon, he "would be sent to a place entirely unfamiliar to me, with no family, no home, and no future."
He also wrote: "My fear is that, if deported, my children will grow up without a father, like I did." He pledged to "do all that I can to be here and to protect them from the outcomes of my deportation."
The gap between Vang's words at arrest, calling child sexual abuse "a minor thing" and a "cultural thing", and his pardon application tells its own story. Whether the clemency commissioners weighed that gap is unclear from the documents. What is clear is that the four who voted yes focused overwhelmingly on Vang's family circumstances and immigration fears, not on the lasting harm to his victim.
The Trump administration moved swiftly. ICE had detained Vang in December, and he was facing a final order of removal. After the Board of Pardons intervened, Rubio used his authority to terminate Vang's legal status entirely.
Rubio did not hold back. "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," he said. "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."
In a separate statement, Rubio noted that "just weeks ago, a foreign child rapist was freed to once again endanger America's children after receiving a pardon from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz."
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis was blunter still. "Governor Tim Walz's decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting," she said. "These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting."
Bis also stated that the pardon would "take away this child rapist's qualifying convictions that made him removable from the United States", a direct acknowledgment that the pardon's purpose was to block deportation, not merely to recognize rehabilitation.
This was not the only time Walz's Board of Pardons has moved to shield an illegal immigrant from removal. In May, Walz pardoned another Laotian national convicted of armed robbery ahead of an ICE deportation to Laos. That case followed the same pattern: a pardon timed to strip the convictions that made the individual deportable.
The Vang case drew immediate federal condemnation. After the pardon, ICE and the State Department moved to deport Vang despite the clemency grant, setting up a direct confrontation between state and federal authority over immigration enforcement.
The New York Post reported that Rubio highlighted Vang's own arrest-day statements in justifying the deportation, noting that Vang "even tried to pay his victim for her silence, and called those heinous crimes 'minor things.'" Rubio added: "Americans must not be forced by their elected leaders to live alongside foreign sex criminals, who have no right to begin with to reside in our country."
The pardon controversy lands at a moment when Walz's governance record faces scrutiny on multiple fronts. A House oversight report has accused his administration of ignoring fraud warnings as billions in taxpayer funds disappeared through Minnesota's pandemic-era programs.
Neither Walz nor Ellison offered public comment on the Vang pardon in the documents reviewed. No direct quotes from either official appear in the available reporting. That silence is itself notable. The governor who signed off on clearing the record of a man convicted of sexually assaulting a child, a man who told police the abuse was "a minor thing", has offered no public defense of the decision.
Walz has also faced questions about accountability in his administration's handling of fraud investigations he initially dismissed before rushing to claim credit when federal agents stepped in.
The commission records make the calculus plain. Four commissioners weighed a convicted child sex offender's fear of deportation against the nature of his crimes, and chose deportation fears. They cited the victim's support, the wife's forgiveness, and Vang's six children. They noted his remorse and his early discharge from probation.
What they did not grapple with, at least in their written statements, was the prosecutor's central objection: that Vang's expressions of regret centered on what his own children would think of him, not on what his victim endured. They did not address the fact that the lenient sentence resulted from pressure on a child victim not to cooperate. They did not explain why immigration status should weigh in a clemency decision for someone convicted of years of sexual abuse against a ten-year-old.
The Board of Pardons, Walz, Ellison, and Hudson, then adopted the commission's recommendation without recorded dissent.
Rubio's intervention ensured Vang was deported anyway. But the documents remain. They show a state clemency system that treated deportation as a hardship worth preventing, even for a man whose own words, at the time of his arrest, revealed how little he understood about what he had done to a child.
When elected officials use the pardon power to override federal immigration enforcement on behalf of convicted child sex offenders, voters don't need a commission report to tell them something has gone badly wrong. They just need to read the file.
