Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he revoked the legal status of a 42-year-old Laotian national convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in Minnesota, and deported him to Laos. The move came after Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson had granted the man a full pardon on June 10, wiping his record clean and, critics say, shielding him from removal.
The man, Tue Lue Vang, entered the United States through California in 1994 and received legal status under the Clinton administration. Between 2002 and 2004, when he was 18 to 20 years old, Vang sexually assaulted a girl in St. Paul's Ramsey County beginning when she was in fourth grade. He admitted to having intercourse with her four to six times. He offered her $10 to keep quiet.
Now, documents reviewed by Fox News Digital show exactly why the Minnesota Clemency Review Commission recommended the pardon, and the reasoning tells a story that should trouble every parent and taxpayer in the state.
The Clemency Review Commission voted 4-2 to recommend a full pardon. Four commissioners, Zach Linstrom, Artika Roller, Nadine Graves, and Perry Moriearty, voted in favor. Two unnamed commissioners voted against, citing the seriousness of Vang's offenses. The recommendation then went to the three-member Board of Pardons: Walz, Ellison, and Hudson. They granted it.
The commissioners' written statements, captured in the documents, make clear that immigration was the driving concern, not public safety, not the victim's long-term welfare, and not the precedent being set for convicted sex offenders who happen to face deportation.
Commissioner Roller wrote plainly: "The applicant stated the need for clemency related to immigration issues." Commissioner Graves listed her reasons in a string of justifications:
"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."
Graves also noted that Vang "retracted his prior statement about this being a result of culture. He admits this was wrong then and will always be wrong." That retraction deserves some context, because the prior statement was anything but minor.
The criminal complaint tells a different story than the one Vang's pardon application presented. When officers arrested him, Vang told police: "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."
The victim was ten years old when the abuse started.
The complaint noted that the girl "did not understand what Vang was doing, so she let him." Her friends later testified she was "angry and sad." The Ramsey County Attorney's Office offered Vang a lighter sentence, a dispositional departure, in part because the then-12-year-old victim faced pressure from her own family not to cooperate with law enforcement after Vang's arrest.
Vang was convicted of criminal sexual conduct. A judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison but stayed the sentence in favor of 30 years of supervised probation, including one year of local confinement. He served eight months at a county correctional workhouse. In 2019, he was discharged from probation early.
In his application for clemency, Vang struck a different tone from the man who once called child rape "a minor thing." He wrote: "I carry deep shame and regret for the harm I caused." He told the commission he feared being "sent to a place entirely unfamiliar to me, with no family, no home, and no future."
"My fear is that, if deported, my children will grow up without a father, like I did."
Vang has six children. He stated he had been detained by ICE in December and was facing a final order of removal.
Commissioner Linstrom acknowledged the weight of the case but sided with Vang's family argument: "Very tough case but the kids not having a father is not in the best interest of society." Commissioner Moriearty went further, writing that "despite the extraordinary severity of the underlying offense, there is substantial evidence of rehabilitation, remorse and acceptance of responsibility." Moriearty also noted that Vang "is facing deportation" and that the "victim supports" the pardon.
The Ramsey County prosecutor who handled the case disagreed. Assistant Attorney Tami McConkey filed a formal opposition, recommending against the pardon. She pointed to aggravating factors: the abuse occurred over an extended period, Vang drove the victim to his home on at least one occasion to assault her, and he did not use sexual protection. McConkey wrote:
"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 took no position on the pardon.
Despite the prosecutor's opposition, the Board of Pardons, Walz, Ellison, and Hudson, awarded Vang a full pardon on June 10, essentially giving him a clean slate. The Washington Examiner reported that the pardon came exactly one week before Vang was scheduled to be deported to Laos.
That timing is worth pausing on. The pardon did not just acknowledge rehabilitation. It arrived at the precise moment needed to strip away the qualifying conviction that made Vang removable from the country.
Homeland Security Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis did not hold back when the pardon became public: "Governor Tim Walz's decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting." She added: "These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting."
The pattern of questionable judgment from Walz's office extends well beyond clemency decisions. Vice President JD Vance recently sent fraud allegations involving Walz and Ellison to the Department of Justice in a criminal referral, raising separate but related questions about the governor's stewardship of his office.
The Trump administration did not accept the pardon as the final word. Secretary of State Rubio announced he had terminated Vang's legal status in the United States and that Vang had been removed to Laos. Just The News reported that Rubio framed the action in stark terms.
"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."
Rubio added: "Vang has now been removed from our country and will never pose a threat to any American ever again."
Walz, for his part, had offered his own rationale for the pardon. "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," the governor said, as the New York Post reported.
That framing, that Minnesota's safety somehow depends on keeping a convicted child sex offender within its borders rather than removing him, captures the inverted logic at work. The question was never whether Laos wanted Vang. The question was whether Minnesota's governor should use the pardon power to override federal immigration enforcement on behalf of a man who raped a child.
The broader record of Walz's administration raises the same structural concern: a willingness to look past serious misconduct when the political incentives point that way. A House oversight report found the Walz administration ignored fraud warnings as billions in federal funds disappeared through Minnesota programs, a pattern that suggests systemic failures in accountability, not isolated lapses.
Multiple commissioners cited the victim's support for the pardon as a factor in their votes. But the documents also reveal a victim who, as a 12-year-old, was pressured by her own family not to cooperate with law enforcement. The system that was supposed to protect her offered her abuser a lighter sentence because of that pressure. Years later, the same system cited her apparent support to justify erasing his conviction entirely.
The prosecutor's opposition statement cuts through the commissioners' reasoning. McConkey noted that Vang's expressions of remorse centered on his own children's reactions, not on what his victim endured. The distinction matters. A pardon board that cannot tell the difference between self-interested regret and genuine accountability has no business wielding clemency power in cases involving child sexual abuse.
Breitbart reported that DHS officials explicitly characterized the pardon as an attempt to allow a convicted child sex offender to remain in the country. Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the House Majority Whip, called out what he described as a governor who "puts violent illegal aliens ahead of innocent Americans."
Minnesota Democrats have already shown a willingness to circle the wagons around Walz. When lawmakers attempted to open an impeachment inquiry into the governor over a separate fraud scandal, state Democrats blocked the probe on a party-line vote even as fraud losses climbed to $19 billion.
The clemency commission records lay bare a process in which four of six commissioners treated deportation risk as a reason to pardon a convicted child sex offender. The prosecutor objected. Two commissioners objected. The sentencing judge took no position. And the three most powerful officials in Minnesota state government, the governor, the attorney general, and the chief justice, signed off anyway.
The pardon did not make Minnesota safer. It did not serve justice. It served one man's desire to avoid the immigration consequences of his own crimes, crimes he once dismissed as "a minor thing" and blamed on culture.
Rubio and ICE reversed the outcome. Vang is in Laos. But the pardon still stands on the books in Minnesota, a monument to a system that decided a child rapist's fear of having "no future" mattered more than the future he stole from a ten-year-old girl.
