Federal authorities just deported a child rapist that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and his allies actively tried to shield from removal, exposing an open-border coalition that protects foreign predators over American children.
Walz, alongside Attorney General Keith Ellison and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, issued a pardon last month to erase the qualifying conviction of Tou Lue Vang, an illegal alien from Laos who repeatedly raped a 10-year-old girl. The Minnesota Board of Pardons gambled that a state-level pardon would block federal deportation. They lost, but the attempt reveals exactly where the establishment's loyalties lie.
Vang was convicted in 2006 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for assaulting a young girl from 2002 to 2004, starting when she was just ten years old. According to Breitbart and the New York Post, investigators noted Vang offered his victim $10 for her silence and dismissed his crimes as "minor things" and "a cultural thing." He received a suspended 12-year prison sentence, 30 years of probation, and served a mere eight months in a county workhouse. A federal immigration judge ordered him deported in 2006.
Vang first entered the country in 1994 under the Clinton administration, which granted him permanent residency as a refugee. When ICE finally arrested him late last year during Operation Metro Surge, a Minnesota judge ordered his release in February. Then, on June 10, Walz, Ellison, and Hudson not only pardoned him—they sent him a letter of congratulations.
The strategy was transparent: wipe the state conviction to strip the federal government of its basis for removal. It failed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Vang’s legal status earlier this week, and ICE deported him on Friday. Laos has no formal repatriation agreement with the U.S., but the Trump administration pressured the country to take him back. "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," Rubio stated. DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis didn't mince words, calling Walz's pardon "disgusting" and accusing sanctuary politicians of protecting criminal illegal aliens.
The establishment press will look for any excuse to bury this. The New York Post noted that Ramsey County prosecutors opposed the clemency bid, revealing that Vang only got a lenient sentence originally because his victim "was experiencing pressure from her family to not cooperate." Walz and his board knew this, yet they still chose to side with the predator.
A state pardon cannot override federal immigration law, a constitutional reality Walz ignored to signal his virtue. The child rapist is back in Laos, but the politicians who fought to release him onto American streets remain in power.
