Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and his state's Board of Pardons granted clemency to a 42-year-old Laos national convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl, and did so exactly one week before the man was scheduled to be deported. The decision drew immediate fire from the Department of Homeland Security and went viral after actress Justine Bateman posted a blistering response on X.
The pardon, issued June 10, effectively eliminates the criminal conviction that made Tou Lue Vang deportable under federal immigration law. DHS officials say it will strip federal authorities of the qualifying legal basis they need to remove him from the country.
That a sitting governor would use the pardon power to shield a convicted child sex offender from the consequences of his crime, and from lawful removal, tells you everything about where Tim Walz's priorities sit. Not with the victim. Not with public safety. Not with the rule of law.
Vang, a native of Laos who entered the United States in 1994, pleaded guilty in 2005 to first-degree criminal sexual conduct. Newsmax reported that court filings describe Vang repeatedly sexually assaulting the girl between 2002 and 2004. During a police interview, Vang reportedly called it "a cultural thing" to have sex with girls as young as 12.
The New York Post reported that upon his 2005 arrest, Vang admitted to the rape and called it a "minor thing." He received a 12-year stayed sentence and 30 years of supervised probation. His conviction in 2006 triggered the revocation of his legal immigration status, and a final order of removal was issued that same year.
For nearly two decades, that removal order went unenforced. Then the Trump administration acted.
Federal authorities arrested Vang in 2025 under the Trump administration's "Operation Metro Surge" enforcement campaign and marked him for deportation to Laos. The Washington Examiner reported that Vang's deportation was scheduled for June 17, 2026, exactly one week after the Minnesota Board of Pardons voted unanimously to grant him a pardon.
The board consists of three officials: Governor Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson. All three approved the pardon.
The timing alone is hard to explain as coincidence. A man sits under a final removal order for twenty years. The federal government finally enforces it. And seven days before the flight, the state erases the conviction that makes the deportation legally possible.
This is not the first time Walz and the board have moved to shield an illegal immigrant from removal. Fox News reported that the Minnesota Board of Pardons also previously pardoned Jai Vang, another Laotian citizen with convictions for robbery, armed robbery, and DUI. A pattern of using state clemency power to obstruct federal immigration enforcement is not a one-off act of mercy. It is a policy choice, and the people of Minnesota deserve to know it is being made on their behalf.
The broader record of Walz pardoning illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes to block ICE deportations raises the question of whether the pardon power is being systematically weaponized against federal law.
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis did not hold back. In a public statement, she condemned the governor's decision directly:
"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 also noted that the pardon "will take away this child rapist's qualifying convictions that made him removable from the United States." DHS called on Walz to "stop these dangerous political games and to stop prioritizing criminal illegal aliens over American citizens."
Whether the pardon fully blocks deportation under federal law remains an open question. State pardons erase state convictions, but federal immigration authorities operate under separate statutory authority. The legal battle may not be over. What is clear is the intent: the pardon was designed to remove the legal foundation for Vang's removal.
Actress Justine Bateman, best known for the sitcom Family Ties, reposted a New York Times story headlined "Minnesota Pardons Sexual Abuser Who Was Set to Be Deported" on her X account. She added her own pointed commentary, as Breitbart News reported:
"There is no other way to regard @Tim_Walz than irrefutably grotesque. He's a fan of people who sexually terrorize children. You just can't get lower."
Bateman is not a politician. She is not a policy analyst. She is a private citizen who read the facts and reacted the way millions of Americans would. A governor pardoned a man who admitted to raping a child and tried to excuse it as cultural. The pardon came just in time to block his deportation. And no public explanation from Walz has surfaced to justify it.
The fact that Walz and the Minnesota Board of Pardons cleared a convicted child sex offender facing federal removal proceedings has drawn bipartisan outrage, though the loudest voices have come from the right.
Perhaps the most telling detail in this entire episode is what is missing: any public statement from Governor Walz explaining why he granted this pardon. No press conference. No written rationale released to the media. No defense of the decision on the merits.
The Minnesota Clemency Review Commission's executive director, Carli Stark, sent Vang a letter stating: "Being granted a pardon is a notable achievement and a reflection of the work you have done since your conviction." That bureaucratic language, "notable achievement", applied to a man who raped a child for years and called it a cultural norm, is the kind of institutional tone-deafness that erodes public trust in government at every level.
Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has already faced mounting legal and political scrutiny. Vice President Vance referred Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Ellison to the DOJ fraud division for criminal investigation, a separate but telling indicator of the cloud gathering around the governor's office.
Lost in the political firestorm is the person who matters most: the girl. She was ten years old when the abuse was documented. Court filings describe years of repeated sexual assault. Vang admitted to it. He pleaded guilty. He served a fraction of the sentence he could have received.
And now the governor of her state has erased the conviction entirely, not because new evidence emerged, not because Vang was wrongly convicted, but because federal authorities finally tried to deport him.
The pardon does not undo what happened to that child. But it does send a message about whose interests Minnesota's leadership is willing to protect, and whose it is willing to discard.
Walz has shown a consistent willingness to take positions that prioritize ideological signaling over the safety and dignity of women and girls. This pardon fits the pattern.
This case exposes something larger than one governor's bad judgment. It reveals how state-level sanctuary policies can be used not just to decline cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, but to actively dismantle the legal architecture that makes enforcement possible. A pardon is not a refusal to cooperate. It is an affirmative act, a use of sovereign state power to undo a criminal conviction for the express purpose of defeating a federal removal order.
If governors can pardon their way around immigration law, then immigration law means nothing. The federal government arrests a convicted child sex offender. The state erases the conviction. The deportation collapses. And the man stays.
That is not compassion. That is not justice. That is a governor choosing a convicted child rapist over the law, over the victim, and over the citizens he swore to protect.
When the pardon power becomes a tool for obstructing federal law enforcement, the people granting the pardons have stopped serving the public, and started serving themselves.
