Four members of Minnesota's Clemency Review Commission voted to recommend a full pardon for a 42-year-old Laotian national convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a child, and every one of them listed his immigration status as a reason, according to documents reviewed by Fox News Digital. The pardon, granted June 10 by the Minnesota Board of Pardons, wiped the conviction of Tue Lue Vang clean, just as federal authorities were preparing to remove him from the country.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio overrode the state action, terminated Vang's legal status, and announced that Vang had been removed to Laos. But the clemency documents lay bare how Minnesota's pardoning apparatus, chaired by Gov. Tim Walz and including Attorney General Keith Ellison and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, prioritized an illegal immigrant's fear of deportation over the gravity of what he did to a ten-year-old girl in St. Paul.
The case has become a sharp-edged collision between state-level clemency and federal immigration enforcement, and a case study in what happens when elected officials treat a convicted sex offender's family circumstances as more compelling than accountability for a child victim.
Vang admitted to sexually assaulting a girl four to six times between 2002 and 2004. The abuse began when the victim was in fourth grade, approximately ten years old. Vang was between 18 and 20 at the time.
The criminal complaint stated the victim "did not understand what Vang was doing, so she let him." Her friends later testified she was "angry and sad" about the abuse. Vang offered the girl $10 to keep quiet.
When police arrested him, Vang told officers: "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 told police the victim "should be arrested also because she was as much at fault."
He was convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, as Newsmax reported, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. But the sentence was stayed. Instead, a court imposed 30 years of supervised probation, including one year of local confinement. Vang served eight months at a county correctional workhouse. He was discharged from probation early in 2019.
Vang's pardon application told a different story than his words at the time of arrest. He wrote that he carried "deep shame and regret for the harm I caused." He said he arrived in the United States as a child in 1994 through California and was granted legal status under the Clinton administration.
After ICE detained him in December and issued a final order of removal, Vang applied for clemency. His application framed deportation in personal terms. He said he would be "sent to a place entirely unfamiliar to me, with no family, no home, and no future." He wrote: "My fear is that, if deported, my children will grow up without a father, like I did."
Vang has six children.
The Minnesota Clemency Review Commission voted 4-2 to recommend the pardon. The documents show each of the four commissioners who voted yes cited Vang's immigration situation as a factor. Two commissioners who voted against noted the serious nature of the offenses.
Commissioner Zach Linstrom, who voted in favor, called it a "Very tough case but the kids not having a father is not in the best interest of society." He also noted that Vang's wife and the victim both supported the pardon.
Commissioner Artika Roller stated simply: "The applicant stated the need for clemency related to immigration issues."
Commissioner Nadine Graves went further, writing: "The victim supports this pardon. His wife stayed and has forgiven. He also [has] immigration concerns. He has remorse and was discharged from probation." Graves added that Vang "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 severity of the crime but voted yes anyway:
"Despite the extraordinary severity of the underlying offense, there is substantial evidence of rehabilitation, remorse and acceptance of responsibility."
Moriearty also listed that Vang "is facing deportation" and that the "victim supports" clemency.
Not everyone went along. Ramsey County Assistant Attorney Tami McConkey formally opposed the pardon. Her office had originally offered Vang a lighter sentence because the then-12-year-old victim faced pressure from her own family not to cooperate with law enforcement after his arrest.
McConkey's opposition statement cut through the commission's framing. She noted that "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."
That distinction, between Vang's concern for his own children's reaction and any reckoning with the suffering of the child he assaulted, sits at the center of this case. The commissioners who recommended the pardon treated Vang's family hardship and immigration fears as decisive. McConkey pointed to what they glossed over.
Ramsey County District Court Judge Sara Grewing, for her part, did not take a position on the pardon.
The Board of Pardons, consisting solely of Gov. Walz, AG Ellison, and Chief Justice Hudson, awarded Vang a full pardon on June 10. None of the three officials' individual statements or reasoning appeared in the reviewed documents. The pardon effectively erased Vang's conviction.
The Washington Examiner reported the pardon came just one week before Vang was scheduled to be deported to Laos. DHS officials argued the pardon could "thwart his removal from the United States" by eliminating the qualifying convictions that made him deportable. A federal immigration judge had ordered Vang deported back in October 2006, but the state pardon threatened to undo that order two decades later.
Just The News reported that Walz himself stated: "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 treated the question as one of state safety, not federal immigration law, not accountability for a sex crime against a minor, and not the interests of the public at large.
Secretary of State Rubio moved to terminate Vang's legal status, bypassing the state pardon's intended effect. Federal law allowed officials to refuse to restore his green card and restart removal proceedings regardless of the state-level clemency.
Rubio announced the action Friday:
"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."
He added: "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 blunter. She called Walz's pardon decision "disgusting" and said: "These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting."
Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the House Majority Whip, piled on, calling Walz "our feckless governor that puts violent illegal aliens ahead of innocent Americans," as Newsmax reported.
Breitbart noted that a Minnesota judge had ordered Vang's release from ICE custody on February 19, 2026, months before the pardon, adding another layer to the state's efforts to shield him from federal enforcement.
Read the clemency documents straight through and a pattern emerges. The commissioners who voted yes treated Vang's rehabilitation, his family obligations, and his fear of deportation as the operative facts. The crime itself, the repeated sexual assault of a child over two years, appeared in their reasoning mainly as a qualifier, a throat-clearing acknowledgment before they moved to the conclusion they had already reached.
Commissioner Moriearty conceded "the extraordinary severity of the underlying offense." Commissioner Linstrom called it a "very tough case." Then both voted yes. The two commissioners who voted no cited the seriousness of the offenses, but their names and full reasoning did not appear in the reviewed documents.
The prosecutor who handled the original case saw through the application's framing. McConkey noted that Vang's expressions of regret centered on his own children's embarrassment, not the victim's suffering. That observation alone should have given the commission pause. It did not.
And Walz's own stated rationale, that he could find "no reason" deportation would make Minnesota safer, dodged the real question. The issue was never whether one man's removal would measurably change the state's crime rate. The issue was whether a governor should use the pardon power to override a federal removal order for a man convicted of sexually assaulting a ten-year-old.
Neither Walz, Ellison, nor Hudson has offered a public statement explaining their individual reasoning for granting the pardon. The victim's support for clemency was cited by multiple commissioners, but it is unclear whether she submitted a formal statement to the commission or whether her position is known only through commissioner summaries. The two commissioners who voted against the pardon have not been publicly identified by name.
The New York Post reported that Rubio also stated: "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."
Vang is now in Laos. The pardon remains on the books in Minnesota. And the documents that justified it remain a record of a state clemency system that weighed an illegal immigrant's deportation fears against the sexual assault of a child, and decided the deportation was the greater injustice.
When a government treats a convicted sex offender's comfort as a stronger claim than a child victim's right to see justice hold, the system hasn't shown mercy. It has shown its priorities.
