Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated the legal status of a 42-year-old Laotian national convicted of sexually assaulting a child, and ICE removed him from the country within hours, one month after Minnesota's Board of Pardons voted unanimously to wipe his conviction clean.
The man, identified as Vang, had been convicted in 2006 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for repeatedly assaulting a girl between 2002 and 2004, beginning when she was 10 years old. Investigators said he once offered the child $10 to keep quiet and described the abuse as "a cultural thing." An immigration judge ordered him deported on October 31, 2006. He stayed anyway, for nearly two decades.
Then, on June 10, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, the three members of the Board of Pardons, granted Vang a unanimous pardon. Under federal immigration law, a state pardon can extinguish the underlying conviction that triggers removal. The pardon, as the Washington Examiner reported, came exactly one week before Vang was scheduled to be deported to Laos.
The timing alone tells you everything about the intent.
Rubio moved to override the pardon by refusing to restore Vang's green card and restarting removal proceedings, a mechanism that cleared the last legal obstacle to deportation. ICE carried out the removal on Friday, sending Vang back to Laos, a country he had not lived in since arriving in the United States as a refugee in 1994 under the Clinton administration.
Rubio framed the action in blunt terms. As Newsmax reported, the Secretary of State said:
"Because of our action, this foreign criminal will never pose a threat to any American ever again."
A fuller version of Rubio's statement, published by Just The News, added a detail worth noting. Rubio said Vang had been "freed to once again endanger America's children" after receiving the pardon from Walz.
DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis went further, directly accusing Walz of using the pardon as a shield against federal enforcement. Walz, she said, "pardoned this sex criminal in an attempt to allow him to remain in our country."
"These are the criminal illegal aliens he and sanctuary politicians are protecting. We will always put the safety of the American people first."
Walz offered a rationale for the pardon that will strike most readers as difficult to square with the facts. He said he could 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."
Leave aside the question of whether Minnesota's safety is the only consideration when a convicted child sex offender holds a two-decade-old deportation order. The board said the victim's own letter supporting clemency was decisive. No verbatim text from that letter has been made public in available reporting.
Ellison's office took a different tack. It argued that the pardon did not actually shield Vang from deportation because the Trump administration could refuse to restore his green card and restart proceedings, which is exactly what Rubio did. Ellison's office reiterated this position after Friday's removal, a claim that amounts to saying the pardon was always toothless. If so, why grant it one week before a scheduled deportation?
Ellison's office also noted the board denied pardons to three other men convicted of sex crimes who face deportation. That fact, presumably offered as evidence of the board's discernment, only raises the question of what made Vang's case different enough to warrant clemency.
This is not the first time Walz has used the pardon power to intervene ahead of federal immigration enforcement. The governor also pardoned an illegal immigrant convicted of armed robbery in a separate case aimed at blocking ICE deportation to Laos.
The timeline of Vang's case reads like an indictment of the system's inability to enforce its own orders. He entered the country in 1994 as a refugee. He was convicted in 2006. An immigration judge ordered him removed that same year. He remained in the United States for another 19 years.
ICE finally detained Vang on December 10, 2025, during Operation Metro Surge. But a federal judge ordered his release on February 19, writing that the government "detained the petitioner first, and asked questions later." The judge's name and court were not identified in available reporting.
That release set the stage for the pardon. With Vang free and a deportation date approaching, the Board of Pardons acted on June 10 to wipe the conviction, the legal predicate for removal, off the books.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican, posted on X on July 1 calling the pardon the work of "our feckless governor that puts violent illegal aliens ahead of innocent Americans."
Vang received a suspended 12-year sentence and 30 years of supervised probation for his original conviction, the New York Post reported. His legal status had been revoked upon conviction, meaning he had been living without lawful immigration status since 2006, the same year an immigration judge told the federal government to send him home.
The Vang case did not happen in isolation. It became a political flashpoint precisely because it fit a pattern of decisions by Walz and the Board of Pardons that appeared designed to frustrate federal immigration enforcement.
Breitbart reported that the Board of Pardons had sent Vang a congratulatory letter granting his pardon, a detail that underscores the deliberateness of the action. Federal officials framed the pardon as a calculated move by Walz and sanctuary politicians to prevent the deportation of a convicted child sex offender.
Walz's broader record of governance has drawn scrutiny on multiple fronts. A House oversight report found the Walz administration sat on fraud warnings while billions in federal funds drained from Minnesota, a separate controversy, but one that raises the same questions about judgment and accountability.
The legal tension at the heart of the Vang case remains unresolved in principle, even if the immediate dispute is over. A state pardon can extinguish the conviction that makes someone deportable. But the federal government retains authority over immigration status, including the power to refuse restoration of a green card. Rubio exploited that gap, and Ellison's office, remarkably, conceded the point both before and after the deportation.
Several questions hang over this case. What specific statutory authority did Rubio invoke? What did the victim's letter actually say, and did the board weigh any other factors beyond it? Why did Walz find no public-safety reason to deport a man convicted of assaulting a 10-year-old, but the board denied three other sex offenders in similar circumstances?
And perhaps most pointedly: if Ellison's office always believed the pardon would not prevent deportation, did the board tell Vang that before sending him a congratulatory letter?
The federal government ultimately completed the removal that Minnesota's leaders tried to prevent. Vang is back in Laos. The deportation order from 2006 has finally been enforced, twenty years late, and only because Washington overrode a governor who thought a convicted child sex offender deserved to stay.
When a state's top officials use the pardon power to keep a convicted child predator in the country, and then claim they never expected it to work, the problem isn't a legal technicality. It's a failure of priorities that no amount of lawyering can explain away.
