The Department of Homeland Security said on Friday that it had deported an immigrant just weeks after he received a pardon from Minnesota state officials for a 2005 conviction for sexually abusing a child.
The pardon last month from Minnesota’s pardon board, which includes the Democratic governor Tim Walz, effectively erased the criminal record of the man, Tou Lue Vang. Mr. Vang, 42, had come to the United States legally as a child, but because of his conviction, he lost permanent residency status and was issued a final removal order. Before his pardon, Mr. Vang had been facing imminent deportation to Laos.
Pardons, however, do not automatically safeguard against deportation.
It is unclear where Mr. Vang was sent or on what specific legal grounds he was deported.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a video statement posted on X that Mr. Vang “has been removed from the United States” and that “because of our actions, this foreign criminal will never pose a threat to any American ever again.”
Mr. Vang and his family could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Vang was around 18 when he first began abusing his victim, who was then 10. After his arrest in 2005, he blamed cultural norms in Thailand, according to the criminal complaint. He later pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct in a plea deal that spared him from serving time in prison.
He was ordered deported in 2006, but Laos had for many years refused to accept large numbers of deportees. Many ethnic Laotians and Hmong, including Mr. Vang, were allowed to remain in the United States on supervised release.
In that time, Mr. Vang got married and had six children, according to his pardon application. After his conviction, court records show that Mr. Vang was not charged with any further serious crimes, apart from petty traffic violations.
When President Trump returned to office early last year, Laos began to accept many of these stateless deportees with decades-old removal orders. Hundreds of people have since been deported to Laos. Democratic lawmakers and Southeast Asian advocacy groups have condemned the administration’s efforts as unnecessarily cruel.
In a letter to the pardon board, Mr. Vang expressed regret for his actions and said a pardon could help him stay in the United States with his family. He expressed concern about being sent to Laos, where he said he had no surviving relatives. Mr. Vang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1983 and is Hmong, an ethnic minority in Laos that supported the United States during the C.I.A.’s “secret war” against the Communists.
State-level pardons have become a new front in the Trump administration’s attack against Minnesota leaders, and Democratic states more broadly, over immigration.
“This case exposes the depravity of the Radical Left: they will literally pardon child rapists and defy federal law to protect criminal illegals,” the White House said in a statement on Friday.
Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, one of the three pardon board members, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Vang’s deportation. A second member, the chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court, Natalie Hudson, declined to comment.
Mr. Walz’s office referred to a previous statement defending the board’s decision to pardon Mr. Vang, which noted that the victim had signed a letter in support of his petition. Mr. Ellison had said that the decision was made after “exhaustive” deliberations, which included looking at the victim’s letter and a large number of other letters in support from community members. During the pardon hearing, Ms. Hudson had also pointed to the victim’s letter.
State-level pardons to prevent deportation have long been allowed under federal law.
“This is not a loophole,” said Jason A. Cade, a law professor at the University of Georgia. “The role for state pardons is as old as criminal deportation itself.”
In some recent cases, state pardons have shielded people from expulsion. As the Trump administration has stepped up efforts to expel criminals, more immigrants have sought such acts of clemency.
Applying for a pardon is often time-consuming and expensive, and only immigrants with certain types of convictions are eligible for relief from deportation. Officials, including those in Minnesota, sometimes deny applications even if petitioners are facing imminent deportation.
Those who are pardoned still face obstacles. Their federal immigration cases must be reopened to have the final removal orders lifted, a step that experts say has become more uncertain under the Trump administration.
“If I had any kind of final order based on any kind of criminality, I would be worried,” said Andrew R. Arthur, a former federal immigration judge and a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restricting immigration. “Unless you’ve gone through the process of getting the case reopened, even if you’re getting the pardon, you are on the docket.”
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