A convicted child sex offender who repeatedly raped a ten-year-old girl walked away with a full pardon from Minnesota's Board of Pardons on June 10, and the internal documents behind that decision show commissioners weighed the man's immigration fears more heavily than the gravity of his crimes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded by terminating the man's legal status and deporting him to Laos.
Tue Lue Vang, a 42-year-old Laotian national, pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct for abusing the girl four to six times between 2002 and 2004, beginning when she was in the fourth grade. He was between 18 and 20 years old during the assaults. Documents reviewed by Fox News Digital show he offered the child $10 to keep quiet. When police arrested him, he told them the abuse was "a minor thing", a "cultural thing in Thailand to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12."
Now the paper trail from Minnesota's Clemency Review Commission lays bare the reasoning that led four of six commissioners to recommend wiping Vang's record clean. And the reasoning had far less to do with the child he victimized than with his desire to avoid deportation.
The Minnesota Clemency Review Commission voted 4-2 to recommend a pardon for Vang. Fox News Digital obtained the written recommendations from each commissioner who voted in favor. Every one of them cited Vang's immigration situation as a factor.
Commissioner Artika Roller wrote simply: "The applicant stated the need for clemency related to immigration issues." Commissioner Zach Linstrom acknowledged it was a "very tough case" but concluded "the kids not having a father is not in the best interest of society." He also noted the victim and Vang's wife supported the pardon.
Commissioner Nadine Graves wrote: "The victim supports this pardon. His wife stayed and has forgiven. He also 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 offered the most expansive rationale, writing that "despite the extraordinary severity of the underlying offense, there is substantial evidence of rehabilitation, remorse and acceptance of responsibility." Moriearty also noted Vang "is facing deportation" and that the victim supported clemency.
Two commissioners voted against. The documents note they cited the serious nature of Vang's offenses, though their full reasoning has not been disclosed.
The gap between what Vang told police at the time of his arrest and what he wrote in his pardon application tells its own story. At the time of arrest, he blamed the child, telling officers the victim "should be arrested also because she was as much at fault." He called his crimes a "minor thing."
Years later, in his pardon application, Vang struck a different tone. "I carry deep shame and regret for the harm I caused," he wrote. He warned that deportation would send him to "a place entirely unfamiliar to me, with no family, no home, and no future." He added: "My fear is that, if deported, my children will grow up without a father, like I did."
Vang entered the United States through California in 1994 and was granted legal status by the Clinton administration. He has six children. ICE detained him in December, the year is not specified in available records, and he was facing a final order of removal when he applied for the pardon.
Not everyone in the system went along. Ramsey County Assistant Attorney Tami McConkey filed a formal opposition to the pardon. She laid out aggravating factors the commission apparently chose to look past: Vang abused the victim over an extended period, in one instance drove her to his home to assault her, and did not use sexual protection.
McConkey also pointed to a telling omission in Vang's application. "While Mr. Vang expresses shame and regret about what his children experience when they learn of the offense," she wrote, "he does not share any thoughts or insight about what the victim must have gone through."
McConkey's office had originally offered Vang a dispositional departure, a lighter plea arrangement, because the then-12-year-old victim faced pressure from her own family not to cooperate with law enforcement after his arrest. The victim, documents show, "did not understand what Vang was doing, so she let him." Friends later testified she was "angry and sad" about the abuse.
Vang was sentenced to 12 years in prison. That sentence was stayed in favor of 30 years of supervised probation, including one year of local confinement. He served just eight months at a county correctional workhouse and was discharged from probation early in 2019.
Minnesota's Board of Pardons consists of three officials: Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson. The board awarded Vang a full pardon on June 10. Neither Walz, Ellison, nor Hudson has been quoted publicly explaining their vote.
Just The News reported that Walz stated at the time: "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 placed the burden on the state to justify deportation, rather than on the convicted sex offender to justify remaining.
Walz's standing in Minnesota was already eroding before the pardon became national news. His approval ratings had dropped to all-time lows amid a separate fraud scandal, and the pardon decision has only deepened the political damage.
Ramsey County District Court Judge Sara Grewing, who handled Vang's original case, did not take a position on the pardon.
The Trump administration moved swiftly. Rubio announced on a Friday that he had terminated Vang's legal status in the United States. Vang was then removed to Laos.
Rubio framed the action in blunt terms, as the New York Post reported:
"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. Vang has now been removed from our country and will never pose a threat to any American ever again."
Homeland Security Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis was more direct. "Governor Tim Walz's decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting," she said. "These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting."
Newsmax reported that ICE carried out the removal within hours of Rubio's announcement, effectively nullifying whatever immigration protection the pardon was intended to provide.
The Vang pardon did not occur in a vacuum. Minnesota under Walz has faced repeated questions about institutional oversight. The governor dropped his own DHS commissioner just before a confirmation hearing as fraud scrutiny intensified, and Republican challengers have made the state's governance failures a central campaign issue.
Breitbart noted that DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis described Vang as a "monster" who "repeatedly sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl," and said Walz "pardoned this sex criminal in an attempt to allow him to remain in our country."
Voters across the state have expressed growing frustration with the governor's leadership. A GOP Senate candidate and Navy SEAL veteran recently said Minnesotans are "fed up" with Walz over a series of governance failures.
Meanwhile, federal authorities have also been active in the state on immigration enforcement matters, including indicting members of a Minneapolis group tied to an alleged campaign against immigration enforcement.
Strip away the procedural language and the clemency commission's careful phrasing, and the facts are plain. A man raped a child repeatedly. He blamed the child. He called it a cultural norm. He served eight months. He got off probation early. He applied for a pardon, not because he had been wrongly convicted, but because he wanted to avoid the immigration consequences of his guilty plea. Four commissioners said yes. Three statewide officials signed off. And a prosecutor's warning about what the application left unsaid went unheeded.
The federal government stepped in where the state would not. Vang is now in Laos. The child he assaulted will carry what happened to her for the rest of her life, regardless of what any board stamps on a piece of paper.
When a state's clemency process bends itself around the deportation fears of a convicted child rapist, the system isn't showing mercy. It's showing who it values, and who it doesn't.