A three-person Minnesota panel including Gov. Tim Walz granted a pardon to an immigrant convicted of sexually abusing a child, drawing accusations that he and other Democrats are impeding federal efforts to expel dangerous foreign criminals eligible for deportation.
The Minnesota Board of Pardons granted the reprieve on June 10 to Tou Lue Vang, 42, who came to the United States as a child and was set to be deported to Laos imminently. Mr. Vang had submitted a letter to the board expressing regret for the actions that led to his 2005 conviction, and said a pardon could help him stay in the country with his wife and six children.
Mr. Vang’s victim, who was 10 when the abuse began, also submitted a letter supporting the pardon. Mr. Vang pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct in a plea deal that spared him from serving time in prison.
The pardon effectively wiped clean Mr. Vang’s criminal record, providing him an avenue to fight deportation.
Trump administration officials criticized the pardon, denouncing Mr. Walz and other Democratic leaders in the state. The other two members of the pardon board are Attorney General Keith Ellison and the state’s chief Supreme Court justice, Natalie Hudson.
“These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting,” Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, said of Mr. Walz in a statement.
“Tou Lue Vang lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl,” Ms. Bis said, confirming that the pardon would remove the criminal sexual conduct conviction underlying Mr. Vang’s removal order.
In response to a request for comment, Mr. Walz’s office pointed to the letter the victim provided the board, and said such pleas for clemency carry significant weight. Mr. Walz was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2024 and has been a frequent target of the Trump White House, especially over immigration.
“The Minnesota Board of Pardons made a unanimous decision to grant Tou Vang this pardon after an exhaustive process which included a statement of support for the pardon from the victim, a recommendation to grant the pardon from the Clemency Review Commission and a large number of community support letters,” Mr. Ellison’s office said in a statement to The New York Times. It noted President Trump’s own expansive use of executive pardon power.
Ms. Hudson declined to comment for this article. During the pardon hearing, she explained her decision to vote in favor, saying that “we’ve seen some evidence here of rehabilitation, but obviously the victim’s statement here is very significant for me.”
Mr. Vang declined a request for comment sent through a lawyer.
The board’s decision provides a new line of attack by the Trump administration against Minnesota leaders, who have served as a foil in the president’s battle against Democratic states on a variety of fronts including immigration. The state was the site of an immigration crackdown that led to the arrests of thousands and the fatal shootings by federal agents of two Americans.
Democratic governors have long faced scrutiny for pardoning immigrants with criminal records who have served their sentences, in an effort to slow or halt their deportations. They often weigh a number of factors as part of their decision, including the severity of the crime.
Mr. Vang’s situation is notable in that it involves a sex offense against a child, a type of crime that is widely reviled.
Pardons granted by state officials can help immigrants fight a deportation order, but do not guarantee they will remain in the country or attain legal status. They highlight the difficult decisions Democratic governors face in drawing the line between who deserves to remain in the country and who does not.
The process of applying for a pardon is often time-consuming and expensive, but experts say more immigrants are seeking this avenue as the Trump administration has stepped up efforts to expel criminals, including those who have green cards or have been in the country for decades.
Of the more than 400 applications received in Minnesota from March 2025 to June 2026, around 67 — or 16 percent — mentioned immigration as a reason for seeking a pardon, according to data provided by Minnesota’s Clemency Review Commission. Last year, the board granted 121 pardon applications and denied 14. So far this year, it has granted 83 and rejected five.
Mr. Walz and other members of the Minnesota pardon board have stressed that the threat of removal is one factor among many that they consider, and have rejected others seeking relief from deportation. So far this year, the board has denied at least four pardons to people convicted of sex crimes, three of whom were facing deportation.
On the same day Mr. Vang received a pardon, the board denied clemency to another man who was facing deportation to Laos. They deemed him insufficiently remorseful for his past convictions, which included participating in the group rape of a 12-year-old girl.
“Look, in this country I am the most outspoken critic of what’s happening around immigration because it’s absolutely outrageous,” Mr. Walz said during the hearing, before voting to deny the pardon. “But it doesn’t change the fact of the situation that we’re in and the accountability on this act.”
Mr. Ellison added that he had never voted in favor of a petition for the sole purpose of saving somebody from deportation. “What I need to look at is, would I grant this no matter what the federal government decides to do?” Mr. Ellison said to the applicant. “And in your situation, I cannot.”
According to Mr. Vang’s pardon application, he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1983. Court documents show that he was admitted to the United States as a refugee in 1994, when he was a child, and became a permanent resident soon afterward.
He eventually settled in Minnesota with his family. In doing so, they joined a large community in Minnesota of Hmong, many of whom supported the C.I.A. during the “secret war” against the Communists in Laos.
Mr. Vang was around 18 when he first began abusing the girl, who was then 10 years old. Mr. Vang initially tried to defend his actions upon his arrest in 2005.
When a detective interviewed Mr. Vang, he acknowledged having had sexual contact with the girl and called it a “minor thing,” according to a criminal complaint. Mr. Vang blamed cultural norms in Thailand, according to the complaint.
The conviction led immigration officials to seek his deportation, and an immigration judge ordered him removed in 2006. But because Laos refused to accept deportees in large numbers, many ethnic Laotians and Hmong, including Mr. Vang, were allowed to remain in the United States on supervised release.
That changed early last year when Mr. Trump returned to office, and Laos began to accept many of these stateless deportees with decades-old removal orders. Hundreds of people have since been deported to Laos.
In December, immigration authorities detained Mr. Vang as part of what the Trump administration has called Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota.
According to his pardon application, Mr. Vang has held various jobs, most recently as a custodian at a Minnesota-based wholesale company. After his conviction, court records show that Mr. Vang did not commit any further serious crimes, apart from petty traffic violations.
In Mr. Vang’s pardon application, filed last year, he pointed to these decades as evidence of his rehabilitation, arguing that he had taken “full responsibility for the mistakes I made in the past.”
“The shame and regret I carry — especially as my children have grown older and learned about my past — run deep,” he wrote. “If it were possible to undo what happened, I would do so without hesitation.” He said he had no surviving relatives in Laos.
The Minnesota Clemency Review Commission, which includes nine members, voted to approve Mr. Vang’s petition in April. Four members voted in favor, two voted against and three were absent. The board takes the commission’s review into account, but it has the ultimate authority to grant or deny pardons.
Mr. Vang’s victim submitted an unsigned statement asking the board to grant the pardon. “What happened to me was wrong, but I have had many years to think about this,” she wrote. “I have made peace with it. I forgive him.”
The Ramsey County attorney’s office, which handled Mr. Vang’s prosecution, had opposed a pardon. Tami McConkey, an official at the office, wrote that Mr. Vang had received a lenient sentence of 30 years’ probation in part because the victim in the case, who was then 12, “was experiencing pressure from her family to not cooperate.”
Susan Gaertner, who led the Ramsey County attorney’s office when Mr. Vang was sentenced, said prosecutors often feel compelled to offer plea deals that involve little or no prison time in cases where a victim is reluctant to cooperate.
“That difficult choice presents itself more frequently in cases where there is a young victim and the family is putting pressure on that young victim,” said Ms. Gaertner, who ran for office as a Democrat. “It’s not hard to imagine a 12-year-old not being able to resist that kind of family pressure.”
Ms. Gaertner called Mr. Vang’s pardon “unusual given the seriousness of the offense and the fact that the defendant did not receive significant consequences after he pled guilty.”
