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.<\/p>\n
The pardon last month<\/a> from Minnesota\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Pardons, however, do not automatically safeguard against deportation.<\/p>\n It is unclear where Mr. Vang was sent or on what specific legal grounds he was deported.<\/p>\n Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a video statement posted on X that Mr. Vang \u201chas been removed from the United States\u201d and that \u201cbecause of our actions, this foreign criminal will never pose a threat to any American ever again.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Vang and his family could not immediately be reached for comment.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> the administration\u2019s efforts as unnecessarily cruel.<\/p>\n 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.\u2019s \u201csecret war\u201d against the Communists.<\/p>\n State-level pardons have become a new front in the Trump administration\u2019s attack against Minnesota leaders, and Democratic states more broadly, over immigration.<\/p>\n \u201cThis case exposes the depravity of the Radical Left: they will literally pardon child rapists and defy federal law to protect criminal illegals,\u201d the White House said in a statement on Friday.<\/p>\n Minnesota\u2019s attorney general, Keith Ellison, one of the three pardon board members, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Vang\u2019s deportation. A second member, the chief justice of the state\u2019s Supreme Court, Natalie Hudson, declined to comment.<\/p>\n