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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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The post Minnesota Pardons Sexual Abuser Who Was Set to Be Deported appeared first on American Renaissance.
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