The Trump administration said it has stripped legal status and deported a migrant whom Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tried to protect from ouster by granting him a pardon for sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl.
The pardon had erased the criminal conviction that would normally have earned Tou Lue Vang, a Laotian, a deportation.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio countered by revoking Mr. Vang’s legal status, making him once again eligible to be deported.
Federal agents have already carried out his removal.
“This foreign criminal will never pose a threat to any American ever again,” Mr. Rubio said Friday. “Americans must never be forced by their elected leaders to live alongside foreign sex criminals.”
Mr. Walz is part of the three-member pardon board that voted on June 10 to grant the clemency to Mr. Vang.
“Congratulations!” the Clemency Review Commission said in its letter to the migrant.
Mr. Vang was convicted in 2006 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. Homeland Security said he repeatedly assaulted a girl between 2002 and 2004. She was 10 when the abuse began.
He offered to pay the girl $10 to keep silent, and when police caught up with him, he minimized the crime as “a cultural thing,” DHS said.
The conviction earned him a deportation order from an immigration judge in 2006.
But Laos refused to take him back, so the U.S. government released him from custody in 2007 and he lived in the country for nearly two decades while under “supervision” of ICE.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved to carry out the deportation last year, arresting him on Dec. 10 and revoking his supervision on Dec. 16.
U.S. District Judge John Gerrard, an Obama appointee, ordered him freed from ICE custody on Feb. 19.
The judge said the government arrested first and only later moved to justify the arrest, saying Mr. Vang’s circumstances changed when ICE found a country to deport him to.
“The government detained the petitioner first, and asked questions later. That’s not how this works,” he wrote.
Mr. Walz and his fellow board members then delivered the pardon last month.
Mr. Vang, in his application, noted his “shame and regret” at his behavior.
The board also said the victim’s support for Mr. Vang’s pardon weighed heavily on its decision.
Mr. Rubio did not say what nation Mr. Vang was deported to.
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