There is a special kind of political instinct that looks at a convicted child sex offender facing deportation and says, "You know what this guy needs? A pardon." Minnesota Governor Tim Walz apparently has that instinct. Marco Rubio, thankfully, has a different one.
Here is what happened, as USA Journal reported. Tou Lue Vang came to the U.S. from Laos as a child. He later pled guilty to criminal sexual conduct involving repeated sexual abuse of a girl who was 10 years old when it started. He reportedly described his own crimes as a "minor thing," which is certainly one way to talk about sexually abusing a minor. Vang should have been deported ages ago, but Laos was not accepting large numbers of returnees at the time, so he stayed in the country on supervised release for roughly 20 years.
When the Trump administration secured cooperation from Laos and began deportation proceedings, Vang was detained in December. Justice was finally knocking on the door, two decades fashionably late.
Then Tim Walz answered the door and told justice to come back later.
The Minnesota Board of Pardons, a three person panel that includes the governor, granted Vang a full pardon in June. The pardon was based partly on a forgiveness letter written by his victim. That letter is entirely her right to write. It also does not create an immigration status out of thin air. A state pardon wipes a conviction from state books. It does not override federal immigration authority. It does not generate a green card. It does not undo what happened to a 10 year old girl.
Walz apparently figured the pardon would block deportation. He figured wrong.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Vang's legal status entirely, making the pardon irrelevant to the deportation question. ICE took Vang into custody, and as of Thursday, he has been removed from the United States permanently.
Rubio's statement was characteristically blunt: "Americans must never be forced by their elected leaders to live alongside foreign sex criminals who have no right to begin with to reside in our country."
Hard to argue with that. A non citizen convicted of sexually abusing a child has no legal or moral claim to remain on American soil. That should be one of those rare political statements that requires zero debate. And yet here we are, because a governor decided this was the hill worth dying on.
Walz looked at a convicted child sex offender with no legal right to remain in the country and chose to use the power of his office to help him stay. Rubio looked at the same situation and put the man on a plane. One of these people read the room correctly. The other one might want to start workshopping his explanation for why pardoning sex offenders felt like a good use of gubernatorial authority.
Some political calculations are just math. This one was arithmetic, and Walz still got it wrong.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
