On June 10, Minnesota's three-member clemency board — Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson — voted unanimously to pardon 42-year-old Tou Lue Vang, an illegal immigrant man convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for repeatedly sexually assaulting a girl starting when she was 10 years old. The sexual abuse continued for two years. Vang had been sentenced to 30 years of probation and had a deportation order in place since his 2006 conviction. Walz, Ellison and Hudson all cited deportation as one of the reasons they were pardoning the convicted child rapist.

Last Friday, DHS deported him to Laos anyways.

Walz's response on Tuesday wasn't contrition. It wasn't even silence, which would've been the smart play. Instead, he doubled down and asked: "Did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable?"

He was talking about Vang's children. Not the 10-year-old girl Vang sexually assaulted multiple times over two years.

Walz then delivered what may be the single worst sentence uttered by a sitting governor in 2026: "We can't all be judged by our worst day." As the NY Post reported, the comment landed like a grenade. DHS fired back within hours: "For Tou Lue Vang this wasn't just one 'worst day' — it was YEARS of repeatedly sexually assaulting a girl starting when she was 10."

That distinction matters. Walz framed a convicted child rapist's two-year pattern of abuse as a singular lapse in judgement — a rough Tuesday, an off day, the kind of thing that could happen to anyone. It can't. It didn't. Vang himself told the pardon board, "What I did was wrong. It was a serious crime. She was a child."

The pardon case rested heavily on a letter from Vang's victim, now an adult, who wrote that she had forgiven him and supported the pardon. That letter carried weight with the board. But a pardon doesn't erase a federal deportation order, and it doesn't override immigration law. Vang, born in a refugee camp in northern Thailand to parents who fled Laos during the Vietnam War, had been under a removal order for 20 years. Laos only began accepting deportees last year, which finally made enforcement possible.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Vang's status. ICE arrested him. He was on a plane to Laos by Friday.

The White House didn't mince words: "Under President Trump, criminal illegal aliens who rape children will be found, arrested, and removed — and Democrat politicians will not stand in the way."

Walz tried to frame his response as compassionate nuance. He noted that the board denied other pardon requests involving immigration issues on the same day, as if selectivity proved thoughtfulness. But the question nobody in Minnesota's capitol seems willing to answer is simpler than that: Why did the governor use his pardon power to shield a man convicted of sexually assaulting a child from the deportation order that came with his conviction?

Vang pleaded with the board before the vote: "If I am sent away, we lose everything. My children will lose their home, and they will lose their education." Three officials heard that plea, weighed it against a two-year pattern of child sexual abuse, and said yes.

The former running mate of Kamala Harris — the man the Democratic Party put one heartbeat from the presidency in 2024 — looked at a convicted child rapist's deportation and decided the real injustice was the deportation.

That's not a bad day. That's a governing philosophy.