President Trump's mass deportation strategy is not complicated. Target the worst of the worst first: rapists, killers, and violent criminals who have no business walking free in the United States. Democrats have spent months howling that Trump's immigration crackdown is scooping up nonviolent illegal immigrants, and even U.S. citizens, in some grand dragnet of cruelty. Funny thing, though. When actual violent predators show up on Trump's list, Democrat governors seem to be doing everything in their power to save them.
Last month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) pardoned Tou Lue Vang, a 42-year-old illegal immigrant convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, wiping his record clean and shielding him from deportation to Laos. The pardon erased Vang's conviction. Worse, Walz issued it specifically to rescue Vang from the consequences that Trump's immigration enforcement was finally about to deliver.
Vang pleaded guilty in 2006 to repeatedly sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl over four years, starting in 2002. When police arrested him in 2005, he did not deny what he did. He justified it, telling officers it was a "cultural thing" to "marry and have sex with girls as young as 12."
He is exactly the kind of criminal illegal immigrant that anyone, regardless of political affiliation, should want deported. Yet, his pardon came from a three-person panel that included Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), and Minnesota Chief Justice Natalie Hudson.
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Minnesota is not alone. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) granted a full pardon to Deda Malota Margilaj, 74, on July 2, 50 years after he was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting and killing a man at a Detroit gas station in 1975.
The administration of President Joe Biden had placed Margilaj in removal proceedings based on his 1978 conviction. Whitmer's pardon erased that legal basis and could allow the removal case to be terminated, according to the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, which represented him.
Joshua Dubin, executive director of the Perlmutter Center, framed the pardon as an act of mercy. "Now more than ever, this case demonstrates the power of executive clemency to correct the lifelong collateral consequences of decades-old convictions," Dubin said. He added, "Thanks to Governor Whitmer, Mr. Margilaj will be able to do what he enjoys the most — spend time with his family and friends, free of the fear that has limited his life for so many decades."
Margilaj came to the United States alone as a 17-year-old refugee from Albania and later started a business in Detroit. In 1975, he was charged with second-degree murder for shooting a man while defending his brother, who had been shot by the victim, according to the Perlmutter Center.
Neither of these stories is about mercy or redemption. Democrats view illegal aliens as future voters, and amnesty is the endgame. They do not actually want to deport anyone, because a permanent underclass with a path to citizenship is a permanent voting bloc. It does not matter how many Americans, including children, get hurt along the way. Democrats have run the numbers and decided that signaling loyalty to their base is worth more than the bad optics of protecting a child predator and a killer from deportation.
