Tim Walz's Response to the Deportation of a Child Sex Offender Is Disgusting

Let's just sit with the basic fact pattern for a second. Tou Lue Vang was convicted in 2005 of raping a ten-year-old. Two decades later, the federal government finally moves to deport him, and Tim Walz sits on a three-person board that steps in to pardon him specifically to stop that from happening. Not to correct some paperwork error. Not because new evidence emerged. The pardon exists, as far as anyone can tell, to keep a convicted child rapist in the United States.

Walz has spent years positioning himself as the guy who just wants to be nice to people, the aw-shucks Minnesota dad who governs by vibes and Midwestern warmth. That persona only works if you never look closely at what the niceness actually protects. Here it protects a man who committed one of the worst crimes there is against one of the most defenseless victims there is. If Walz wants credit for compassion, he owes an explanation for who he chose to extend it to.

This is what happens when immigration enforcement gets treated as inherently cruel rather than as a basic function of a country that expects something in return for letting people in. A deportation order after a child rape conviction isn't harsh. It's the system working exactly as it should. Walz and his board decided that outcome was the injustice worth fixing.

Democrats keep telling us Walz is the normal one, the reasonable alternative to Trump-era hardliners. Normal people don't use their government power to keep a convicted child rapist from being sent out of the country. If this is what "normal" looks like now, voters are right to want something else.