Trump admin deports criminal migrant pardoned by Tim Walz

A pardon for a man who sexually abused a 10-year-old girl. Not a shoplifting case, not a probation violation, not some decades-old nonviolent thing that got swept up in a mandatory minimum. That's the case Tim Walz decided was worth using his clemency power on, specifically so immigration authorities couldn't remove the guy from the country. You have to sit with that for a second before you even get to the politics of it.

Governors have pardon power for a reason, and sometimes it's used well. This isn't that. This was clemency deployed as an immigration shield, full stop. The administration's decision to strip his status and deport him anyway is exactly what should happen when a state official tries to use a pardon to override federal removal proceedings for a child sex offender. There's no daylight here for a "he already served his time" argument, because the pardon wasn't about punishment. It was about keeping him in the country.

What's strange is how little defending Walz's office seems to want to do on the substance. There's no serious case to make that a pardon for this crime, aimed at blocking deportation, was a just use of power. So the silence is telling. Governors get to make judgment calls on clemency all the time, and voters are entitled to ask what judgment led to this one.

If there's a lesson here it's a simple one. State officials don't get a side channel around federal immigration law just because they dress it up as mercy. The girl this man abused doesn't get a pardon from what happened to her.