On July 10, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had deported Tou Lue Vang. Vang arrived in America illegally as a child and later became a legal permanent resident. In 2006, he was convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for long-running abuse of a ten-year-old girl. He lost his status and was ordered removed, yet remained in the United States for another twenty years under federal supervision. Late in 2025, he was arrested by ICE; a judge ordered his release while his immigration case worked its way through the courts. In June, Gov. Tim Walz and the Minnesota Board of Pardons pardoned Vang, with a seeming eye to keeping him in the country. The Trump administration deported him anyway, prompting a protest from Walz: “Did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”
The resolution of the Vang case is likely—despite what may be regarded as an unduly long grace period—to please advocates of a more secure border. But the case bears striking parallels to another one that is still in administrative and legal limbo, and much better known: that of Kilmar Abrego García.
On June 22, the Department of Justice filed notice it would appeal a Tennessee judge’s dismissal of human trafficking charges against García. It was the latest phase in the Salvadoran national’s public battle to avoid deportation. Abrego, who entered the country illegally as a teen, first came to the attention of immigration authorities in 2019 after an arrest for loitering and marijuana possession in Maryland. He spent seven months in ICE custody. Before his release, he was denied asylum but granted a withholding of removal order to El Salvador on the grounds that he feared persecution by the country’s violent gangs. Abrego was arrested again in 2022 by Tennessee state police, and then in 2025, this time by ICE, and slated for deportation. It was after his deportation in March 2025 to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo that Abrego became a cause celebre for pundits and politicians, culminating in the public visit paid to him by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
Abrego is not a citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to vote; in the eyes of some, Van Hollen was at risk of appearing to care more about non-citizens than his own constituents. Recall that he did not go nearly as far out of his way for the Maryland family of Rachel Morin, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant in 2023. Gavin Newsom said of the Abrego case: “This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue.” Newsom’s comments drew pushback from many progressives, but he was onto something. A string of court cases and administrative decisions have not only accorded non-citizens equal rights with Americans, they have in some cases offered them better treatment—even creating a two-tier system in which US citizens are at a disadvantage.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member