An illegal alien and convicted child rapist was able to shoot two California corrections officers on Saturday because Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused to enforce the law and take actions that would have forced his home country to repatriate him.

On Saturday, Thong Vang, a 37-year-old Laotian national, shot and critically injured two corrections officers in Fresno, California. Vang had previously served sixteen years in prison for gang raping three girls under the age of 14

As KFSN-TV Fresno reported:

Vang last appeared in court in 1998, on charges related to the abduction, forced confinement and rape of three girls aged between 12 and 14. The girls were taken to a Motel 6 motel and held for two days, forced to have sex with multiple men and boys. Vang was then 22 and a member of a Hmong gang known as the Mongolian Boys Society. Vang and the others were convicted of violent forcible rape and sent to prison. Vang was released on parole two years ago.

Following his parole in 2014, Vang was supposed to be deported. Instead, he was released into the U.S. interior.

Immigration experts say that’s because Hillary Clinton failed to comply with a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that her State Department signed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2011.

The memorandum required the State Department to apply diplomatic pressure to foreign countries to repatriate their citizens. Immigration experts say that because Clinton refused to comply with the MoU, Laos was under no pressure to cooperate with the U.S. and begin repatriating its citizens. As a result, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was forced to release the convicted child rapist, who had ties to a gang-related sex-slave ring, back into American communities.

As Fox News reported, Vang is just one of thousands of illegal criminal aliens from Laos who were released to roam free inside the United States. “Last year, 3,735 illegal immigrant criminals from Laos were ordered deported but instead freed when the country refused to cooperate.”

While Laos refused to take back its criminal citizens, the State Department reportedly continued to issue more than 11,000 temporary visas to Laos over the last five years. Center for Immigration Studies’ Jessica Vaughan said:

Federal law requires that the U.S. impose visa sanctions on countries that won’t take back their citizens, Laos is one of the most uncooperative countries in the world in terms of taking back its citizens. In 2011, Hillary Clinton signed a formal agreement between the State Department and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that pledged she would take action and put diplomatic pressure on uncooperative countries to take back their citizens, but instead Clinton’s State Department gave Laos a pass on this issue.

Ian Smith, an attorney with the nonpartisan Immigration Reform Law Institute said:

Under federal law, there already exists a requirement to use visa sanctions in order to do that. Under the Obama Administration, Secretary Hillary Clinton said that the State Department would use the MoU to work with DHS to pressure countries to remove its citizens. But her State Department did nothing with regards to Laos. They refused over and over again to invoke targeted visa sanctions on the nation. They just kept handing out visas for the people of Laos, even though Laos was refusing to take back any of their criminals who were in our country.

Vaughn explained:

Clinton refused to use this very sharply focused tool [i.e. visa sanctions] to try to get Laos to take back convicted criminals, and as a result Americans have gotten hurt. There’s a public safety cost for her refusal to act on this… If she had done her job and complied with the law while she was Secretary of State, this criminal [Vang] more than likely would have been deported in 2014, just as ICE wanted, and he wouldn’t have been here to shoot up a jail waiting room.

NumbersUSA Director of Government Relations, Rosemary Jenks, said this failure to enforce U.S. immigration law “seems par for the course with the Obama-Clinton administration.”

“If you have a pool of convicted, violent criminals in the country, and you have an easy, legal way to get them out, what possible excuse can this administration come up with for not doing that?” Jenks asked.

According to reports, the two unarmed prison officers whom Vang shot in the neck and head area remain in critical condition. The Daily Mail writes that Officer Toamalama Scanlan was “a father-of-six, ten-year veteran of the force and a high school football coach.” Officer Juanita Davila was “a mother and grandmother who had worked at the Fresno County jail for 18 years.”