IOWA’S STUNNING, EMBARRASSING IMMIGRATION MESS. On May 16, 2023, the Des Moines, Iowa, school board hired Ian Roberts to be its new superintendent. Roberts began the job on July 1, 2023.
By the end of July, the board got some surprising news about their new superintendent. He had been named in a $250,000 settlement with an ex-employee at his previous job as head of the Millcreek Township School District in Pennsylvania. Melody Ellington, the Pennsylvania district’s human resources director under Roberts, claimed she had been subjected to “unlawful treatment.” The nature of that treatment was not revealed. Roberts said he could not comment on a confidential personnel issue, but he insisted the problem “had absolutely nothing to do with me leaving Millcreek and coming to Des Moines.”
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Meanwhile, officials at the Des Moines board said Roberts’s problem was news to them. “Given the confidential nature of the settlement, there is nothing that Des Moines public schools would have known about prior to the hiring of Dr. Roberts,” the board chair, Teree Caldwell-Johnson, told the Des Moines Register. “For the same reason, this would not have been picked up by the search firm doing the background check.”
There was more. It turns out Roberts left two other settlements in his wake in Pennsylvania. Both of them, one for $87,500 and the other for $66,000, went to school officials demoted by Roberts. Altogether, Roberts left the Millcreek system on the hook for $403,500 in legal settlements. His new employers in Des Moines knew nothing about it.
Des Moines school officials were in for a far bigger surprise last Friday, when they learned that Roberts, who came to the United States from Guyana sometime in the 1990s, was in the United States illegally and had, in fact, received a final order of deportation last year. The board learned that from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who arrested Roberts and then issued this statement to the press: “Today, ICE Des Moines arrested Ian Andre Roberts, a criminal illegal alien from Guyana in possession of a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash, and a fixed blade hunting knife. At the time of his arrest, Roberts was working as the Superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools despite being an illegal alien with a final order of removal and no work authorization.”
ICE said Roberts “sped away” when approached by officers. They found Roberts’s car abandoned in the woods and later located Roberts and arrested him. He remains in ICE custody.
ICE said Roberts first entered the U.S. in 1999 on a student visa and had a weapons possession charge against him from February 2020. He never became a permanent legal resident or a citizen. He also did not leave. Even when he had the weapons charge — that was apparently while he was running the Pennsylvania school system — his illegal status did not come to light.
Then came the final order of removal, deportation, in May 2024. (For those noting such things, the action, last year, was obviously not part of the Trump crackdown.) Roberts said nothing to the Des Moines school board and continued in his role.
The rapid series of events left school officials frazzled. They stressed that they relied on a search firm to find Roberts when they were seeking a new superintendent in 2023. They thought Roberts was totally legit. “No one here was aware of any citizenship or immigration issues that Dr. Roberts may have been facing,” board Chairwoman Jackie Norris said after the news became public.
Norris pointed to the I-9 form, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services document in which a prospective employee verifies to a new employer that he is authorized to work in the U.S. “We can tell you that on his I-9, he stated he was a citizen,” Norris said, “and he provided two forms of verification: a driver’s license and a Social Security card.” Should the board have checked further? Norris put all the blame on the search firm. “Nothing in the information the search firm gave us contained any question about his citizenship,” she said.
Norris referred frequently to “Dr. Roberts,” and the revelations caused some journalists in Iowa to take a closer look at his history. It appears Roberts earned a B.A. from Coppin State University, a historically black university in Baltimore, in 1998. He earned a master’s degree from St. John’s University two years later. The Des Moines Register noted that he “has claimed for many years” that he earned a doctoral degree from Morgan State University, another historically black university, but “a university spokesman [said] that Roberts did not obtain a degree from the school, despite attending Morgan State from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2007.” Iowa television station KCCI noted that when Roberts was hired in Des Moines, the school district “announced that Roberts had earned a doctorate from Trident University, a private for-profit online institution.” KCCI was not able to confirm that.
All this raises questions about why board members knew so little about their superintendent. In her remarks, Norris, a former top aide to first lady Michelle Obama who is now running for the Democratic nomination for senator from Iowa, perhaps inadvertently hinted at a reason. With his engaging personality and flamboyant dress — one article described the now-resigned Roberts in “a maroon three-piece suit, candy cane striped bow tie and matching Nike Air Force 1 sneakers” — Roberts, the first black superintendent in the school board’s history, simply bowled people over. “He sparked joy in our kids, and an excitement in our kids,” Norris said. “This is an individual who brought a lot of enthusiasm and vibrancy to our community.”
Finally, despite it all, despite the lies, the deportation order, the gun, the evading police, and more, Norris seemed positive about Roberts. “Two things can be true,” she told reporters. “It is possible that you may not be a citizen, but you are still a good human being.”