The spectacular tale of a gun-toting illegal alien captured in Des Moines, Iowa, last week keeps getting stranger by the day. ICE agents chased the man until he abandoned his vehicle and fled into the woods on foot. They had to call in state troopers with a canine unit to track Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Ian Andre Roberts into the bushes where he was hiding. The Department of Justice has announced that it’s launching an investigation into the school board over its hiring and vetting practices. However… this isn’t the only school district where Roberts has worked during his 22 years in the country as an illegal alien.
This story isn’t just an indictment of our broken immigration system that allows illegal aliens to hang out in the country for decades without being deported. It’s an indictment of America’s education bureaucracy, the teacher unions, and the Democrat Party’s DEI religion.
Roberts got into the country in 1999 on an F-1 student visa. Under the F-1 system, an immigrant can come into the country for four years for college. They can sometimes get a one-year extension to work at a full-time job in their chosen field. Just two years into his education, and well before he had finished his bachelor’s degree, Roberts was hired as a full-time teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2001.
His visa expired in 2003, and he never applied for any sort of extension. Roberts was officially an illegal alien from that point on. He may not have even finished his bachelor’s degree. Despite those nitpicky little facts, Roberts was eventually promoted to serve as the principal of a school in Baltimore!
He left that job in 2010 to take on an unspecified leadership role in the District of Columbia Public Schools. No one in our nation’s capital noticed that they hired an illegal alien who had overstayed his visa by seven years.
It appears that when Roberts realized that the real money in education was in the administration/bureaucracy side of things, and not in the classroom, he suddenly started touting his doctoral degrees. He claimed on job applications with multiple school districts to have two different doctoral degrees from two different universities that say they never heard of him.
No one ever bothered to check that. Perhaps that’s why Roberts was then able to be hired for a leadership role in Aspire Public Schools in Oakland, California, and later in the St. Louis Public Schools in Missouri.
In July 2020, Roberts was hired as the Superintendent of the Millcreek Township School District in Erie, Pennsylvania. He spent three years on the job there. The main reason why Roberts was hired was to implement DEI hiring and promotion practices in the school district. And boy, did the Erie taxpayers get to bear the brunt of that!
During Roberts’s tenure in Erie, the district’s HR Director quit in frustration over “unlawful treatment.” The taxpayers in the district were forced to pony up $250,000 to settle that lawsuit. The DEI policies implemented by Roberts also passed over a highly qualified teacher named Joe Orlando, who was very much qualified for a promotion to a school principal position. That lawsuit was settled for $87,500. Roberts also demoted a white man from an administrative position, who is now considering EEOC legal action against the district.
In 2023, Roberts was hired as the Superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools. In May 2024, ICE called the Des Moines school board to inform them that their new superintendent was a Guyana national who had just been issued a final deportation order by an immigration judge.
You’d think that the school board would have sh*t their pants over that news.
Instead, they kept Ian Roberts on the job. He was still the superintendent and collecting a salary last week when ICE agents had to chase him down in the bushes.
It’s great that the Department of Justice is investigating the Des Moines school board for its hiring practices now. But this guy was able to find lucrative education jobs in five different states and the District of Columbia. He ran school districts in red states and blue states, even though he might not even have a bachelor’s degree.
This gun-toting illegal alien school superintendent also registered to vote while he was living in Maryland. So, the DOJ might want to take a look into that as well. Just sayin’.