Democrats tell us that illegal immigrants are not allowed to work, vote, or collect Social Security. Yet somehow an illegal immigrant managed to become the superintendent of Iowa‘s largest public school system. He was also registered to vote in Maryland.
The arrest of Ian Roberts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at the end of September and the exposure of many lies he told to get to where he was show why Democratic immigration policies are useless and damaging, and why President Donald Trump’s mass deportations are necessary.
Many details of Roberts’s case are unclear, but it appears he first entered the United States on a student visa in 1998 to attend Coppin State University in Baltimore, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He then secured a second student visa in 1999 to attend St. John’s University in New York, where he earned a master’s degree in general education.
At that point, he should have left the country, but like so many foreign students, Roberts illegally overstayed his visa. He got a job teaching in Baltimore Public Schools in 2001, and it is not clear if or how he was legally authorized to do so. He enrolled in Morgan State University’s urban educational leadership doctoral program in the fall of 2002 and continued doing academic work through 2007, but according to the university, he never earned his degree.
From there, Roberts found work at public schools in Washington, St. Louis, and Oakland, California, before being named superintendent of Millcreek Township School District in Erie, Pennsylvania. It is unclear on what legal basis he was allowed to take any of these jobs.
Throughout Roberts’s travels across the country, he maintained a Maryland driver’s license from 2001 through 2024, and he had been registered to vote in the state since 2012. Maryland records show that he signed a registration document “under penalty of perjury” affirming he was a U.S. citizen, and the state mailed him valid ballots that may have been cast in elections, although there is no record of Roberts actually voting.
At no point was Roberts a citizen with the right to vote, nor should he have been able to secure the same Social Security card that citizens do. Immigrants with a valid work permit can obtain a card, but unlike those of citizens, it has the words “valid for work only with DHS authorization” written on it in all caps. This signals to any competent employer that a separate DHS work permit is needed to make the hire legal.
Des Moines Public Schools officials claim that Roberts presented them with a valid Social Security card and driver’s license when he was hired in 2023. Did he have a fake Social Security card, or did Des Moines not ask for his work authorization? Considering the many lies Roberts told, the former seems likely.
In addition to claiming falsely that he earned a doctorate from Morgan State, Roberts lied about George Washington University once naming him the District of Columbia’s “Principal of the Year.” Contacted for comment on this, a GWU spokesperson said the university “has no record of awarding such recognition to DC principals, and did not present this award.”
Roberts also told Des Moines Public Schools that he “completed education programs” at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and had a master’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Harvard, Georgetown, and MIT have no record of Roberts attending, let alone any indication that he completed education programs there.
Roberts also racked up two gun charges, one with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 2020 and a separate incident in Pennsylvania in 2022. It is against federal law for a person on a non-immigrant visa even to possess a firearm, yet Roberts had a handgun when he was arrested by ICE agents last month.
THE SENSELESS SCHUMER SHUTDOWN
When President Barack Obama dismantled ICE’s internal immigration enforcement system in 2014, frauds such as Roberts were the type of illegal immigrant the Democratic Party was trying to protect. It worked. Thanks to Democratic nonenforcement, Roberts could lie his way to a $280,000 salary in Des Moines. He also got his former employer, the Millcreek School District in Erie, to pay off three lawsuits totalling over $400,000 in damages against him.
The Roberts saga is not an isolated one. It is the inevitable outcome of Democrats deliberately weakening immigration controls and of many institutions refusing to take vetting requirements seriously. For decades, Roberts manipulated loopholes, exploited lax enforcement, and profited from lies that a functional system would have caught. Instead, he rose to the top of one of the nation’s largest school districts by breaking the very laws he swore to obey. His arrest is a reminder that immigration enforcement is not optional. It is essential to protect the integrity of schools, elections, and communities.
