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Notes -
ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested Ian Andre Roberts, who is the superintendent of the Des Moines (IA) public school district. If you've been following along with this aspect of the culture war, you probably figure he was arrested for abetting or protecting a student or faculty or staff member from them. But no; the guy is, according to ICE here illegally and was given a final order of removal in May 2024. ICE is strongly implying he never had any work authorization beyond a long-since-expired student visa. It seems to me pretty bold for someone here without work authorization to be in such a high-profile position. Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired. Someone screwed up there.
Other aspects are that he had a weapons possession charge in Pennsylvania from 2021, but this was a pissant ("5th degree summary offense") thing about having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded. More serious is that he fled the ICE agents when stopped; his car was found with a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash. I don't much care about the illegal-alien-in-possession aspect; making a whole range of normal activities super-illegal based on a status offense is a tyrant's trick. But fleeing certainly seems to indicate a guilty mind rather than some sort of error or misunderstanding on ICEs part.
At first I thought they might have the wrong guy; there's an Ian Andre Roberts from Guyana who competed in the Olympics. But no, that's actually the same guy.
On reddit, /r/desmoines is up in arms... about the arrest, of course, not about the school district hiring a guy with no work authorization.
Sounds like the kind of Stupid Human Trick that ends up with "and the guy was shot by his own rifle" that may engender amusement in those who think hunting is immoral.
Depending on how well the vetting was done, I guess. There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive. And I remember years ago when I was in third level education where the college hired someone who later turned out to be on the run from charges of assault in Sweden.
So even good checks can have someone slip through the cracks, and maybe this guy used the fact that he was an immigrant to cover up any gaps in the background check? (e.g. "Yeah, I am waiting for the government office back home to get that paperwork, you know the kind of delays that happen").
The story sounds odd, though. Wikipedia has a scanty article up, and it says that he was working as school principal back in 2012. So he was in the US presumably on some kind of sports scholarship, graduated, got (it would seem) a fairly high level of education - and then started work? But he was supposed to be finally deported in 2024? I don't understand what was going on there.
This seems apples and oranges. There is no background check which can 100% assure you that someone is not abusive, or not a North Korean spy.
By contrast, if someone has a work visa is something which can be determined on a prima farcie basis. Sure, it is possible that he forged his visa, or stole an identity, or obtained his visa based on false statements, or blackmailed an official into improperly granting his visa, and I would not expect a school district to do the kind of digging to find these. But from what we know so far, it sounds more like they did not even check.
Is employing someone without checking their visa status (or nationality) an offense, criminal or regulatory?
My assumption is that he had some sort of bridging status that got formally revoked at the end of 2024, which might answer the question of how he managed to get into the job (since I assume HR's not doing quarterly immigration status checks)
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