LEFT WING LOONS
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Title: "The One About the Illegal Immigrant School Superintendent"
Source:
National Review
URL Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/corn ... migrant-school-superintendent/
Published: Oct 1, 2025
Author: Jeffrey Blehar
Post Date: 2025-10-01 16:29:33 by Mudboy Slim
Keywords: None
Views: 6
The federal government has shut down, readers, and that’s as close as I get to a “snow day” around here at National Review. Nobody’s budging on their negotiating position in Washington for the time being, and we’ve all placed our bets on who’s going to catch the blame. (My position: While this will likely factor into Virginia’s statewide elections in November, it will have no effect on 2026 either way.) Meanwhile, I’m still trying to convince my editors that as long as the feds are on strike I qualify for a fully paid vacation. (Surely I am the living definition of a “nonessential worker,” no?) But since it seems unlikely that I will win my claim against these Big Business hacks, let’s instead spend a few moments savoring the details of an utterly fantastic story from America’s heartland last week. Yes, readers, we need to talk for a moment about Des Moines School Superintendent Ian Roberts: dapper speed demon, woke educationalist, résumé fraudster, and illegal immigrant. I have sequenced these key qualities in what I believe to be the properly ascending order of egregiousness. To work backward from the worst, however, you read that right: Up until two days ago, the superintendent of the Des Moines, Iowa, public school system was an illegal alien from Guyana. Dr. Ian Roberts, who took over the job of superintendent in 2023, was revealed last week to have been living in the country illegally ever since 1999, when he overstayed his student visa. According to the New York Times, ICE officials approached Roberts while he was in his car on Friday. In a moment that plays a bit like an outtake from Chappelle’s Show, Roberts dropped what he was doing and sped off in a panic, abandoning his car near a wooded area before taking off on foot. (He was later apprehended having in his possession a gun, a knife, and $3,000 in cash.) Later it was revealed that Roberts had already pled guilty to multiple speeding tickets and unlawful-firearms- possession charges in the past — without stirring any investigation into his immigration status. Keep in mind, Roberts is not a young man. He is a veteran administrator. As the Times puts it: “Over a two-decade education career, Dr. Robert had moved from state to state and built a national profile as an administrator. He wrote books, spoke at conferences and supported racial equity programs, sometimes drawing criticism from conservatives.” “It still seems baffling to me how someone could be hired and their status not be legal in that process,” said the Rev. Robyn Bles, who has a child in the district. “The case that is being presented to us doesn’t stand up to the fact that he has been hired and worked in multiple districts and multiple states. So what’s going on in all of those places?” If you can read that paragraph without cracking up, then congratulations: You’re less embittered than I am. The rest of the article is full of quotes from well-meaning but utterly bewildered Des Moines–area liberals asking how a charming young grifter from a perfect demographic category could possibly rise in state government without being reported to ICE? (And in the field of public education, no less!) To ask the question out loud like that — which it never occurs to authors of the Times article to do — is to answer it. You would be shocked at how easy it is to launder your immigration status in fields with strong progressive sympathies, and while Roberts may be the boldest such fraud, I can assure you that he is by no means the only one. (We will discover more in the age of Trump.) The Iowa school board voted 6–0 on Monday morning to replace Roberts, which it sort of had to do given that it had been officially notified that Roberts is not authorized to work in the United States — not even as a burger-flipper, much less a state employee with six-figure salary and a 401(k). ICE is presumably now going to deport him back to Guyana — where he has not lived for 26 years — with extreme prejudice. What can you do except tip your cap to a truly exceptional man? In my earliest days here, I wrote an ode to George Santos (then a Republican representative from New York, presently a jailbird) titled “In Praise of Hilarious Frauds.” How can you ask me to feel any differently about a true gold-star achiever such as Roberts? Any old fool can overstay a student visa and live a life in the shadows nowadays, but it takes real shamelessness and a special kind of entrepreneurial grift to do that while asking for civic responsibility over the education of 30,000 public-school students. I haven’t even mentioned the final, delightful twist in this whole story: As it turns out, Dr. Roberts, Des Moines’s top educator, isn’t even a doctor. He fabricated more than just his immigration status; he fabricated his educational qualifications as well. (He pretended to have a Ph.D. from Morgan State University, when in fact he has nothing at all. But apparently he is a very sharp dresser.) My friend Iowahawk announced on Twitter/X this morning that “Doctor” Ian Roberts is “the greatest charming grifter to fleece dimwitted gullible Iowans since Professor Harold Hill.” I have to nod in vigorous approval at the sheer chutzpah required for an illegal alien to take the job of head of a red state capital’s public school system — proof that immigrants do the sorts of jobs that Americans just won’t do. Hey, Ian. don’t be blue: You can always try getting a job here in Chicago if you manage to slip away from ICE once again — the CTU will hire anybody.
Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Ian Roberts speaks during the "Standing Up For Public Education Rally" at Goodrell Middle School in Des Moines, Iowa, May 1, 2025.
(Lily Smith/The Register/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images via Reuters)
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