Ian Roberts began this academic year as superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools. He was on the rise, boasting of improved academic results and asking voters to approve more funding.
But on Friday, about a week before classes let out for the summer, Dr. Roberts was sentenced by a federal judge to two years in prison for lying about his citizenship on an employment form and for possessing guns while in the country illegally. The sentence was less than the roughly three years that prosecutors had sought, but more than the probation and immediate deportation that defense lawyers had wanted.
The unraveling of Dr. Roberts’s career began in September when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers tried to detain him. Dr. Roberts, a former Olympic runner who was scheduled to be at an elementary school field day, fled from the officers. He was eventually arrested, and a gun was found in his district-issued vehicle.
At first, Des Moines residents responded with shock and outrage. Protesters gathered downtown. Students walked out of class. In just over two years in Iowa, Dr. Roberts, who is from Guyana, had injected swagger and self-confidence into the Des Moines schools. Many believed ICE must have had made some sort of mistake. Surely, they thought, the well-liked leader of Iowa’s largest school district was not an undocumented immigrant.
But as details emerged, and as the Trump administration drew attention to the case, it became clear that Dr. Roberts’s achievements as superintendent had been possible only because he had repeatedly lied about his immigration status and inflated his qualifications. He soon resigned from the school district. Federal officials outlined how, for years, he had bounced from school system to school system without permission to work in the United States.
As Des Moines’s school year moved on without him, Dr. Roberts sat in the Polk County Jail, facing federal felony charges that carried the possibility of a long prison term, as well as near-certain deportation.
In November, more than 70 percent of voters approved the extra funding for the school district that he had sought. In January, he pleaded guilty after reaching an agreement with prosecutors.
At Des Moines’s federal courthouse on Friday, a mile and a half down Grand Avenue from where Dr. Roberts once attended school board meetings, the former superintendent told Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger that he was “pleading with you for leniency, for mercy.”
“I committed a crime,” Dr. Roberts, shackled and wearing a green-and-white jail jumpsuit, told the judge. “I broke the law — something that I’ve spent 25 years or more telling children and adults not to do.”
In a lengthy speech, Dr. Roberts described an impoverished upbringing in Guyana, a small country in South America, and his decision to immigrate to the United States as a young man. He spoke about the degrees he had earned from American colleges, his training to become an Olympic athlete and the purpose he found leading schools across the country.
“I’m committed to spending the rest and remainder of my life in education, redeeming myself,” he said.
Prosecutors, defense lawyers and the judge all acknowledged the paradox of the case: Dr. Roberts lied, cheated and broke the law to take hard jobs that, by most accounts, he performed well.
“He was helping educate young people,” said one of his lawyers, Alfredo Parrish. “He did a bad thing to do good work.”
MacKenzie Tubbs, a prosecutor, spoke of “the many positive contributions” that Dr. Roberts had made in Des Moines and elsewhere. But the quality of his work, Ms. Tubbs argued, did not detract from the seriousness of his crimes.
“He made a choice to exploit the trust that the public gave him,” Ms. Tubbs said, adding that the unraveling of his lies damaged trust in institutions and had caused disruptions. She said that Dr. Roberts had employment authorization for only 18 months of his career in education, and that he had an active deportation order even as he led the Des Moines schools.
As she announced the sentence, Judge Ebinger, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, walked through her decision-making. She said the crime was serious and “not an isolated ethical lapse or administrative error.”
But she also noted the dozens of pages of letters submitted to her that attested to Dr. Roberts’s skill as an educator, adding that it was clear that “Dr. Roberts had a positive impact in this community and others despite the deception.”
Judge Ebinger told him that he was now a felon, and that he would be transferred to ICE custody after his prison term. Then, just before Dr. Roberts was led out of court by marshals, she said, “Dr. Roberts, I wish you the best moving forward.”
“Thank you,” he said from the defendant’s table. “You as well, Your Honor.”
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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