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ICE Detains Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent
The Department of Homeland Security claims that Roberts was taken into custody as part of a "targeted enforcement operation."
Sep 26, 2025
Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
The Des Moines Register reports that Roberts, who has served as superintendent in the Iowa district since 2023, was taken into custody by ICE agents on Friday morning.
The Des Moines Register has confirmed that Roberts is currently being held at the Pottawattamie County Jail, which the paper noted would put him in close proximity to the Omaha Immigration Court.
According to local news station KCCI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims that that Roberts was been taken into custody as part of a "targeted enforcement operation."
DHS said that after ICE officers approached Roberts' vehicle on Friday, he sped away and tried to escape. They eventually apprehended him and found a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash and a fixed-blade hunting knife inside his vehicle.
DHS also claimed that Roberts had been ordered to be removed from the US in May 2024, and that he had an existing weapons possession charge dating from 2020.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, put out a brief statement on Friday saying she was "made aware this morning that Ian Roberts was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and is in contact with the Iowa Department of Public Safety and federal authorities."
Reynolds last year touted a meeting she'd held with Roberts in which she said the two discussed "our shared goal of providing all Iowa students a world-class education."
Local residents who spoke with The Des Moines Register were stunned by news of Roberts' detention. Alison Hoeman, founder of the local nonprofit Des Moines Refugees Support, told the paper that her phone "blew up" from concerned parents as soon as they heard the news about Roberts' arrest.
“You know it’s the Black and brown kids who are worried," she said. "If it’s Ian Roberts who’s in trouble, what does that mean for them?”
Roberts was born to parents who immigrated to the US from Guyana, and he told local news station WHO 13 last year that he spent considerable time in both countries growing up.
Prior to pursuing a career in education, Roberts competed in the 2000 Summer Olympics as a middle-distance runner for the Guyana team.
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'I've Never Seen Anything Like It': Trump Policies Leave US Farmers in Dire Straits
"It's a five-alarm fire," one Kentucky soybean farmer said, describing the harmful effects of the president's tariffs.
Sep 16, 2025
As anticipated, US President Donald Trump's economic and immigration policies are harming American farmers' ability to earn a living—and testing the loyalty of one of the president's staunchest bases of support, according to reports published this week.
After Trump slapped 30% tariffs on Chinese imports in May, Beijing retaliated with measures including stopping all purchases of US soybeans. Before the trade war, a quarter of the soybeans—the nation's number one export crop—produced in the United States were exported to China. Trump's tariffs mean American soybean growers can't compete with countries like Brazil, the world's leading producer and exporter of the staple crop and itself the target of a 50% US tariff.
"We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61% of soybeans produced worldwide," Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, who is president of the American Soybean Association, told News Nation on Monday. "Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.”
Ragland continued:
It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25% of our total sales is currently missing. And right now we are not competitive with Brazil due to the retaliatory tariffs that are in place. Our prices are about 20% higher, and that means that the Chinese are going elsewhere because they can find a better value.
And the American soybean farmers and their families are suffering. They are 500,000 of us that produce soybeans, and we desperately need markets, and we need opportunity and a leveled playing field.
“There’s an artificial barrier that is built with these tariffs that makes us not be competitive," Ragland added.
Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council executive director Stefan Maupin likened the tariffs to "death by a thousand cuts."
“We’re in a significant and desperate situation where... none of the crops that farmers grow right now return a profit,” Maupin told the Tennessee Lookout Monday. “They don’t even break even.”
Alan Meadows, a fifth-generation soybean farmer in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, said that “this has been a really tough year for us."
“It started off really good," Meadows said. "We were in the field in late March, which is early for us. But then the wheels came off, so to speak, pretty quick.”
It started with devastating flooding in April, followed by a drier-than-usual summer. Higher supply costs due to inflation and Trump's tariffs exacerbated the dire situation.
“So much of what has happened and what’s going on here is totally out of our control,” Meadows said. “We just want a free, fair, and open market where we can sell our goods... as competitively as anybody else around the world. And we do feel that we produce a superior product here in the United States, and we just need to have the markets.”
Farmers are desperate for help from the federal government. However, Congress has not passed a new Farm Bill—legislation authorizing funding for agriculture and food programs—since 2018, without which "we do not have a workable safety net program when things like this happen in our economy," according to Maupin.
Maupin added that farmers “have done everything right, they’ve managed their finances well, they have put in a good crop... but they cannot change the weather, they cannot change the economy, they cannot change the markets."
"The weather is in the control of a higher power," he added, "and the economy and the markets are in control of Washington, DC."
It's not just soybean farmers who are hurting. Tim Maxwell, a 65-year-old Iowa grain and hog farmer, told the BBC Sunday that "our yields, crops, and weather are pretty good—but our [interest from] markets right now is on a low."
Despite his troubles, Maxwell remains supportive of Trump, saying that he is "going to be patient," adding, "I believe in our president."
However, there is a limit to Maxwell's patience with Trump.
"We're giving him the chance to follow through with the tariffs, but there had better be results," he said. "I think we need to be seeing something in 18 months or less. We understand risk—and it had better pay off."
It's also not just Trump's economic policies that are putting farmers in a squeeze. The president's anti-immigrant crackdown has left many farmers without the labor they need to operate.
“The whole thing is screwed up,” John Painter, a Pennsylvania organic dairy farmer and three-time Trump voter, told Politico Monday. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”
As Politico noted:
The US agricultural workforce fell by 155,000—about 7%—between March and July, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That tracks with Pew Research Center data that shows total immigrant labor fell by 750,000 from January through July. The labor shortage piles onto an ongoing economic crisis for farmers exacerbated by dwindling export markets that could leave them with crop surpluses.
“People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” said Tim Wood, another Pennsylvania dairy farmer and a member of the state's Farm Bureau board of directors.
Charlie Porter, who heads the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau’s Ag Labor and Safety Committee, told Politico that “it’s a shame you have hard-working people who need labor, and a group of people who are willing to work, and they have to look over their shoulder like they’re criminals—they're not."
Painter also said that he is "very disappointed" by Trump's immigration policies.
“It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said of the administration. “All of us, if we look back in history, including the president, we have somebody that came to this country for the American dream.”
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Dems Break GOP Supermajority in Iowa Statehouse with 20-Point Swing in Trump District
In a race that bodes well for Democrats' hopes in 2026, Catelin Drey won by championing "affordable housing, childcare, and healthcare, strong public schools, and bodily autonomy," wrote one progressive Iowa journalist.
Aug 27, 2025
Democrats have broken the GOP stranglehold over Iowa's statehouse with a resounding win in a special election for the state Senate on Tuesday.
In the Sioux City-area district that Donald Trump carried by more than 11 points in 2024 and which had been won by Republicans for 13 consecutive years, Democrat Catelin Drey is projected to have won a convincing 55% of the vote over her Republican opponent, Christopher Prosch.
By taking the vacant seat, Democrats not only added to the mounting evidence for a coming anti-Trump backlash in the midterms, but also ended the Republican supermajority in Iowa's state Senate, which has allowed the GOP to spend the past three years curtailing abortion rights, stripping civil rights protections from transgender people, and chipping away at public education.
Additionally, the Democrats have thrown up a barrier to Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who needs a supermajority to confirm appointments and will now require some measure of bipartisan approval.
Like other successful Democratic candidates, Drey's message focused on affordability, with a special emphasis on the cost of living for families. Her slogan was "Iowa's Senate needs more moms."
"She has highlighted issues of particular importance to young parents," wrote Laura Belin for the progressive Iowa politics site Bleeding Heartland. "Affordable housing, childcare, and healthcare, strong public schools, and bodily autonomy."
Drey seized on outrage toward Republican attempts to defund public schools. Teachers, she said in one ad, "shouldn't have to rely on GoFundMes just to do their jobs."
"One takeaway from the Iowa special election: don't listen to centrist Democrats on education," said Jennifer Berkshire, an education writer for The Nation and the New Republic. "Catelin Drey made defending and funding public schools a focal point of her campaign and called for rolling back Iowa's controversial school voucher program."
Drey's victory adds to the already mounting pile of evidence that backlash towards President Donald Trump, whose approval ratings have skidded to near-record lows in recent weeks, will manifest at the ballot box next November.
G. Elliott Morris, a political data journalist, wrote Wednesday in his Strength in Numbers newsletter that "there have been plenty of special elections" this year, with "all of them suggesting a pretty sizable leftward shift in the electoral environment since November 2024."
Citing data from The Downballot's special election tracker, Morris wrote:
On average in 2025, Democratic candidates in special elections are running about 16 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris’s margin versus Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election. That is 5-6 points higher than the average Democratic overperformance in 2017.
These crushing results, Democratic strategists say, are the reason behind Republicans' frantic efforts to ratchet up gerrymandering in states like Texas, where they control the state legislature.
"If you're wondering why Republicans are gerrymandering the fuck out of red states," said Democratic fundraiser Mike Nellis, "Democrats just flipped a Trump [+11] Iowa Senate seat. That's what they're afraid of."
With Drey's victory, Iowa Democrats have now won four consecutive special elections held in the state, flipping two other Republican-held seats. Riding that wave of optimism, they now have their sights set on a greater target: Iowa's two-term senator Joni Ernst, who comes up for reelection in 2026.
Defeating Ernst would be a significant boost to Democrats' efforts to regain control of the Senate in 2026. That effort may have been helped along by Ernst herself, who responded to questions at a town hall earlier this year about her support for savage cuts to healthcare in the GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill Act by callously remarking, "Well, we are all going to die."
An internal poll published Tuesday showed Democratic state senator Zach Wahls, one of many Democrats vying for the party's nomination, edging Ernst out in a hypothetical general election. Other polls show the race to be within the margin of error.
In a video posted to X, Wahls said Tuesday's Democratic victory is further evidence that "the state is in play," after not having elected a Democratic senator since 2008.
"Iowans are sick of the inability of the current administration and politicians like Joni Ernst to deal with rising costs. They are sick of the corruption, and they are ready for change," Wahls said. "We are going to flip this US Senate seat, the exact same way that Catelin Drey flipped her state Senate seat."
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