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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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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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'Deplorable': Iowa's GOP Governor Opts Out of Summer Food Program for Kids
"Announcing three days before Christmas that we've deliberately chosen not to feed hungry kids? The Dickensian parallels write themselves," said the board chair of the Iowa Hunger Coalition.
Dec 25, 2023
Iowa's Republican-led government sparked outrage late last week by declining to participate in a federal program that would have provided low-income residents with $40 a month in additional food assistance during the coming summer.
Created by the U.S. Congress late last year, the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) for Children program aims to boost nutrition benefits for families with school-aged children who typically receive free or reduced-price meals during the school year. Starting in summer 2024, eligible families will receive a prepaid debit card with $40 per child for three months.
But in a press release issued Friday, the state's health and human services department said it had notified the Biden administration that Iowa would be opting out of Summer EBT, claiming the program doesn't sufficiently restrict the kinds of food that families can purchase.
Kim Reynolds, Iowa's Republican governor, echoed that assertion in a statement focused more on childhood obesity than food insecurity, which impacts one in 11 kids in her state.
"Federal Covid-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don't provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families," said Reynolds. "An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic."
"Starvation is not a legitimate strategy to reduce childhood obesity."
The Iowa Hunger Coalition (IHC) noted that because of the government's decision, 240,000 children in the state will lose out on $120 in food assistance this coming summer.
"This is an unconscionable decision," Luke Elzinga, the IHC's board chair, said in a statement. "Announcing three days before Christmas that we've deliberately chosen not to feed hungry kids? The Dickensian parallels write themselves."
Elzinga criticized the state government's suggestion that "low-income Iowans can't be trusted to make their own choices about what to feed their kids" as "incredibly insulting."
"We've somehow decided that parents know best when it comes to school curriculum but not what to feed their kids? Starvation is not a legitimate strategy to reduce childhood obesity," Elzinga said, adding that "an abundance of academic research has made clear the link between food insecurity and obesity in the United States."
Hunger is growing across the U.S. as safety net expansions enacted during the coronavirus pandemic continue to unwind. Some states have moved to make crisis-era programs such as universal free school meals permanent while others, such as Iowa and Arkansas, have worked aggressively to curb benefits for poor residents.
IHC said Saturday that Iowa's food banks are currently seeing record-breaking demand and warned that the government's pledge to bolster existing state-level programs while refusing to take part in Summer EBT will exacerbate the crisis.
"Hunger is a policy choice, and this is just one more unfortunate example of that fact," said Elzinga. "Summer EBT should be a bipartisan no-brainer policy win for Iowa's kids. The Iowa Hunger Coalition will be making this an issue with the Iowa legislature in 2024. We can not and will not accept this disastrous decision by Governor Reynolds. It's deplorable that Iowa's leadership has chosen to make feeding children a political issue."
Democratic State Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott told The Gazette on Friday that the government's rejection of Summer EBT is a "huge loss for Iowa."
"If we're talking 20-some million (dollars) coming from the federal government, I don't think the state is going to be matching that," said Trone Garriott, who works with the Des Moines Area Religious Council Food Pantry Network. "They are just going to be leaving it to the charities to make up the difference."
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