Des Moines, Iowa, public school leader detained by immigration agents
Monks, iowa – Federal immigration agents owned the head of public schools in the capital of Iowa, the school board announced on Friday.
The superintendent of the public schools of the monks, Ian Roberts, was detained by American immigration and customs agents on Friday morning, said president of the school board Jackie Norris in a statement. A district spokesperson said they had no additional information to share for the moment.
“We have no confirmed information about the reason why Dr. Roberts is held or the next potential steps,” said Norris in his declaration.
American immigration and customs’ application files show Roberts under their custody in a county prison in western Iowa. But an employee of Pottawattamie County prison said that he was not currently in their prison. Council Bluffs prison is around 130 miles west of monks.
An employee of the ICE office in St. Paul, Minnesota, who oversees operations in Iowa, said he had no information on the arrest of Roberts. An e-mail at the national media line of ICE was not immediately returned and his phone sounded unanswered. Additional calls to other regional offices in Omaha, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri, also remained unanswered.
Roberts, 52, began his mandate as a superintendent of the schools of the monks, which serve 30,000 students, in July 2023. A biography for Roberts listed on the district website says that he was born from immigrant parents in Guyana and spent a large part of his childhood in Brooklyn, New York.
The Coppin State University website offers a profile of former Roberts students, a graduate of the Baltimore school in 1998. In her, Roberts said that his father had immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and that his mother immigrated in the early 2000s.
