More than eight months after he was arrested, and three months after he pleaded guilty and admitted he is not a U.S. citizen, Ian Andre Roberts remained on Maryland’s voter rolls, according to a group that has been tracking the case.
Roberts is due to be sentenced Friday for lying about his citizenship when he won the school superintendent’s job in Des Moines, Iowa, and for having a small arsenal of guns in his possession — also against the law for an illegal immigrant.
But Maryland has so far declined to boot him from its voter rolls, despite the public reporting, and Roberts’ own guilty plea in February when he admitted he “was not and has never been a United States citizen,” and was “illegally and unlawfully present” in the U.S.
Roberts first registered in 2017 and re-registered again five years later, both times wrongly checking “Yes” when asked if he was a citizen, according to records obtained by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has confirmed through tracing that the Roberts sitting in jail in Iowa is the same man on the rolls in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
While the voter deceit has been going on for years, his deception of schools across the country has lasted even longer, according to federal prosecutors, who say he began working as a principal at a school in Maryland as far back as 2008, then was a principal in the District of Columbia, a school district administrator in St. Louis, and then a superintendent in Pennsylvania and Iowa.
He lacked legal work status for each of those jobs, government lawyers said in a court filing late last week.
Yet he was hired, time and again.
When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement finally caught up with Roberts in Des Moines last September, he ran away on foot, leaving his school-issued vehicle.
While some officers chased him down, others went over the vehicle and found a loaded Glock 19 pistol, an extended magazine loaded with 29 more rounds, $3,000 in cash, his Guyanese passport, a bogus Social Security card and a copy of his May 2025 order of deportation issued by an immigration judge.
He had three other weapons at home — a Sig Sauer P320 pistol, a Remington bolt-action rifle and a Remington shotgun, along with plenty of ammunition — none of which he was supposed to possess, given his lack of legal status.
That weight of evidence might have silenced others, but Roberts, a former Olympian runner for his native Guyana who has always displayed a fake-it-till-you-make-it optimism, has been anything but silent as he sits in his jail cell awaiting the outcome of his case.
He’s continued posting to his LinkedIn page, delivering missives on the importance of reaching schoolchildren where they are, the importance of hope, the power of prayer and the demand for redemption.
He called his time behind bars his “current assignment” and said it’s been made bearable by fellow inmates seeking out his advice, assistance or spiritual counseling.
In one post, he expounded on the need for “radical empathy” and removing the “red asterisk” of judgment that holds people back.
“And if there’s one beside your name — placed there by a mistake you made, a label you didn’t ask for, or a judgment you once accepted — I hope you find the courage and community to erase it too,” he wrote.
Roberts has even published a book from jail, “Unshakable: How bold leaders win hearts, inspire minds and obtain results during crisis,” filled with similar reflections and mantras for burgeoning leaders.
“Regardless of our situation, circumstance or prediction about outcomes, you always have one more move,” he wrote.
What is not in those writings is any explanation of how he managed to mislead so many people for so long.
Matthew O’Brien, a former immigration judge who is now deputy executive director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the simple answer is people were inclined not to look.
“It sounds shocking, but believe it or not, it’s actually fairly easy to do this on a long-term basis,” Mr. O’Brien said. “The system is built to allow people like this to exploit it.”
In Iowa, school officials insisted they went through a “methodical, data-informed and rigorous” hiring process and blamed an outside contractor for not verifying Roberts’ work status.
A Pennsylvania township that hired Roberts in 2020 also blamed a contractor for helping hire him.
In Maryland, election officials have brushed aside questions about his place on the voter rolls.
In a statement in September, after Roberts’ initial arrest, the state cautioned against assuming it was the same Roberts, then said it could only cancel the name if the person self-removed, or if a local election board were to “receive information” that he wasn’t a citizen.
Apparently, a guilty plea and impending sentencing aren’t enough information. PILF said his name was still on the rolls when it checked Wednesday, showing him still to be registered as a Democrat at an address in Greenbelt, and a polling place of Greenbelt Middle School’s gym.
There was even a sample ballot prepared for him for the June 23 Democratic primary.
A group of Republican state lawmakers wrote election officials in January asking them about Roberts’ removal. Delegate Matthew Morgan told The Washington Times they never got a response.
Neither the state Board of Elections nor Prince George’s County’s board responded to inquiries for this story.
PILF’s Logan Churchwell said the state could have blocked someone like Roberts from getting on the rolls in the first place if it had used Homeland Security’s SAVE system, which can verify someone’s eligibility for government programs.
“It’s telling that SAVE is used in [Maryland] for refugee programs but not voter registration,” Mr. Churchwell said. “The Biden and Trump administrations have worked in succession to optimize the system — the only one of its kind. If a state won’t use SAVE, it’s proof of ideological capture and nothing more.”
The Justice Department said the sentencing guidelines call for him to serve 30 to 37 months in prison, and Assistant U.S. Attorney MacKenzie Benson Tubbs said he should serve the full 37 months.
“For more than 15 years as an education professional, defendant cultivated a public image grounded in integrity, leadership, and authenticity. Yet behind that public image, defendant engaged in conduct that undermined those values,” she wrote to the judge.
She also said Roberts shouldn’t get a lighter sentence just because he will likely be deported at the end of his sentence.
Roberts’ own sentencing memorandum to the judge was filed last week but was sealed.
His lawyer asked that it be unsealed and a magistrate judge has agreed, subject to review by the district judge. It hadn’t been made public as of Wednesday afternoon.
