How exactly does a Guyanese immigrant alleged to be in the United States illegally come to be superintendent of the largest school district in Iowa? Just as important, how did Ian Roberts get hired by a half-dozen public school districts in the US over the past 25 years before landing his $300,000-a-year job in Des Moines?

These are questions that point to serious flaws in the public hiring and immigration processes that took decades to catch up to Roberts. His arrest on Friday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents set off an embarrassing set of revelations that have betrayed a community’s trust and illustrate the myriad flaws of the US immigration system — flaws highlighted by Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Roberts was no victim here. He evaded immigration authorities for years, and hoodwinked a school board and community not only about his eligibility to work, but also about his academic qualifications.

Even before he was hired in Des Moines in 2023, there were red flags that should have prompted school officials to look deeper. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Roberts first entered the country on a student visa in 1999 — the same year he claimed to have graduated with a bachelor’s degree from a US university. He also claimed to have gotten a doctorate from Morgan State University in Maryland, which later said it had no such record.

Visa overstays such as Roberts’s have been a persistent yet overlooked problem in the US immigration system: By some accounts, “overstayers” account for more than 40 per cent of all undocumented immigrants. They can live and work undetected in the US for years — but seldom do they have careers as high-profile as that of Roberts.

A charismatic figure, Roberts was easily recognised in the district in his colourful suits, and over the years he had built a national reputation as an educator. He moved from teacher to principal to superintendent, working in public schools in New York City, Baltimore, St Louis, Washington and Pennsylvania. He was registered to vote in Maryland, attesting under penalty of perjury that he was a US citizen.

Employers are responsible for verifying that those they hire are either US citizens or authorised to work. Federal officials say that Roberts had no such authorisation, and in May 2024, he was scheduled for a final deportation hearing. Failure to appear at such a hearing is a grave matter that can incur fines and even imprisonment before deportation.

Nevertheless, Roberts, who at the time was less than a year into his job in Des Moines, skipped the hearing. The judge issued a deportation order that he leave the country. Roberts’s lawyer says the case was “resolved successfully” in March 2025, but provided scant details.

In the past, such orders often languished, particularly for immigrants not already in detention. Democrats failed to fully take on such issues when they had the opportunity during the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Voters who lived with the uncertainties of unfettered immigration grew increasing impatient as the problem festered.

Enforcement has changed dramatically under Trump, who has gone beyond merely enforcing immigration laws and cleaning up administrative messes such as those that led to Iowa’s embarrassment. Trump has taken his immigration mandate into harsher terrain, generously funding and militarising Ice. This has cheered Trump’s Maga base but shocked and repelled others, poisoning any goodwill that might have been generated by removing only undocumented immigrants with criminal records. The majority of Ice arrestees have come from the armies of undocumented workers who pick crops, tend gardens, deliver lunches, build houses and so on.

Roberts’s case was different, requiring a targeted investigation. When he was apprehended last week, after first fleeing in his car and then on foot, Ice says he had a loaded handgun, a hunting knife and $3,000 in cash in his school-leased vehicle. Undocumented immigrants are prohibited from possessing guns, and last Thursday Roberts was charged with unlawful possession of firearms.

Given all this, the initial local reaction to news of Roberts’s arrest was surprising. The school board put Roberts on paid leave, with chair Jackie Norris calling on the community to engage in “radical empathy” — a favourite phrase of Roberts — calling him an “integral part” of the community. Parents turned out in droves to demand his release. Students staged a walkout. Mazie Stilwell, executive director of the liberal group Progress Iowa, decried Trump’s willingness “to use political power against anyone who disagrees with him”.

But Roberts’s story fell apart too quickly for him to become a cause célèbre. The Iowa Department of Education soon revoked his administrative licence. The school board pivoted to unpaid leave, and on Tuesday gave him until noon to produce evidence of citizenship. He could not, and that evening the board accepted his resignation.

A chastened school board issued a statement on Wednesday saying it had been “a victim of deception by Dr Roberts” and would “find ways to improve our entire process as we move forward”. Norris said Roberts had signed a form attesting that he was a US citizen. Adding to the district’s woes, the justice department is opening an investigation into its hiring practices.

As it should. There are at least three other lessons, too. The first is that the crucial business of enforcing the law is sometimes unpleasant. The second is that, when it becomes clear that a public official has broken the public’s trust, the best thing for the community to do is acknowledge it — and begin the hard work of finding out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. And the last is that leaving significant gaps around public policies such as immigration will haunt the political party that drops the ball, beset communities forced to live with the consequences and allow demagogues to exploit the uncertainty.

• Patricia Lopez is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. She is a former member of the editorial board at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she also worked as a senior political editor and reporter