The Des Moines School Board is suing the consulting firm that conducted its search for a superintendent in 2023, resulting in the hiring of Ian Roberts. The board made its decision during a special session that began at 8 a.m. on Friday. The lawsuit against JG Consulting, a Texas-based firm, was filed in Polk County District Court.
“The firm failed its duty to properly vet candidates,” Board Chair Jackie Norris said after the special session. “Ian Roberts should have never been presented as a finalist. And if we knew what we knew now, he would never have been hired.”
In May 2023, the board voted unanimously to hire Roberts as superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools. At the time, the board believed Roberts, who is originally from Guyana and was then the superintendent of the Millcreek Township School District in western Pennsylvania, was a U.S. citizen. On the morning of Friday, Sept. 26, Roberts was taken into custody by ICE, which alleges he is in the country illegally, having received an order of removal issued by an immigration judge in May 2024.
Roberts was detained in Woodbury County Jail from Sept. 26 until Thursday, when he was arrested by agents from the U.S. Department of Justice. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa has charged Roberts with four counts of possessing a firearm while not having legal authorization to be in the country. Roberts is currently being held in Polk County Jail. The school board voted unanimously to accept Roberts resignation during a special session on Tuesday.
Since his arrest, it’s been reported that Roberts’ false claims go beyond his citizenship status, and include claims about various academic credentials and professional honors now known to false. One false claim was known to the school board during the hiring process. In the first resume he submitted, Roberts claimed to have a doctorate from Morgan State University, a well-respected HBCU in Maryland. He does not. Roberts submitted a revised resume with the Morgan State claim. It appears he does have a doctorate, but it was awarded by Trident University, a for-profit online school.
“This is about accountability,” Norris said regarding the lawsuit. “Taxpayer dollars were used, and we are seeking accountability.”
According to Norris, “JG Consulting was responsible for advertising, recruitment, application and resume review, public domain search, complete reference checks and presentation of qualified candidates. It also said it would conduct comprehensive reference calls on each applicant to include the verification of all employment experiences.”
The complaint filed in Polk County District Court accuses JG Consulting of negligence. The district is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages.
The Des Moines isn’t the only school district ready to sue over Roberts. On Wednesday, the Millcreek Township School District, where Roberts was superintendent from August 2020 through June 2023, announced it has instructed its attorney “to determine whether the District has any claims against Roberts as a result of his fraudulent misrepresentations, and if so, to aggressively pursue them.” The district is also “actively evaluating potential litigation against the search firm Ray & Associates, Inc.,” which conducted the candidate search that led to Roberts being hired.
“We understand that we once welcomed Ian Roberts into our District with open arms,” Millcreek said in its Wednesday announcement. “However, now we have realized that we were profoundly misled in a way that undermines the very foundation of integrity upon which our District prides itself.”
In addition to those potential civil lawsuits, Millcreek has instructed its attorney “to contact the appropriate governmental authorities and to provide them with the documents Ian Roberts supplied to the District for employment verification, as we now believe them to be either fabricated or false.”
Additional information about the criminal charges Roberts is facing, and his immigration case, became available on Thursday, when the criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in federal district court in Des Moines on Oct. 1 was unsealed.
The complaint contains a narrative by Robert Carlson, special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and begins by addressing Roberts’ immigration status.
The complaint states that Roberts entered the U.S. in March 1999 on an F-1 student visa. That visa “expired on March 7, 2004.”
According to the filing, Roberts filed a Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status, with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in May 2001, and in May, June and July 2018. All four applications were rejected.
“In addition, in July 2018, Roberts applied for and, in January 2020, was denied an adjustment of status (Form I-485) based on his marriage to a United States citizen because Roberts failed to respond to a request for further information.”
Roberts did have “lawful employment authorization status to work in the U.S.” between Dec. 18, 2018 and Dec. 18, 2020, according to the complaint. “Since December 18, 2020, Roberts has not had lawful employment authorization.”
The narrative continues, stating that an immigration judge in Texas — Roberts and his wife have a home in Denton County, Texas, the Associated Press reported this week — issued a removal order, meaning Roberts had to leave the country, on May 22, 2024. He did not attend that hearing. Roberts’ filed an appeal, seeking to have his case reopened. On April 30, 2025, an immigration judge declined to reopen the case, “finding Roberts had failed to demonstrate that he did not receive notice” of the May 2024 hearing.
After completing its account of Roberts’ immigration status, the complaint then recounts his encounter with ICE agents on Sept. 26.
ICE agents, acting under the belief that Roberts was in the country illegally, had his house in southeast Des Moines under surveillance that morning. They saw a man they recognized as Roberts exit the house, get into a white Jeep Cherokee with official license plates (it was a DMPS vehicle) and drive off. They followed.
Roberts pulled into a mobile home park. When he parked his vehicle, “ICE officers, dressed in tactical vests with high visibility ICE markings, approached the Jeep Cherokee on foot. The Jeep Cherokee drove away.”
After a brief search, the vehicle was found, but Roberts was nowhere to be seen.
“Law enforcement officers with the Iowa State Patrol along with a certified patrol canine were called to help locate Roberts,” the complaint states. He was found nearby, then taken into custody by ICE.
An ICE agent waited with the Jeep Cherokee, while DMPS dispatched a public safety officer to collect it. According to the complaint, the DMPS officer “located a firearm wrapped in a towel under the driver’s seat.”
It was a loaded 9mm Glock pistol. Special Agent Carlson said an ATF instant trace of the gun indicated it was legally purchased in Arkansas by a person believed to be Roberts’ wife. The firearm aspect of the case was turned over to ATF.
Carlson does not mention the hunting knife or approximately $3,000 in cash that ICE has said was found in the vehicle. He does state that Roberts’ Guyanese passport was in the vehicle.
Later that day, ATF agents executed a search warrant at Roberts’ Des Moines home. The complaint says agents seized a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol, a rifle and a shotgun. The agents searched a Ford Mustang parked in the garage and reported finding “immigration documents under the floor mat in the back seat behind the driver’s seat,” including a copy of the May 2024 order of removal.
Carlson states that the house “appears to be occupied by a single individual, Roberts, and no female clothing was located during the search.” That would seem to be included to support the claim that it was Roberts, and not his U.S. citizen wife, who was in possession of the firearms found in the search.
The complaint also offers new information about something that came up during the Tuesday news conference by Alfredo Parrish, the prominent Des Moines attorney whose firm is representing Roberts.
During the news conference, Parrish distributed copies of a letter from a Texas attorney who represented Roberts in his attempt to get his immigration case reopened after the order of removal. Parrish suggested that Roberts may have been confused about his immigration status, thinking his appeal had been successful, because in the letter the attorney wrote, “It has been my pleasure to represent you throughout this process, and I am pleased to report that your case has reached a successful resolution.”
In the complaint, Carlson says immigration court documents show the Texas attorney had petitioned the court to be removed as Roberts’ attorney of record in January 2025, because Roberts was not paying the bills for her services. She was no longer representing Roberts when the immigration judge rejected the appeal. Carlson said he interviewed the attorney, who explained the “successful resolution” Parrish referenced in the news conference was actually a reference to Roberts settling his outstanding bill for her services.
On Thursday night, Parrish and other members of Roberts’ legal team spoke at a town hall meeting on the case held at Corinthian Baptist Church in Des Moines.
“Immigration law in the United States is very complex,” Parrish told the people gathered at the church. “Let’s not get ahead of our skis. The government filed a complaint against him. It’s not an indictment.”
Parrish’s fellow attorney Brandon Brown described the firearm charge against Roberts as “priority number one for us.”
“We’re going to be looking at that and developing a defense to the elements of that case right now, knowing that we will still have an immigration case to address at some point, and maybe it’ll be at the same time, but right now, what we’re looking at is the charge,” he said.
As he did at the news conference on Tuesday, Parrish encouraged people to be patient as the case proceeds.
