The former superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was sentenced Friday to two years in federal prison for falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen.

“I regret what I’ve done every single day,” Ian Roberts said before U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger handed down the sentence.

Roberts’ sentence was closer to the three years in prison prosecutors had recommended than the probation his defense team asked for.

Explaining her decision, Ebinger said Roberts knowingly lied about his citizenship status to earn an “incredible position of trust.”

While the dozens of letters of support that were submitted on Roberts’ behalf were powerful, she said probation was not a sufficient sentence.

Upon completing his sentence, Roberts will likely be deported to his native Guyana.

Before the hearing, Roberts’ lawyers told the judge that he fled his homeland in 1994 because he had been a police officer and was “seeking safety from his undercover drug work.”

Roberts became the first Black educator to helm Des Moines Public Schools when he was hired in 2023 to lead the district of about 30,000 students.

After submitting a Social Security card and a driver’s license as verifying documents, Roberts stated he was a U.S. citizen in his application to the state board of educational examiners, which issued him a professional administrator license in 2023, the district said.

Before the sentencing, Roberts’ lawyers confirmed that was not true.

“Dr. Roberts made a fatal mistake when he completed an I-9 to work with Des Moines Public Schools ... falsely affirming he was a United States citizen,” his lawyers wrote in a 173-page brief to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.

Roberts’ arrest in September by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shocked Des Moines and sparked a walkout by hundreds of middle and high school students and protests by angry parents demanding that he be released.

Iowa Republicans responded by branding Roberts a criminal and calling for an investigation of the district’s hiring practices.

But for two decades, Roberts had worked in school districts across the country despite lacking authorization to work in the U.S. And with his trademark flashy suits, matching sneakers and frequent appearances at school and other public events, Roberts quickly became a beloved figure in Des Moines, a diverse city in a Republican-led state with an overwhelmingly white population.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security tracked down Roberts in Iowa after federal immigration officials issued a final removal notice in 2024 to have Roberts deported.

Roberts fled when agents tried to apprehend him as he was driving to work in his district-issued Jeep Cherokee. He was later arrested with the help of the Iowa State Patrol.

“ICE made a spectacle of his arrest — doubling up on state troopers in addition to ICE officers in tactical gear, as if they were entering combat against an army,” Dan Hunter, who heads a Des Moines arts advocacy group, said in a statement included in the brief.

Inside the Jeep, police said they found a loaded handgun wrapped in a towel, a hunting knife and $3,000 cash. Shortly afterward, Roberts resigned from his job, which paid an annual salary of $286,716.

In January, Roberts pleaded guilty to making a false statement for employment and one count of unlawfully possessing a firearm while being in the country illegally.

Together, the charges carried a possible sentence of up to 37 months in federal prison. But Roberts’ lawyers asked the judge to sentence the former educator to probation.

“He is not violent and will receive the ultimate punishment of banishment from the United States,” they wrote. “Looking at all his foibles, failures and successes while living in a country he came to love, his successes outweigh his failures.”

Their brief included a biography of Roberts that noted that he was “born into poverty in one of the world’s poorest nations” without “a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, yet he made an enormous impact in each community [where] he worked.”

Roberts, it said, had been abandoned by his father but became a top student despite having worked as a child to support his family.

It noted that he was an Olympic sprinter who competed at the Sydney Games in 2000. And it said he left for the U.S. on the advice of the Guyanese government because of the threats he faced for his police work.

Following Roberts’ arrest, DHS publicized his criminal history, including a 2020 arrest in New York state on a charge of criminal possession of a weapon, the details of which have been sealed.

Roberts, according to DHS, was also cited in 2021 for a minor firearms violation in Pennsylvania related to his storage of a hunting rifle in his vehicle.

Roberts’ lawyers did not mention these arrests in the brief but argued that DHS has subjected him to “media demonization.”

The lawyers pointed out that Republican politicians in Iowa were parroting an official press release that described Roberts as “a criminal illegal alien with multiple weapons charges and a drug trafficking charge” who “should have never been able to work around children.”

Roberts’ lawyers also addressed another controversy that came up after the educator was arrested, namely that he had falsely claimed to have earned a doctoral degree from Morgan State University when applying for the Des Moines job, and that he was hired even after the school board learned about the misrepresentation.

Roberts, according to his lawyers, got his doctorate in educational leadership in 2021 from Trident University, an online school.

In their court filing, Roberts’ attorneys said he had first tried to establish permanent residence in 2001 after marrying a U.S. citizen, but his application was denied because he had failed to disclose that he had been arrested in 1996.

“If Dr. Roberts had been properly represented, this issue would have been avoided,” his lawyers wrote. “Arrests without convictions do not make aliens inadmissible to the United States.”

Roberts continued trying to establish permanent residency, his lawyers wrote.

“While Dr. Roberts tried to adjust his status three more times, this initial mistake by Dr. Roberts sealed his fate,” his lawyers wrote. “In the background of his career for the next 24 years, this denial of his adjustment of status haunted Dr. Roberts like a ghost, eventually derailing his life and career.”