Top officials in the administration of President Donald Trump are directing more federal law enforcement resources to investigate allegations of rampant government fraud in Minnesota — a move that comes in the wake of a viral video claiming significant abuse in Somali-run day care programs.

A video posted to social media platforms on Friday by YouTuber Nick Shirley shows what appear to be empty day care centers in Minneapolis and claims to expose millions of dollars in fraud in the state’s federally funded child care program. The video has more than 100 million views on X.

The video is based on existing allegations about fraud in Minnesota’s child care program, which until recently was run by the state’s Department of Human Services and is now under the authority of the Department of Children, Youth and Families, a spin-off agency.

In the video, Shirley visits several day cares, including Quality Learning Center, which had already been under investigation by state officials for various violations and had collected $7.8 million from the state since 2019, according to a January report by KSTP-TV.

The video drew praise from Vice President JD Vance, who reposted the video on X.

“This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 (Pulitzer Center) prizes,” he wrote.

In response to the video, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel announced boosts to federal law enforcement resources in the state. Social media posts Monday showed federal law enforcement agents visiting businesses in the Twin Cities area, including some shown in the video.

State response

At a Monday news conference addressing Shirley’s video, the Department of Children, Youth and Families Commissioner Tikki Brown said children were present at the day cares shown in the video during unannounced inspection visits in 2025. Still, the video warrants more scrutiny on fraud, she said.

“While we have questions about some of the methods that were used in the video, we do take the concerns that the video raises about fraud very seriously,” Brown told reporters. “Each of the facilities mentioned in the video has been visited at least once in the last six months as part of our typical licensing process.”

Brown said she had questions about when Shirley visited day cares, as some centers could have been closed, and said her department was making additional unannounced visits to businesses shown in the video to confirm whether children are present.

Two of the seven day cares Shirley visited in the video — Quality Learning Center and Mako Childcare — are no longer open. Quality Learning Center closed “just over a week ago,” Brown said. Mako “closed maybe even several years ago.”

Allegations of fraud

Allegations of fraud in federally funded state-administered programs, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson recently said could potentially top $9 billion since 2018, have drawn significant attention and scrutiny on the record of second-term Democratic-Farmer-Labor Gov. Tim Walz, who is seeking a third term.

Walz and officials in his administration continue to press back against claims by Republican critics and the Trump administration that they hadn’t done enough to address fraud in recent years.

Earlier in December, Walz announced the hiring of former Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension head Tim O’Malley as fraud czar.

In October, DHS, which oversees the Medicaid-funded programs that have seen significant fraud, ordered a third-party audit of 14 “high-risk” programs.

They also moved to shut down a Medicaid-funded housing-stabilization program beset by fraud after news emerged in July of a federal investigation into several providers.

Minnesota House Republicans on Monday told reporters that allegations of fraud in Minnesota’s day care program, including at Quality Learning Center, had come up at a hearing of the GOP-led Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight committee earlier this year,

“If DHS or the Walz administration had been serious about wanting to root up fraud, they would have already been taking care of these things much before we brought it up in February,” said House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor in 2026.

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