A social media frenzy that began in Minnesota overallegations of day care fraudhas rippled into at least seven other states over the past week, as conservative journalists and right-wing influencers have embraced the idea that they should investigate state-subsidized child care centers, especially those run by local people of Somali descent.
In the days since Christmas, conservative content creators have been showing up at day care centers from Ohio to Washington state, recording videos of themselves trying to interview employees and expressing suspicion over whether the centers are legitimate businesses. Like Minnesota, Ohio and Washington also have significant Somali populations.
NBC News viewed similar videos on social media investigating day care centers in Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
Many of the people making the videos are affiliated with small conservative websites or have ties to political groups. The clips have been posted to X, where some have racked up millions of views and praise from viewers, with help from a network of prominent right-wing influencers on the platform who share and reuse the content.
The videos have sparked a national debate about the tactics of right-wing media figures, with some Republicans praising the conservative creators for spotting potential red flags, while some Democrats and immigrant advocates warn that the confrontational tactics amount to harassment. Day care center operators — in particular, many people of Somali descent who have not been charged with any crime — are caught in the middle.
The attention on Somali business owners has its origins partly in along-running federal investigationof fraud in Minnesota that has been going on sinceat least 2022. That investigation, which has had bipartisan support,has led to dozens of convictions, and many of the fraudsters in that case were of Somali descent.
But President Donald Trump has used those charges as justification for hisdisparaging remarks attacking Somalipeople as a community. And right-wing influencers have run far beyond prosecutors, flooding social media with amateur sleuthing of their own that often has thin evidence and is missing context.
The videos gained traction in right-wing social media circles after Nick Shirley, a conservative content creator, posted a lengthy video on Dec. 26purporting to showchild care facilities in Minnesota that weren't operational but were receiving state and federal funds.
Shirley's video has received 135 million views on X and 3 million more on YouTube, and although it did not prove fraud and his tactics have been criticized, it received wide praise from conservatives online andwithin the Trump administration, including from Vice President JD Vance and tech billionaireElon Musk. And it led some of the most followed right-wing influencers on X, such as "Catturd" and "Gunther Eagleman," to call for all Somali immigrants to be deported to get rid of fraud.
Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvetsaid thatthe allegations of fraud at Minnesota day care centers is "so big, it's so important, because it's going to unlock a lot of other storylines that we're going to see play out in 2026."
At the heart of Shirley's video and others like it is an unproven belief that Somali immigrants are disproportionately committing widespread fraud through day care centers that receive state or federal subsidies for looking after children, but which the content creators suspect are conducting little or no business.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it wasfreezing all federal child care paymentsto the state of Minnesota Shirley's video drew national attention.
Now, other influencers are creating imitations of Shirley's video in additional states.
Cam Higby, who describes himself as an "America-first independent journalist," said on X that he visited four separate child care locations on Dec. 30, to investigate what he believed could be potential fraud — all in Washington state, and all run by Somalis, he said.
Higby and a second conservative journalist, Jonathan Choe, have created multiple videos from the visits, including one where someonecloses a front dooron Higby after he asks for a day care application. Inanother video, someone Higby calls "my decoy" goes inside a day care center and reports back to him that she did see children inside and believed they were acting suspiciously.
In posts on X and in videos, Higby and Choe compare two sets of state records: historical spending records for how much money each day care center has received as a contractor for providing subsidized care, and point-in-time records for how many children each center was looking after in late December.
Based on their interpretation of those records and of day care employees' behavior, the influencers often make far-reaching claims about criminality.
The comparison can be misleading because it pits long-term subsidy totals against a one-day enrollment snapshot.
"Just uncovered another SEVEN FIGURE case of obvious Somali daycare funding abuse," Higbywrote on X on Jan. 1, in reference to one of the centers he visited.
In one video, Choe makes a call for "other citizen journalists, other volunteer sleuths" to take up similar work documenting the comings and goings at child care centers. The style of the videos borrows heavily from investigative exposés, with footage from inside moving vehicles and attempted interviews on people's doorsteps.
In a phone interview Friday, Higby acknowledged that he had not found conclusive evidence of wrongdoing by day care centers.
"It could very well be that the day cares themselves are acting within the law," he said.
He said he was drawn to the topic because the numbers he was seeing online did not make sense to him, and he said that neither state officials nor day care owners would help him, so he posted his work online.
"I've been trying to word things so that it's obvious that I'm just digging," he said. "My goal is just to point out: Something is not adding up with this situation. Something is fishy."
He also defended his decision to focus on Somali day care center, to the near exclusion of others.
"We have been to at least one that was non-Somali, but we're looking primarily at Somali ones because that's where the spotlight is now and also that's where the abuses are that we've seen," he said.
Both Higby and Choe are rising creators within the conservative media ecosystem who have worked on the ground in other political hot spotssuch as Portland, Oregon, earlier this year. On Friday, they announced on X that they had also launched a joint legal defense fund in case someone sues them over their work.
The trend took off on social media during a time period — the week between Christmas and New Year's Day — that is typically slow for day care centers.
Seattle's newly elected mayor, Katie Wilson, was among the Democrats to condemn the activity of right-wing influencers. Without mentioning specific influencers, she saidin a statement Thursdaythat she stood with Somali child care providers who had experienced "targeted harassment" and "the surveillance campaign promoted by extremist influencers."
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement Tuesday that his office hadheard reports of harassmentfrom members of the Somali community "accused of fraud with little to no fact-checking."
"Showing up on someone's porch, threatening, or harassing them isn't an investigation," he said. "Neither is filming minors who may be in the home."
A Trump appointee, Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Department of Justice's civil rights division,fired back at Brownon X, warning him not to "chill or threaten to chill" a journalist's First Amendment rights. Brownthen repliedthat he hadn't "threatened anyone, especially not journalists."
Choesaid on Xthat police officers responded on Tuesday to one of the day care centers he had visited in Federal Way, Washington. A spokesperson for local police confirmed they received a complaint from a resident about people filming their residence while standing on a sidewalk, but the officer determined no crime occurred, the spokesperson said.
Renée DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown University studying political narratives on social media, said the rapidly expanding campaign has gained fuel from elected officials echoing the influencers' concerns. That in turn inspires others to join in by filming themselves visiting facilities and attempting to repeat the narrative in their town.
"There's already a belief within the online faction that a thing has happened," DiResta said, "and what is happening now is they are backfilling the belief with justification. This isn't evidence to conclusion — it's belief to justification."
Some of the amateur sleuthing is missing important context, said Nancy Gutierrez, a spokesperson for Washington's Department of Children, Youth & Families. For example, a post on Xwith 4.4 million viewsalleged that it was suspicious for a child care center to not list a street address in a state-run online database of providers; Gutierrez said that in-home child care providers are not required to put their address on public databases.
Most of the right-wing figures making such videos generally do not explain how they decide which day care centers to scrutinize, but across multiple states, their targets appear to be of Somali descent. That, in turn, has fueled accusations that they are basing their decisions on whom to investigate solely on the targets' country of origin.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group for Muslims, said he believes there is no reason for social media influencers to target Somali immigrants other than racism.
"There are very obviously fascists and other bigots who want to turn this controversy in Minnesota into a nationwide campaign to harass Somali-Americans," he said.
Mitchell said that racists are exploiting the existence of real fraud prosecutions in Minnesota to try to smear people of Somali descent regardless of where they live.
"It would be insane to do this to the Jewish community or the Black community or the white community," he said. "I've never seen a feeding frenzy directed at an entire race of white people when a white person commits a crime."
Before the spread of fraud accusations, right-wing figures had already been attacking Minnesota's Somali population for other reasons. In September, Musk retweeted a post arguing that Somalis were replacing the state's white population. In July, Shirley posted a video aboutMuslims in Minnesota, although it received far fewer views than his fraud video.
The conservative media ecosystem appears to be hungry for more videos like Shirley's viral fraud post. The CEO of far-right video platform Rumbleposted on Wednesdaythat he wanted to strike a deal with Shirley. And some users on X have urged others on,such as with one suggestionto ask AI "for an extensive list of daycares in your city…. Then go hunting!!!"
In Ohio, over 40 Republican lawmakers cited the allegations on social mediato call forincreased audits and unannounced inspections of day care centers in Columbus by state officials. Columbus has the second-highest concentration ofSomali immigrantsin the United States, behind theTwin Citiesarea.
State Rep. Josh Williams, a Republican from the Toledo area who is running for Congress, saidhe wantsthe state to use the power it already has to look at all day care centers and either quiet concerns about fraud or prosecute any confirmed cases of it.
"And we want to be clear," Williams said in an interview, "if those individuals are here from another country — either through legal or illegal status — we want them to not only be prosecuted, sentenced and confined in our prisons, but when they are done with their term of incarceration, we want them sent home to their country of origin."
Mehek Cooke, an attorney and Republican consultant, said she sorted day care centers in the Columbus area by which ones were open seven days a week, and concluded the vast majority of the facilities identified were connected to Somali-born individuals. She then narrowed down her list by looking up their inspection reports and searching their addresses on Google Maps, and identified a handful to visit with Thomas Hern, a former Turning Point USA operative, while filming.
Theirvideos showCooke knocking on the day care centers' front doors and commenting how they found it odd that one had a semitruck parked in front. Cooke said she just wanted to ask how much it cost to enroll a child, but in one incident she posted, she alleged that someone who answered the door pushed her and tried to grab her phone. She said she reported it to the police.
Hern, who did not respond to requests for an interview, separatelyposted a videoof himself visiting another day care center in which two men come out to his car to ask him why he's filming the building. One of the men calls him a "terrorist," tells him to leave and says they've called the police.
Columbus police said in a statement that officers have responded to at least eight calls regarding these encounters at day care centers since Monday.
"I've been an immigrant, a legal immigrant, and I am proud to be American," Cooke said in an interview. "But what I have seen from the Somalian immigrant population in particular — whether it's Minnesota or at least what I'm seeing in Ohio with this alleged fraud, if it is true — the only thing that they have done is expand our welfare state without contributing on the backs of hardworking Americans."
Somali immigrants havebeen creditedby some as playing a key role in revitalizing economically downtrodden areas of Columbus byopening small businesses.
Some of the viral videos and social media posts have misconstrued publicly available information.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican,fact-checked one viral tweetthis week from an account that appears to belong to a Google executive that suggested one day care center might be a taxpayer funded fraud operation, and that Google Maps showed it as a tobacco shop. The poster had failed to notice the Maps photo was taken in 2022; the day care center did not open until July 2025, and it does not take any public funds. The tweet was later deleted.
Dan Tierney, a spokesman for DeWine, said state agencies are paying attention to the social media allegations but have not received an influx of official complaints. The state also uses a PIN-based system requiring families to log their child's attendance when they drop them off at government-supported day care centers to help mitigate fraud, Tierney said.
Dorothy Jubity Hassan, CEO of Our Helpers, a nonprofit that supports refugees in Franklin County, Ohio, said that many of the videos raising suspicions based on the exterior of the facilities — windows covered, chipped paint, security cameras — are failing to take into account the economic conditions of the inner-city areas where they're located.
"This is a witch hunt," she said. "The Somali community is established and thriving, but still suffering a lot of the consequences of poverty that are well-documented in refugee and migrant communities."
Guadalupe Magallan, the president of the Washington State Family Child Care Association, a nonprofit organization for providers, said that social media influencers seem not to understand several aspects of the day care industry — including how common it is for day care providers to be nonwhite women or immigrants who run small operations out of their homes.
Magallan said that most day care and child care providers are just getting by.
"We're just trying to survive like everyone else," she said. "I don't know any place that just hands out money. If we were getting rich, we wouldn't live the way we live."
A social media frenzy that began in Minnesota overallegations of day care fraudhas rippled into at least seven other states over the past w...
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