It has been ordinary citizens, not billions spent on federal law enforcement, that uncovered the immense daycare fraud committed by Somalis in Minnesota. In one video posted on Facebook, a Minnesota resident explains that he personally visited 40-50 Somali-run daycares in the Minneapolis area and never saw a child at any one of them.
“So one of the things that I’ve noticed is there’s an exceptional number of childcare centers that are set up mostly in Minneapolis, but also in St. Paul. And I said, wow, how many kids are there in the Twin Cities?” the Minnesotan commented to a reporter.
When he inquired at one facility about availability for his grandson, “they said, no, we’re all full, we’re all full. And they had the door open and I looked and there were no kids.”
The Minnesotan noticed this beginning five years ago, and yet the Democrat Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, bragged in his debate last year against JD Vance that Walz had made it easier for folks to run daycare businesses. The fraud is obvious to anyone who visits these centers.
The 23-year-old social media influencer Nick Shirley has aired videos of his own visits to these Minnesota childcare centers; his videos have attracted more than 116 million views on X and 1.6 million additional views on YouTube. With that publicity, there is finally movement in uprooting this fraud and holding the perpetrators legally accountable.
FBI chief Kash Patel threatens to denaturalize and deport Somali refugees responsible for this. These immigrants from a country on the equator were ill-suited to be relocated by Democrat presidents to Minnesota, where they lacked the skills and background needed to thrive in that winter climate.
As a Shirley video demonstrates, calling the phone number for one of these apparently fraudulent daycare centers results in the office of Tim Walz answering the phone, as the Governor of Minnesota. Yet he has refused to resign amid this engulfing scandal, and is running for reelection with the support of the Democrat Party.
In another video Shirley features the “Quality Learing Center” daycare which misspells the word “learning” on its own sign. Someone would have corrected that error if the daycare were really in daily operations serving many families, and the video shows that it appears empty in the middle of a weekday when it should be active.
This fraud in Minnesota could be part of a broader government-funded childcare scandal that extends to many other states. Publicly funded childcare has long been a bad idea as public policy, vulnerable to fraud, and yet even conservative states like Missouri have large programs like this.
The newly elected socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, ran on a campaign of free childcare for everyone, because mothers “are giving up paying jobs to do unpaid childcare.” Zohran vowed to “implement free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years,” and to pay childcare workers the wages of “public school teachers.”
Government-run childcare has never worked. President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have established universal federally funded daycare nationwide, and he properly called it the “most radical piece of legislation” ever sent to him by Congress.
Democrats in Congress later pushed for the Act for Better Child Care Services of 1989, for federal funding of childcare centers nationwide. President George H.W. Bush successfully opposed it for not sending assistance directly to parents as tax credits, for reducing options available to parents, and for discriminating against two-parent families where one stays at home with the children.
Government-run daycare separates children from their families and marginalizes the essential role of fathers both financially and in the upbringing of children. At the time of Nixon’s veto, the communist Soviet Union was an example of the failed approach of pushing women into the workforce while government controlled the raising of their children.
It is estimated that Mamdani’s plan of universal child care for New York City could cost $6 billion, and such enormous funding is unavailable for this. Quebec tried government-run universal child care beginning in 1997, and it has been a billion-dollar step backward which 30 years later is available to only about half the population there.
Economists at MIT, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto studied Quebec’s program and reported in 2015 that it caused a “sizeable negative shock” to children’s non-cognitive skills, resulting in “worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life” among boys.
On November 1, Democrat-controlled New Mexico became the only State providing universal free child care, as funded by its oil and gas revenue. Every other state, including liberal California and Massachusetts, has rejected this costly socialist approach.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.