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The day after<\/span> Christmas, far-right YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video claiming to have exposed fraud at Somali-owned day care centers in Minnesota. Portions of the 42-minute video \u2014 mostly scenes where Shirley is turned away at the day cares \u2014 went viral in conservative circles, catching the attention of the Trump administration, which was already at work targeting<\/a> Minnesota\u2019s Somali community amid its broader war on immigrants.<\/p>\n The video<\/a>, which has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube and millions more on other platforms, sparked a renewed crackdown in Minneapolis, with the Department of Homeland Security announcing on Monday it would visit 30 sites suspected of fraud across the city. A DHS official told CBS News Minnesota<\/a> its agents would focus on a \u201clittle of everything,\u201d when asked whether immigration enforcement would be a part of the crackdown. Threatening arrests, the agency posted a video<\/a> to X in which agents enter a smoke shop and question an employee about a nearby day care center.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time the conservative YouTuber has gotten the attention of the Trump administration. Shirley participated in President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cRoundtable on Antifa<\/a>\u201d in October after an altercation at an anti-ICE protest. At age 23, his videos aren\u2019t merely influencing his audiences \u2014 they\u2019re also influencing government action.<\/p>\n This worries immigrant rights advocates, who fear that the fallout from Shirley\u2019s video will only worsen the harm already being done to Minnesota\u2019s immigrant communities at a time when Trump has taken to calling Somali people \u201cgarbage<\/a>\u201d at his rallies.<\/p>\n \u201cThe very real-world consequence is that it\u2019s going to exacerbate the situation that we have in Minnesota right now where we have a lot of people, including U.S. citizens or people with lawful status being arrested and detained by ICE,\u201d said Ana Pottratz Acosta, who leads the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School.<\/p>\n The video, she said, reinforces xenophobic tropes about the Somali community, specifically tying the community to fraud. Pottratz Acosta said she was worried the increase in DHS visits to day cares could be a pretext to simultaneously conduct immigration detentions.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re doing these visits at day care sites under the auspices of conducting a fraud investigation, but if they happen to see anyone who fits a profile, they might be arrested,\u201d Pottratz Acosta said.<\/p>\n Shirley\u2019s video builds off of the growing interest in a nonprofit fraud scandal in Minnesota involving a pandemic-era program focused on child hunger, which has resulted in dozens of guilty pleas. The Trump administration claims Minnesota\u2019s fraud issue is much larger, to the sum of $9 billion worth of government funds being fraudulently funneled from social services. Republicans have painted Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both Democrats up for reelection, as responsible for an alleged lack of oversight. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Somali American and Muslim, has also been the target of right-wing and xenophobic attacks. Among other racist stereotypes and false claims<\/a>, Trump said, \u201cWe gotta get her the hell out\u201d of the country at a Pennsylvania rally earlier this month.<\/p>\n State regulators said Monday that inspectors had visited the day cares mentioned in the video in the past six months, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune<\/a>, that there was no evidence of fraud at the sites during those unannounced visits, and some of the centers have already been closed or suspended. According to Minnesota Public Radio<\/a>, state Republican lawmakers had steered Shirley toward the day care centers he visited in the video.<\/p>\n Shirley defended his video and said people have been silent about \u201cSomalians committing this fraud\u201d because \u201cpeople are scared to be called Islamophobic, racist.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cFraud is fraud \u2014 it doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s a Black person, white person, Asian person, Mexican,\u201d Shirley told Fox News. \u201cAnd we work too hard simply just to be paying taxes and enabling fraud to be happening.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite Shirley\u2019s insistence that race and religion have nothing to do with his investigation, the YouTuber has a long track record of using his man-on-the-street videos to target immigrants in the U.S., platforming individuals who spread xenophobic<\/a> and Islamophobic<\/a> beliefs and<\/a> conspiracy<\/a> theories. While Shirley\u2019s videos include interviews with those protesting against such hate, he often presents immigration and Islam as a growing threat<\/a> taking over the country<\/a>. Combined with sensationalized headlines \u2014 \u201cExposing Dangerous Illegal Migrant Scammers\u201d or \u201cThe UK\u2019s Insane Migrant Invasion\u201d \u2014 the end result is often a portrait of immigrants as lawbreakers, a societal threat, and a strain on government resources.<\/p>\n Shirley did not respond to The Intercept\u2019s request for comment. <\/p>\n In 2019, Shirley<\/span> began to post prank videos with friends on YouTube while attending a public high school in Farmington, Utah<\/a>, a suburb of Salt Lake City. At first, his focus wasn\u2019t especially political. He garnered a large number of his 1 million subscribers after sneaking into influencer Jake Paul\u2019s wedding in Las Vegas. <\/p>\n But amid his comedic stunts, he documented the January 6<\/a> insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in 2021, where he interviewed far-right commentator and InfoWars founder Alex Jones and infamous rioter Richard Barnett<\/a>. Shirley said he did not take part in the violence and filmed himself leaving without entering the building. Later that year, Shirley took a two-year hiatus from YouTube to go on a mission in Santiago, Chile, as part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.<\/p>\n In late 2023, after his return to the United States, Shirley shifted from prank videos to focus on political topics, such as immigration and crime. In May 2024, he orchestrated a stunt<\/a> in which he paid day laborers $20 to jump into the back of a U-Haul van, drove them to the White House, and gave them signs demanding a meeting with Biden.<\/p>\n Shirley\u2019s mother, Brooke \u2014 herself a right-wing influencer who goes by Brooker Tee Jones on TikTok, where she has more than 250,000 followers \u2014 occasionally joins her son in the videos. It was Brooke who pushed her son to start covering immigration at the southern border after his mission trip, according to an interview<\/a> with Columbia Journalism Review. Early on, she\u2019d feed him questions to ask and lines to say in the videos, she recalled. Her content has similarly focused on immigration in recent years, including other videos that accuse Somali residents in Minnesota of health care fraud without providing evidence.<\/p>\n Reached by The Intercept, Brooke did not answer questions about her work or the work of her son.<\/p>\n Shirley has made a habit of visiting cities and countries that are settings for right-wing, anti-immigrant conspiracies, such as Aurora, Colorado, amid the manufactured crisis<\/a> around the Tren de Aragua gang.<\/p>\n During a visit to El Salvador in 2024, Shirley filmed a series of videos sympathetic to President Nayib Bukele\u2019s violent anti-crime crackdown on his citizens<\/a>, including a video from the notorious CECOT<\/a> prison. It\u2019s his most-viewed video to date, with 6.6 million views. In another video from El Salvador, Shirley recorded from the Centro Industrial<\/a> prison, which has become a manufacturing hub where incarcerated men build school desks<\/a> and vegetable market display racks<\/a>, a form of forced labor. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty amazing if you think about what Nayib Bukele has been able to do with this country \u2014 the streets are as safe as they\u2019ve ever been, because all these guys are out,\u201d Shirley said while inside a CECOT cell block, gesturing to the incarcerated men. At no point in the video does he mention the stories of torture and abuse<\/a> within the country\u2019s prison system.<\/p>\n Shirley was recently awarded a \u201ccitizen journalist of the year<\/a>\u201d prize by far-right media figure and Project Veritas<\/a> founder, James O\u2019Keefe, in large part because of his CECOT video.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In other videos, Shirley himself has become a part of the story. <\/p>\n In September, Shirley and a small crew filmed a video antagonizing street vendors<\/a> in New York City\u2019s Chinatown, referring to them as \u201cDangerous Migrant Scammers.\u201d Vendors could be seen scrambling away while Shirley strolls down Canal Street. At one point, one man tells Shirley to leave and asks why he\u2019s filming, leading to a physical confrontation<\/a> with Shirley\u2019s cameraman.<\/p>\n Several weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the street, detaining nine individuals. Shirley praised ICE for the raid that left the street \u201ccompletely clean of illegal activity\u201d and taunted<\/a> an individual who was detained as a \u201cscammer [who] got ICED.\u201d<\/p>\n Shirley has accompanied<\/a> federal agents during immigration raids<\/a> in Chicago, interviewing a detained man in the backseat of a federal vehicle. Since Trump\u2019s election, media access at raids has largely been given only to outlets or individuals sympathetic to the administration\u2019s mass deportation campaign. <\/p>\n Alongside other far-right influencers such as Andy Ngo and Cam Higby, Shirley landed an invite to participate in Trump\u2019s \u201cRoundtable on Antifa,<\/a>\u201d a White House event where the administration advanced its campaign <\/a>against antifascist activists<\/a>. \u201cPeople may wonder, \u2018What\u2019s the threat to us as Americans?\u2019 You\u2019ll be labeled as a fascist, you\u2019ll be labeled a Nazi, and they\u2019ll wish death upon you as they wished death upon me,\u201d Shirley said of the decentralized protest group at the event.<\/p>\n Leading up to the Minnesota day care video, Shirley released a video about \u201cthe rise of Islam\u201d in the U.S. and what he called \u201cMinnesota\u2019s Somali Takeover.\u201d The July video makes a spectacle of the call to prayer and individuals praying inside a mosque and singles out Omar, as well as an Islamic center that converted from a Lutheran church to illustrate his point of the apparent takeover.<\/p>\n In October, Shirley published an hour-and-a-half sitdown interview with British far-right anti-immigrant and anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, during which he repeated the false claim that there are \u201c40,000 British Muslims\u201d on the United Kingdom\u2019s terror watchlist living in Britain. The figure is a misreading of a real list<\/a> by British intelligence agency MI5, which does not include religious identifiers and contains the names of many people who have never traveled to the U.K. \u201cAt what point does this break out from a revolution to a civil war?\u201d Shirley asked.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n