Watch · December 2025–2026
Nick Shirley’s camera, and the bill on every paycheck
By One Civil Law
A 24-year-old with a phone walked up to Minnesota day cares that had taken millions in public money and asked a simple question: where are the children? The video did not invent the fraud cases. It made a country look. That is worth doing. A slammed door is not a verdict. A charging table is.
Nick Shirley, from Farmington, Utah, posts street interviews to YouTube. On December 26, 2025 he published a 43-minute walk through Minneapolis. He showed licensed child-care sites, blacked-out windows, and midday lots with no small footprints in the snow. He also showed public Child Care Assistance Program totals in the millions. Quality Learning Center — the sign that spelled “learing” — had taken about $1.9 million from that program in fiscal 2025, and about $10 million from the state since 2019. Shirley and a local researcher he names only as David said they had added up more than $110 million in one day of stops. The clip exploded on X (well over 100 million views) and on his channel. Vice President J.D. Vance called it more useful than the last Pulitzer class. HHS froze Minnesota child-care payments and named the video. That is the civic event: a camera plus a payment ledger moved a Cabinet department.
Watch the tape. Subscribe if you want the next one. Then hold two facts at once. First: Minnesota already had a big fraud file before Shirley arrived — Feeding Our Future (hundreds of millions in child-nutrition money), autism clinics, housing, home health. The U.S. Attorney’s office has said most of those defendants were Somali American. That is a charging table, not a vibe. Second: a YouTuber who is not let inside on a Tuesday has not proven the room is empty every hour of the year. WCCO found children at ABC Learning Center after the video. Quality Learning Center’s lot filled with drop-off vans in late December even as the commissioner said it had closed. The license was closed at the operator’s request on January 6, 2026. State inspectors who hit the sites in the video logged safety citations, not an immediate fraud finding. Do not outsource the indictment to a doorbell.
The later record is not nothing. In May 2026 federal prosecutors charged the owner of Future Leaders Early Learning Center — a stop in the video — with wire fraud and conspiracy on the child-care program. In July 2026, Fahima Mahamud, a day-care owner from the tape, pleaded guilty to about $4.6 million in day-care fraud and $850,000 tied to Feeding Our Future. Senator Joni Ernst’s office dug SBA pandemic loans into Quality Learning Center and said the committee was “quite confident” the money was not used the right way — still short of a filed criminal case on that building. Four of the nine named centers were already under state investigations. That is how this is supposed to work: the camera points; the grand jury either returns or it doesn’t.
Hospice is a different street with the same hole. Shirley took the method to California — empty-looking hospices stacked in a plaza, Medi-Cal bills in the millions, a video he said showed more than $170 million. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz had already been talking about Los Angeles hospice mills. California’s attorney general had charged a 14-provider ring. That file is not “Somali day care.” It is immigrant-and-organized fraud against the dying, including Armenian-run shops in L.A. Collapsing every fake hospice, fake autism hour, and fake meal site into “Muslim fraud” is how you lose the charging table you actually have. The Minnesota meal, autism, housing, and child-care defendants were disproportionately Somali. Name that. Do not baptize a Los Angeles hospice mill as a mosque.
The theft is real even when the slogan is sloppy. Public money taken for children who were not fed, hours that were not worked, and hospice that was not given is taken from a nurse’s paycheck, a machinist’s grocery budget, and a widow’s Medicare trust. It is not a victimless “program.” It is a transfer from people who punch a clock to people who learned the billing code. Americans should be as impatient as Shirley is about the clock. They should be more careful than a viral caption about the defendant. Watch the video. Read the DOJ release. Write the auditor. Do not substitute a people for a spreadsheet.
Our read
Watch Shirley. Watch the court docket. Fraud against Medicaid and child-care funds is theft from working families — full stop. A phone at a locked door is how a republic notices. A charging document is how it finishes. Do not let anyone tell you that asking where the children are is racism. Do not let anyone tell you that a religion is the defendant. The defendant is the person who billed the hour that was not worked.
- YouTube — I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal
- Nick Shirley — YouTube channel
- Star Tribune — Minnesotans deserve answers (Dec. 31, 2025)
- CBS Minnesota — ABC Learning Center director responds
- Star Tribune — Quality Learning Center closed (Jan. 6, 2026)
- Harvard Crimson — HHS freeze and Shirley (Sept. 14, 2026)
- One Civil Law — Minnesota Medicaid theft briefing
Written by One Civil Law. The stories and “Our read” are ours. Linked sources are the original record.






