The Trump administration is withholding funds from child care centers in Minnesota after a right-wing YouTuber said centers run by Somali immigrants were taking public money without providing care.
In a post on X on Tuesday, a senior Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official said the agency was freezing funds to combat “the egregious fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota.”
Officials recently tightened immigration controls in the state, home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the United States, after President Donald Trump said he did not want them to remain in the country.
Government officials have spoken out against allegations of fraud in a viral video.
“We have frozen all child care benefits in the state of Minnesota,” Deputy Secretary of Health Jim O'Neill said in an X-Post on Tuesday.
He said the decision comes amid “serious allegations that the state of Minnesota has diverted millions of taxpayer dollars over the past decade to fraudulent child care centers throughout Minnesota.”
The department said it would suspend annual payments of $185 million (£137 million) to the state until the centers concerned were fully reviewed.
O'Neill's message added that HHS will implement a “cost protection” system for all future payments to each state. This would require “justification and a receipt or photographic evidence before we send the money to the state,” he said.
Nick Shirley's video, which has received millions of views across multiple social media platforms since being posted over the weekend, accuses nearly a dozen centers of not providing any services or not having children present during Shirley's visit.
Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families Commissioner Tikki Brown said the sites featured in the video are subject to regular inspections.
“While we have questions about some of the techniques used in the video, we take the concerns about fraud raised in the video very seriously,” she said.
Government officials also told the BBC's US media partner CBS News that they had revisited some of the sites this week.
Two of them have already closed, they added.
CBS found no evidence of fraud in its review of the centers' public records, although it did find citations related to safety, cleanliness, equipment and staff training. All but two of the facilities mentioned in the video had valid licenses, and all had been visited by government regulators in the past six months.
The last inspection took place on December 4 at Sweet Angel Daycare, a center that has received particular attention on social media.
FBI Director Kash Patel said earlier this week that he was aware of “recent social media posts” and that fraud investigations in Minnesota were continuing in the wake of the pandemic.
“The FBI believes this is just the tip of a very large iceberg. We will continue to follow the money and protect the children, and this investigation is largely ongoing,” Patel wrote on X.
In March, a federal jury convicted the head of the now-defunct Feeding Our Future organization in Minnesota for what prosecutors called the largest pandemic relief scam in history, costing $250 million (£186 million).
Minneapolis is the latest target in Trump's months-long campaign to crack down on immigration and crime in cities across the US.
Earlier this month, Trump said he doesn't want Somali immigrants in the U.S., telling reporters they should “go back to where they came from” and that “their country is not good for a reason.”
Minnesota is led by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris' running mate in the 2024 election.
Walz, who has sparred with Trump over immigration and other issues, said: “We welcome support for investigating and prosecuting crimes. But using PR and indiscriminately attacking immigrants is not a real solution to the problem.”
