Category: Wires

Daycare operators say the Trump administration’s restrictions on federal childcare funding unfairly punish them over a conservative activist’s fraud allegations against Minnesota centers that are undercut by state records and disputed by some of the owners.

YouTuber Nick Shirley recently went to nine federally subsidized daycare centers in Minneapolis, many operated by Somali Americans.

In a 42-minute video of his visits that went viral last week, he claimed that the centers weren’t caring for any children because none could be seen entering or exiting the buildings.

In response, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cut off funds to the centers until they undergo extensive auditing and announced stricter verification measures nationwide for childcare funds.

Minnesota state regulators visited the centers within the past 10 months and saw children, according to state officials and records, undermining claims that they are fraudulent businesses.

One daycare manager told the Washington Post that security camera footage showed Shirley visiting her facility when it was closed. Another daycare director said staff didn’t open the door in part because they assumed that Shirley and six or seven men with him, some masked, were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which launched an operation in early December focused on Somali immigrants in the Minneapolis area.

Ahmed Hasan, director of ABC Learning Center, said the YouTuber showed up at the front entrance around noon on Dec. 16. During the winter, most parents use the back entrance and Shirley stayed no more than a few minutes, he said.

“There were kids here all the time,” Hasan said. “I was also here.”

Hasan said his daycare serves about 56 children, most from low-income East African families. It was last visited by a state regulator on Nov. 7. Since the video went viral, people have flooded his center’s phones with harassing calls, threatening to have him arrested or call ICE, he said.

Ayan Jama, manager at Mini Childcare Center, said that her daycare has also received threatening phone calls, including a bomb threat, and that people have attempted to break in.

She said Shirley visited in the morning before her center opened after noon. Its typical hours are 12:30 to 9:30 p.m. to serve mostly Somali children after school while their parents work in the afternoons and evenings, she said.

“Why not come during operating hours?” she said. “This is a targeted attack on our community.”

Jama, whose business was last visited by a regulator on June 11, said she won’t be able to keep her doors open if federal funds, which account for 90% of her revenue, aren’t restored.

Of the seven other daycare centers featured in Shirley’s video, five didn’t return requests for comment on Wednesday, the mailbox was full for a sixth, and multiple calls to a seventh resulted in a busy signal.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said the Trump administration is threatening funding for childcare services “apparently all on the basis of one video on social media.”

“To say I am outraged is an understatement,” Ellison said in a statement Wednesday.

The scrutiny on the nine daycare centers in Shirley’s video has nationwide implications because all daycare centers will have to submit more documentation to HHS before receiving childcare funds.

The new guidelines, while still unclear, mirror “defend the spend” requirements that briefly went into effect in April before they were stopped, child welfare policy analysts said. For a few weeks, states seeking to draw down money to reimburse daycares were asked to upload additional details on why the payments were justified.

That effort significantly delayed payments to providers, said Stephanie Schmit, director of childcare and early education at nonpartisan Center for Law and Social Policy.

If the new documentation requirements are the same or more onerous, providers that are chronically underfunded will struggle to keep their doors open, she said.

“We already know that childcare providers don’t have a lot of additional time to do things like this,” Schmit said.

HHS said federal childcare dollars, which help families with low incomes pay for care, will be frozen to the centers under suspicion until they release extensive documents, including attendance records, inspection reports, and complaints.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the agency has “a clear duty to verify the proper use of taxpayer funds.”

“The documentation process exists to rule out fraud and confirm that funds are supporting legitimate child care providers,” he said in a statement. “Any provider operating should be prepared to demonstrate compliance.”

Clare Sanford, a government relations chair for the Minnesota Child Care Association, which represents more than 300 centers across the state, called the viral video misleading.

For example, daycare centers often lock their front doors for safety reasons, and it is not unusual for employees to not answer a door if they are caring for children and not expecting a visitor, she said.

If an employee opens a door, children might not be visible because daycare centers keep them in classrooms, away from entrances, she said.

Shirley did not return requests for comment Wednesday evening.

The action comes amid state and federal fraud investigations of 14 Minnesota-run safety net programs, including for child nutrition, housing, and autism assistance.

President Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers, and conservative activists and media outlets have cited the involvement of Somali Americans to blast the immigrant group. Trump said in a Cabinet meeting last month that he doesn’t want Somali immigrants in the United States and referred to them as “garbage.”

Around three dozen people gathered Wednesday at the Minnesota Capitol to express opposition to the childcare funding restrictions, holding signs that said “No child care, no workforce” and “Fund care not fear.”

“Let’s be honest about how we really got here: Our president decided he doesn’t like the Somali community and he wants to destroy them,” said Amanda Schillinger, a Minnesota childcare provider, to a loud chorus of boos.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, tweeted Tuesday that Trump was “politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”

State Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, a Democrat who is cochair of the House Children and Families Finance and Policy Committee, said the state has been actively working for years to put safeguards in place against fraud.

“It’s incredibly frustrating to me that Donald Trump and the Republicans want to use this as a political vehicle to cut funding to our state,” she said.

Eight of the daycare centers depicted in Shirley’s video have received multiple violations by state regulators. ABC Learning Center was cited for deficiencies, which Hasan said were corrected and described as common among daycares, such as not having food menus with proper nutritional requirements and not having an individual care plan for a child with a known allergy.

The ninth center in Shirley’s video — Super Kids Daycare Center — had its license activated Oct. 1 and shares the same address as another daycare center whose license expired that same day and previously received violations.

The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families did not return requests for comment after the Trump administration announced its funding freeze.

Chad Hanson remembers a time, not so long ago, when driving on a bridge across Florida’s Apalachicola Bay meant witnessing an astounding sight.

“You’d see just boats lined up along the reefs and spread out,” he said of the hundreds of oyster fisherman that used to harvest from roughly 10,000 acres of the bay, about 75 miles southwest of Tallahassee.

For generations, those boats helped fuel the local economy and provided 90% of the oysters harvested in Florida, as well as about 10% of the nation’s wild caught oysters.

“Pretty much the whole community, in one way or another, was involved with the oyster industry,” said Hanson, a science and policy officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts who works on conservation issues around the Southeast.

Now, more than a decade after the once-iconic industry began to fade — and five years after harvesting was shuttered completely — Apalachicola’s storied oyster beds have opened once more, on the first day of 2026.

In 2013, the fishery entered a precipitous decline, the result of pressures such as excessive drought, overharvesting, the loss of reef material and long-running water disputes along the rivers that feed the bay — a reflection of stressors that have affected oyster populations across the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.

By 2020, Florida had imposed a five-year oyster harvesting ban, in an effort to try to jump-start an ecological recovery.

When harvesting in Apalachicola begins anew, it won’t be anything like the glory days just yet, with a truncated season, fewer permits available to access fewer acres and catches strictly monitored and limited.

But for folks such as Shannon Hartsfield, a fourth-generation Franklin County fisherman, it’s something.

“How can I put it?” Hartsfield, 56, said on a recent afternoon. “It’s a step forward, but it’s not going to be enough to say you can make a living in the bay.”

The decision to reopen the bay

In the fall, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission voted unanimously to reopen Apalachicola Bay to oyster harvesting on Jan. 1 — a decision that drew swift praise from Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican.

“Apalachicola’s oyster industry has been the cornerstone of Florida’s seafood economy for generations. No place knows oysters better than Apalachicola,” DeSantis said at the time.

“I look forward to continuing to invest in restoration activities that support the long-term restoration of Apalachicola Bay and the communities that rely on it,” DeSantis said.

The approval came with a series of restrictions. To begin with, the state will allow only a two-month season, ending on Feb. 28. If all goes well, officials plan to reopen future seasons beginning in October.

For now, the state considers only about 500 acres suitable for harvesting, and commercial crews who qualify for a permit will be allowed to fish Monday through Friday along four small, designated reefs.

Each permit holder also will be limited to a certain number of bags from each reef. A bag is equal to two 5-gallon buckets, one 10-gallon bucket, or 60 pounds of oysters.

No one is pretending that such modest limits are enough to bring back oystering jobs that have been lost over the years, or to immediately make harvesting a sustainable line of work again in Apalachicola, where some oystermen have sold their boats and many have had to seek other kinds of work.

“I just don’t know how it’s going to be,” said Hartsfield, who said he quit harvesting oysters in 2013 but has helped academic researchers with their ongoing search for solutions. “We have a drop in the bucket compared to what we used to have.”

Merely reaching the point of being able to temporarily reopen Apalachicola Bay to harvesting took years of work and significant funding.

Numerous small-scale restoration efforts have unfolded during the years of closure, but the largest effort came in 2024, when the state’s fish and wildlife commission constructed 77 acres of new reef on degraded oyster habitat, the agency said.

State officials have set a long-term goal to restore 2,000 acres of oyster reefs in the bay by 2032 — still a fraction of what once existed, but far more than its recent lows.

The state also hopes to reestablish an oyster fishery with a long-term “cultch” program, in which oyster shells or other material are added back onto reefs to create an ideal habitat for baby oysters to attach and grow.

Such a program “is necessary component of any sustainable oyster fishery,” state wildlife officials wrote in a recent presentation.

“The success of oyster recovery in Apalachicola Bay, which includes a viable oyster fishery, depends on continued restoration and reef maintenance,” the agency wrote, estimating that such efforts will require an annual budget between $30 million and $55 million.

A budget proposal rolled out by DeSantis in December seeks $30 million in funding to expedite the state’s efforts to restore oyster habitats, including $25 million in Apalachicola Bay. But even if that amount ultimately is approved, restoring resilience in the estuary will take time.

“I’ll be frank,” said Hanson, who also serves on the board of the Partnership for a Resilient Apalachicola Bay. “Oyster restoration and habitat rebuilding is on the order not of years, but decades.”

Stress on the industry across the region

The pressures facing Florida’s once-renowned oyster industry are not unique. Other oyster populations around the Gulf of Mexico have faced declines in recent years for a litany of reasons, including habitat loss, pollution, and damage from storms.

Recently, Alabama announced that the state would close all public water bottoms oyster harvesting on Dec. 23 after one of the worst harvests in years.

State conservation officials said in a statement that surveys of reefs “suggest Alabama’s oyster populations have faced multiple stressors in recent years which have led to a population decline.”

Those threats extend across much of the Gulf Coast — and far beyond — said Tom Wheatley, a conservation project director for Pew. “It’s a global issue,” he said.

Indeed, researchers have estimated that as much as 85% of oyster reefs have been lost. Those losses matter not only because of the fishing industry they support, but also because of the habitat they provide for other marine life and the critical role they play in improving water quality and helping buffer the impacts of storm surges and waves.

Hanson said so much work remains in Apalachicola Bay before its beloved reefs resembled anything from decades ago. But he sees the reopening of the harvest season as a small step to a potentially brighter future.

“Hopefully, this is the beginning of a success story,” he said.

Hartsfield, like others who come from generations of oyster families, shares that hope. He said he plans to be back out on the water come January, and so does his 78-year-old father.

But he also knows how delicate the situation remains. How if another drought hits hard, or salinity levels aren’t just right, or other threats deepen, “It could go right back to where it was” when officials closed the bay in 2020.

“Right now, for the next few years, we will just be waiting to see what happens,” he said. “It’s very fragile.”