At day cares in Minnesota, strangers are showing up at their doors as parents scramble to protect staff

They started showing up shortly after the now viral video was posted to YouTube, claiming Minnesota day cares run by Somali Americans were rife with fraud. The video showed no real proof of that claim and has since been widely debunked. They came anyway. 

The first time it happened, the day care received an anonymous call from a woman brusquely asking them to open the door. When Fay, the owner, went outside, a man was already there recording. “There’s nobody here,” he was saying into the camera on his phone. 

“Can I help you?” she asked him. The man said he was there because of Nick Shirley’s video. He wanted to see the children. 

“I’m not going to let you in,” she replied. “There are kids here.” 

“If you’re not lying,” he told her, “let me in.”

Fay, whose name The 19th has changed to protect her identity over fears for her safety, didn’t waver. Even under normal circumstances, she would never let an unknown man enter the day care and come near the children, much less film them, and certainly not under these circumstances, as a Somali day care provider who suddenly feels like she has a target on her back.

It’s been like this for over a month. A pair of young men turned up one night looking through the windows until a nearby business owner walked up to them and asked them to leave. Another time, an older man came twice in one day with a paper in hand, trying to pull open the doors. 

“Does he want to get to the kids? Does he want to shoot us?” Fay wondered. She called the police.

Child care providers in Minnesota — especially Somali Americans — are facing high levels of harassment in a city besieged by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. As strangers continue to show up asking to get access to the children inside, there is also the constant fear that ICE may come for the parents, the children or their staff, a large portion of whom are immigrants. Nationwide, about 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrants, almost all of them women. It’s a fear now extending from child care to schools, with parents standing up adhoc networks to support providers, teachers and other immigrant families.

“I really love America more than I love anywhere in the world, and now I am feeling scared and sad and humiliated,” said Fay, who has been in the country for more than 20 years, is an American citizen and has been operating her center for nearly a decade. 

The video YouTuber Nick Shirley posted just after Christmas alleged widespread fraud at day cares in Minnesota that were siphoning government funds but not providing care for any children at all. In the video, Shirley goes to multiple Somali-run day cares. Some appear closed, others do not let him in when he asks to see the children. Unannounced inspections by state officials into the centers following the video found them operating normally, and nearly all have prior records of inspections and monitoring by the state going back years that further prove they have been serving children. Some fraud at child care centers in Minnesota has been previously reported and investigated by state officials, but there is no evidence that widespread fraud is taking place.

Nevertheless, the video has created a powerful narrative of rampant abuse, drawing the attention of the president and precipitating a drastic surge in ICE activity that by many accounts has turned South Minneapolis into something resembling a war zone. Already, two people have been killed by federal agents and children — including babies and toddlers — have been hurt and detained.

“As a child care community we are feeling attacked and we are an easy target: Child care historically has always been done by women and especially women of color in an exploitative practice,” said Leah Budnik, the board secretary at the Minnesota Association for the Education of Young Children, a child care advocacy organization. 

After Shirley’s video, the Trump administration put a freeze on child care funding to the state, though funds are still available as a lawsuit makes its way through the courts. The administration also asked for additional documentation such as attendance records and student information from providers, an effort that Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families has ratcheted up by sending members of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to parse through paperwork. That means that armed law enforcement is now joining in on the compliance checks, raising questions from providers about the need for that step — particularly around children. 

“I can understand the need for the state to have people-power to go in and collect documentation the federal government is asking for in very short notice, but bringing armed law enforcement into child care centers is probably not the right way to do it,” Budnik said. “It does make people feel scared and criminalized.” 

Cisa Keller, the president and CEO of Think Small, a nonprofit that works with many of the state’s child care centers offering additional education and support services, called the administration’s response to Shirley’s video a “kneejerk reaction” that is ultimately going to harm providers who had nothing to do with the false allegations. Most of the nine programs in the Shirley video, she said, are programs her staff has worked directly with. 

“We are in and out of those programs with coaching and professional development, and we have a presence as part of the system,” Keller said. “We would be able to see if something was going awry.”

Instead, what’s happened is an escalation of a situation where children are going to be the most directly impacted, she said. 

In the Twin Cities, where the bulk of ICE activity is taking place, the situation has boiled over to full panic. Providers are losing staff to the ICE raids because immigrant staffers are either being arrested or choosing to stay home. Some families the providers serve are also in hiding, not taking their children to school or day care to avoid ICE. 

Dawn Uribe, the owner of four Spanish-immersion preschools in Minnesota, said two of her staffers have been detained by ICE. One of them was on break at work in early January when it happened and called a supervisor to let them know they were being taken away and to please inform their family. 

Since, a vast community mobilization effort led by parents has sprung up to support staff, centers and other families. 

Over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend this month, a group of about 20 grandparents and parents showed up to a two-hour training at one of Uribe’s day cares to learn how they could step in as volunteers should the school lose additional staff and be unable to meet teacher-to-student ratios. (By law, day cares must adhere to strict ratios for child safety; in Minnesota there can be no more than four infants to every teacher, for example.) The parents and grandparents who showed up learned about shaken baby syndrome, how to do accident reporting and how to ensure kids are accounted for at all times should they ever need to be called on to step in. 

The parents, Uribe said, are also delivering food to staff, taking parking lot shifts to watch for ICE and ensure teachers get safely to and from school, and standing watch in the lobby. 

“The community in general, the Twin Cities in general, we don’t like what’s happening and we are going to stand up and say that this is wrong,” Uribe said. “Every time there is a training offered [in the community] people are there and they’re showing up to help their neighbors, they’re showing up to take groceries, they’re showing up to protests to be an observer and record what’s going on. That part’s powerful.” 

Sarah Quinn, a mom of two in Minneapolis, said parents at her older daughter’s elementary school had been working together to take food to immigrant students and their families since ICE first showed up in the city in early December. When reports that ICE was patrolling near the schools started to circulate, parents stepped in to give kids rides to school using spare booster seats and car seats. They got an estimated 50 kids back to school in December through those efforts. 

But then came Shirley’s video and the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Calls for aid flooded in. The preschool Quinn’s son attends got so many harassing calls in one day that police had to be sent to the school. 

Parents started to set up school patrols, stationing volunteers in the parking lot and in their neighborhoods to make sure kids, families and staff could come and go to school safely. The number of parents doing food deliveries to other families’ homes shot up.

“People said ‘jump’ and we all kind of said, ‘How high?’” Quinn said. “As parents who care about our neighbors and who love this part of Minneapolis life that is diverse and involves immigrant families who have really just been responding as neighbors.”

They have also resolved to be more careful, watching everyone who comes and goes from the schools to make sure they are not inadvertently letting anyone in behind them who could harm the kids. In Chicago late last year, ICE agents entered a Spanish immersion preschool and detained a worker in front of children.

“We are not going to be Minnesota nice,” Quinn said.

Parents in Quinn’s daughter’s elementary school were made aware in December of a child in her grade who had not been at school for a week. They later learned the child’s parent had been detained and the other parent was keeping the child home out of fear. 

When Quinn went into her daughter’s class recently to do a holiday craft, she realized the missing child was her daughter’s deskmate. 

It’s presented a quiet challenge among the parents in the immensity of this moment: How do you talk to a second grader about what’s unfolding around them? 

“We have had to find a lot of different ways to talk to our kids about how to be safe. Our children know the word ‘ICE’ and they know the word ‘ICE agent,’” Quinn said. 

They’ve developed something of a mantra between them. 

“What do we want?” Quinn may ask. 

“We want them to leave,” the kids will reply. “We want all of our immigrant friends to feel safe.”