(The Hill) – A Minnesota day care center on Wednesday said they’ve faced “extreme vandalism” after Nick Shirley’s viral YouTube video shared allegations of fraud.
Employees of Nokomis Daycare Center in Minneapolis told police they were broken into on Tuesday morning after Shirley claimed they were using public funding to fuel a child care site, where kids were not actually being taken care of.
“We saw that, unfortunately we saw that there was important documentation, enrollment of the children and also employee documentation that was gone. There were also checkbooks that were ripped from our, check papers that were from our book,” Manager Nasrulah Mohamed said during a press conference.
“This is devastating news and we don’t know why this is targeting our Somali community as one video made by a specific individual made this all happen. We’ve been receiving hateful messages through our voice notes threatening us since the past couple of days including one that happened yesterday morning when the break-in, after the break-in,” he added.
Shirley targeted Somali-American owned day care centers after immigrants in the state were charged in connection to a scheme where a local non-profit was misappropriating public funds intended to be used to distribute food to children during the pandemic.
Multiple Somali-Americans were linked to the fraudulent “Feeding Our Future” non-profit but the ring leader was determined to be a white woman.
Mohamed said the backlash from the fallout has been brutal for the Somali-American community in Minnesota.
“I want to say that there are hundreds of day cares out there, Somali day cares that are out there and we all help each our children and everyone in our community. We have high quality day cares and this is very sad news that one individual who made a false claim about fraud that is happening in the day cares helped engage everyone else to come and do this to us,” he told the public.
“We are not a part of any harmful things that are being said. We are, we have no problem with CCAP [Child Care Assistance Program] and our licensing has been good, even the inspections. I want to say no intimidation is going to stop us from what is happening and upgrading our community,” he added.