From Viral Video to Federal Occupation: How Nick Shirley Ignited the Minneapolis ICE Surge

The MAGA operative's viral video about Minneapolis daycare centers ignited the explosive situation that gave Donald Trump an excuse to launch the largest-ever ICE occupation of an American city.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter.

Illustration by Riley Levine

There is a straight line from Nick Shirley’s viral video about alleged fraud at Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis to the shooting death of 37-year Renee Good. He didn’t pull the trigger, but he certainly helped ignite the explosive situation that led to Good’s death.

Let’s be clear: Shirley is not a journalist. He’s a MAGA political operative making an enormous and very dangerous impact on government policy and beyond. He and the other MAGA media sycophants like him need even tougher scrutiny from journalists and the public.

Shirley’s video was strategically posted on YouTube and Twitter on Dec. 26, a typically slow news day right after the Christmas holiday. It’s a selectively edited, gotcha-style video that falsely claims day care and autism centers run by Somali-Americans in Minneapolis were cashing government subsidy checks, but not actually taking care of any kids.

The Shirley video quickly ricocheted across the right-wing media ecosystem with help of some of the right’s biggest internet trolls: billionaire X owner Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance. Deceptive, racist and partisan videos are, after all, the crack that keeps MAGA brains from properly functioning. Right on cue, Donald Trump cited the “news” as an excuse to starve Minnesota of critical federal funding and to launch the largest ever ICE occupation of an American city.

Agent Jonathan Ross’ reckless gunning down of Good, a 37-year mother, could well have happened without the Shirley video. Good, after all, is not the first person ICE agents have shot and killed in recent months and she likely won’t be the last. We’ve all seen the videos, heard the eye witness testimony, and followed the revealing court cases. The facts make plain that out-of-control ICE agents have shot, teargassed, pepper sprayed at close range, assaulted, chased and rammed drivers with their vehicles, harassed and yes, killed people across the country. That despicable federal overreach continues to this day in Minneapolis.

But the odds of a tragedy like the killing of Renee Good grew much larger because of the video. The madness of the MAGA frenzy led to the rapid escalation of the federal response in the Twin Cities. Starting in early December, ICE had 100 agents running an immigration operation in Minnesota called “Operation Midway Surge” with a particular focus on undocumented Somali residents. Tensions were high as the agents started making arrests and enraged community members fought back. Just like in Chicago, most of the people arrested did not have criminal records and many were U.S. citizens.

While this initial enforcement action was underway in Minnesota, Trump was in White House repeatedly launching vile, racist tirades calling the state’s Somali community ‘garbage’ and decrying alleged fraud in the state. As he’s done many times, Trump also ranted about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, a U.S. citizen of Somali descent. At a Dec. 2 cabinet meeting, he singled out Omar. Days later on Dec 9, during Pennsylvania speech that was supposed to be about affordability, Trump attacked Omar again and the crowd joined in shouting, “Send her back.”

MAGA’s Viral Political Operative

Enter Nick Shirley, a rising star in the MAGA media world for his propaganda videos, who became an integral part of the Republican effort to target immigrants and Minnesota Democrats. That included Walz, who has dropped his reelection bid since Shirley’s video was released.

Shirley mysteriously showed up in Minneapolis for a Dec. 17 Republican-led hearing on, you guessed it, fraud in the state’s social services program. How did Shirley end up at an obscure hearing like that? Clearly, it was not by accident. Somebody in Republican politics made sure he was there. MPR News reported that Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth — who is running for governor — proudly revealed that her Republican “caucus steered YouTube creator Nick Shirley to daycare sites in Minnesota.” The false information on all those papers you see Shirley’s mysterious companion, “David,” waving around in the politically charged video? Apparently that, too, originated with the Minnesota GOP.

Shirley hasn’t revealed how he became connected with the Minnesota Republicans (maybe some journalists can press him on that question?) but it’s clear he is now part of the Trump- GOP media machine. As the New York Times reported: “The scale of the reaction to Mr. Shirley’s video has few precedents, but it highlights the way the White House seeds narratives about key issues, then rewards sympathetic creators who deliver viral content.”

An Explosion of Federal Agents in Minnesota

The Trump administration’s rapid response to the video began with word from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who announced that teams would go door-to-door in Minneapolis to investigate the alleged daycare fraud “exposed” in Shirley’s video.

FBI Director Kash Patel and other Trump administration officials joined the pile-on and started announcing additional enforcement efforts. Then, DHS announced an even more ominous threat aimed at the Midwestern city: a dramatic surge of immigration agents that would take the immigration force from 100 to 2,400 almost overnight.

Going from 100 agents to over 2,400 is extreme. That looks and sounds a lot more like an occupying army than a border control enforcement operation. As a matter of scale, consider that the police force of Minneapolis and St. Paul each have fewer than 600 officers. The federal invasion is also far larger than previous actions in other cities. Chicago is dramatically bigger than Minneapolis, but reports indicate the force here last year numbered around 300. That’s 300 agents in a metro region of nearly 9 million people vs. over 2,400 agents in a metro region of less than 4 million. If DHS is telling the truth about soon adding another 1,000 agents to the area, that is even more dangerous.

As ICE swells its ranks courtesy of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” large scale federal assaults like the one in Minneapolis will likely become more common, with predictably tragic consequences.

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There’s No Such Thing as a MAGA Journalist

Although he comes off as pretty clueless in interviews, Shirley is not a random guy with a camera and a YouTube account. He’s also not a journalist.

He started as a video prankster, but it’s clear he’s a now full-fledged MAGA political operative with millions of followers on social media and the ability to impact government action. His focus on targeting immigrants and people of color aligns perfectly with the bigoted Trump White House.

Along with over 3.5 million others and counting, I’ve watched the 43-minute video that helped ignite the powder keg in Minnesota. (I’m not going to link to it here.) You hear him lying about being a parent needing child care to gain access to a daycare center and continuously making wild claims with no supporting evidence. He also tries to force his way into locked daycare facilities. Not only is that not journalism; it could be a crime.

Shirley is also accompanied by his own security force as he stalks the daycare centers, many of them masked like ICE agents. All of it is designed to feed MAGA’s lust for racist, partisan hate.

Disinformation expert Dr. Caroline Orr Bueno says Shirley is engaged in credibility laundering. She writes:

“Shirley also adopted the aesthetics of journalism, effectively laundering the credibility that people assign to investigative journalism and using it to produce propaganda. Because the video appears investigative—featuring on-the-ground footage, documents, and first-person narration—it borrows the visual language of journalism but without having to adhere to journalistic standards.”

Disgracefully, instead of calling him out as a propagandist, many national news organizations have given Shirley a kind of credibility, calling him an “independent journalist” or “citizen journalist.” CNN actually had a headline that read “MAGA journalist.”

A MAGA journalist? There’s no such thing. MAGA and “journalist” don’t even belong in the same sentence, nor does the word “journalist” apply to someone like Nick Shirley whose entire goal is spreading misinformation for political purposes. Frankly, I think even describing him as an “influencer” is also misguided.

To see how journalists can get this right, look at the stories in the Guardian US. Despite that lousy “MAGA journalist’ headline, CNN did confront Shirley with some hard questions. We need to see more of that. Push him on his sourcing, methods, financing, and political partners. Local Minneapolis news outlets are also doing solid work fact-checking Shirley, covering the real life impacts of the viral video including death threats and vandalism. The local news coverage of the current terror campaign underway is also excellent.

Traditional journalism is built on a solid foundation of truth with established reporting guidelines, ethics rules, and a commitment to accuracy, fairness, and transparency. Independence is also key.

MAGA media is the exact opposite. In fact, MAGA media and Republican politics are indistinguishable. Job one is echoing Donald Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories just like state media in Russia and Iran. Some — like Nick Shirley — are also directly impacting government policies. And now Minnesota is paying the price.