By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
Nick Shirley spent Saturday night walking the Freedom Fest audience through the questions that have taken him from hotels near Denver International Airport to empty daycare centers in Minnesota and apartment complexes in Aurora.
Interviewed by Jeff Hunt, co-host of the Jeff and Bill Show on Denver’s 710 KNUS, Shirley spent less time talking about what he uncovered than how he uncovered it.
Colorado was one of the first places he looked
Long before a Minnesota daycare investigation made him nationally known, Shirley found himself in Colorado after repeatedly hearing migrants at the southern border mention the same destination. Denver. He came to look.
“You guys are from Latin America? It’s cold in Denver,” he remembered asking. “What are you guys doing in Denver?”
Shirley speaks fluent Spanish, so he started talking with migrants staying near Denver International Airport. What he heard surprised him. They described three meals a day, housing, free phones and even new clothes after arriving.
“Nobody really knew that was going on,” he said. “Because I could speak fluent Spanish, I was able to expose it.”
Colorado would draw him back again after reports surfaced about Tren de Aragua gang activity in Aurora.
“The media said they weren’t,” Shirley recalled. “I went there and there were bullet holes in the windows.”
Inside one apartment, he said, a woman described gangs extorting residents and taking control of the complex.
For Shirley, the pattern kept repeating. When public claims and what he found on the ground didn’t match, he kept going back to the same approach.
Go look.
Start with a question
Hunt wanted to know how someone with a camera, a car and a lot of questions had uncovered stories that entire newsrooms hadn’t.
Shirley’s answer began in Minnesota. A local realtor mentioned suspected fraud involving daycare centers. Later, a man with only a handful of followers on social media connected him with the numbers.
Shirley said the daycare was supposed to be open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., but when he arrived every window had been blacked out. Nobody answered when he knocked, and when he looked around, there weren’t any footprints in the snow.
“We were like, ‘What is going on?'” he recalled.
A second daycare sat only a block away. It looked much the same. When someone finally answered through the door, Shirley tried to enroll his imaginary son.
“Hey, I want to enroll my son Little Joey in a daycare.”
“The lady said, ‘No.'”
He drove to another location, then another. By day’s end, Shirley said, he realized he had stumbled onto something much larger than he first imagined.
“It was just to show people”
Hunt eventually asked what drives Shirley to keep doing it and where the desire to expose corruption came from.
Earlier in the evening, Shirley had shared how the Minnesota story began.
They were in Minnesota filming another story when, Shirley said, a group of Somalis jumped his mother and stole their camera.
“From that point on,” he recalled, “I had to go get vengeance.”
While he was still in Minnesota, a woman told him about suspected fraud involving daycare centers.
That’s what led him to start knocking on daycare doors.
So when Hunt asked what drove him, Shirley gently pushed back on the premise.
“It was never really a desire to expose anything,” he said.
“It was just to show people what was going on.”
Later, Hunt summarized what he had heard throughout the conversation.
“It sounds like you start with something that doesn’t seem right,” Hunt said, “and then you go and try to figure out why that’s happening. You start to dig and dig.”
“It’s starting with something that doesn’t seem right, and then having the courage to continue to try to expose that.”
“Exactly,” Shirley replied.
When journalism stops looking
Hunt eventually turned to a question many in the audience were waiting for.
“What has happened to mainstream media in this country?”
Before answering, Shirley went back to the people he met along the southern border.
In Laredo, Texas, one mother told him about a pregnant woman who couldn’t pay the cartel. She said cartel members slit the woman’s stomach open, ripped out and killed the baby.
“They just stopped representing the people,” he said, “and they just started representing their party or their agenda or who they’re getting that funding from.”
“If the media would actually have to look into it,” he said, “they’d see how evil some of this stuff is that they are promoting.”
Where Shirley told Colorado to start
As the interview drew to a close, Hunt brought the discussion back to Colorado.
If Shirley were starting an investigation here today, where would he look first?
Shirley didn’t point to one investigation. He started listing places where government dollars flow: homelessness, Medicaid, Medicare, daycare centers and hospice providers.
Then he explained what he looks for.
“Start looking at the numbers and start running the numbers and look for the percentages of increases,” he said.
He said unusually large jumps in government spending are often where he begins asking questions.
After his Minnesota reporting, he said, governors in several states started asking for audits to determine whether similar problems existed in their own systems.
“A lot of governors started asking for audits in their states to make sure Nick Shirley didn’t show up to one of their learning centers,” he joked.
If you see something
When Hunt asked what advice he would give people who wanted to make a difference, Shirley didn’t talk politics.
“I think things aren’t even like right or left anymore,” he said. “It’s like good versus evil.”
“If it’s good, you have to support it. If it’s evil, you have to go expose it.”
“If you see something, say something,” he said.
“You don’t need to go and post a YouTube video on it. Send a message to a local journalist in your area.”
“There’s a lot of power in citizen journalism, especially with X.”