By loading supplies into the back of a Subaru Outback, three Indigenous people ensure they have enough water, food, and care packages to care for displaced Indigenous people in other parts of the valley.
“It’s gotten worse,” Reva Stewart of StolenPeoplesStolenBenefits said of the displacement of indigenous people in the city.
Most of the trips are the direct result of fraudulent behavioral fitness services that have proliferated unchecked for years in the Phoenix area, targeting Native people enrolled in Arizona’s Medicaid program so that services can qualify for the program, at facilities they never provided.
“Deaths are still happening (as a result of these fraudulent facilities),” Stewart said. “We shouldn’t be having any deaths if they’re in a (legitimate) sober living facility or a home.”
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Stewart, who is Navajo, has been advocating for and assisting indigenous people displaced through these fraudulent facilities for about two years.
At the time, he said the number of Indigenous people brought to the Phoenix region, some even from out of state, through those fraudulent services was only increasing, and he doesn’t see any genuine effort on the part of the government to help them.
“We’re going through genocide,” Stewart said of the severity of the crisis. “Let’s acknowledge that it’s happening. “
Stewart and StolenPeoplesStolenBenefits, a volunteer organization of indigenous peoples founded in the Phoenix area, are the actors on the court in the Phoenix area and faint almost every day to help in any way they can.
Four people provide outreach efforts for the group: Stewart, Jeri Long, Raquel Shaye and Jared Marquez.
During one of their outreach efforts this fall, the group first visited a park near Phoenix Indian Medical Center at 16th Street and Indian School Road. The team loaded a cart full of materials and walked around the park, talking to anyone who might want help.
Stewart pulled out the cart full of water and care packages as Shaye approached people, many of whom were Indigenous, to ask if they needed help. Long walked past Stewart with a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and handed one to those who approached.
“We see the recruiting on a daily basis,” Stewart said. Even when they are out doing their outreach efforts, she said they constantly encounter people handing out flyers for rehabilitation services or trying to talk people into going with them.
Once they finish with one area, they move on to the next. The group has identified areas across the Valley where displaced Indigenous people may gather.
“Now we’re recognized,” Shaye said, adding that members of the organization look at everyone because many feel lonely, unwanted or like a burden.
Through their group’s outreach efforts, they have been able to get the indigenous people they serve to accept them as truthful, informing them exactly where fraudulent halfway houses are located and in what situations citizens are being held.
“I report what my loved ones tell me,” Stewart said. “Once they’re comfortable with you, they’ll tell you, they’ll give you the deal, and I’ll report it. “
Stewart said many other displaced people have been traumatized by those amenities and are in worse conditions than before they arrived. According to her, these fraudulent amenities offer promises of job and housing stability, but also sobriety. But those promises are empty.
Stewart recalls how local, state, federal, and tribal leaders publicly declared that they would help Indigenous people left on the streets after a broad crackdown on fraudulent rehab centers in May 2023, but their attention was short-lived.
“They said they were going to come here to help,” Stewart said. However, the last time he saw a government official make an effort to help was after Gov. Katie Hobbs and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced they would begin shutting down those fraudulent facilities.
“There have been closures, but we don’t see helping our loved ones off the streets,” Stewart said.
Stewart has been raising awareness about fraudulent rehab centers for two years. During that time, he collected testimonies from others who were harmed at those facilities, documented encounters with others who were recruited for them, maintained a list of missing persons, and counted others who lost their lives after spending time in those places.
“It’s like our government doesn’t care,” he said. “I don’t understand. “
Stewart said she had written hundreds of reports on her findings and has shared them with the Governor’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office, the FBI, Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), Arizona tribal leaders and the Office of the Inspector General.
“They never responded,” Stewart said, and it’s been a year and a half since he sent his reports. He has about 3 giant boxes full of papers documenting his work.
When Hobbs and Mayes first publicly addressed the factor in May 2023, they called it a “humanitarian crisis” and a “resounding failure of government. “
Since then, the state has shut down many behavioral health care providers, residential and ambulatory after investigators uncovered evidence that they had defrauded the state’s Medicaid program out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
AHCCCS spokeswoman Heidi Capriotti said an updated list of suspended suppliers will be available almost every Friday and that the company continues to suspend suppliers when it can.
“We cannot place a withholding on payment on a supplier until the law enforcement company has accepted our referral and has fundamentally verified our findings,” Capriotti said.
When providers are suspended, it is only for payments, she added. The provider can still provide services to their patients but will not be reimbursed for any submitted claims.
Provider suspensions, as credible allegations of fraud suspensions, are the first step in the action required when Medicaid payment fraud becomes known and multi-agency investigations begin.
In a statement to the Arizona Mirror, Mayes reiterated her stance on the fraudulent behavioral health facilities, saying it is “undeniably one of the worst government scandals in our state’s history.”
“The scale of this scandal and the high human cost it takes on those suffering from addiction cannot be overstated, and their suffering has only been exacerbated through the systems that deserve to have them,” he said. “The Arizona Attorney General’s Office “continue to aggressively investigate and prosecute Americans and entities that defrauded the state of millions of dollars by exploiting vulnerable Americans. “
Mayes’ office’s most recent case about fraudulent services was announced on Dec. 6, when a grand jury indicted 10 other people on illegal charges of a business and other charges similar to those of patient brokering.
The defendants allegedly ran sobriety houses or unlicensed halfway houses in the valley. These other 10 people are accused of agreeing to send 75 patients, many of whom were beneficiaries of the American Indian Health Plan administered through AHCCCS, to a fake behavioral health care facility. .
Mayes said his workplace is in a position to assist AHCCCS and the governor’s workplace in any way it can as the state continues to manage the humanitarian consequences resulting from the fraudulent sober living facilities.
The Arizona Mirror reached out to Hobbs’ workplace several times for an update, but did not receive any reaction.
The FBI’s Phoenix field office was another company that decided to tackle the crisis. The office has appealed to patients who may have been recruited to live and receive services in the organization’s homes.
In an emailed reaction to the Mirror, FBI spokesman Kevin Smith said an investigation is still active.
“The FBI’s involvement here is a federal investigation into fitness care fraud, necessarily the misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars,” Smith said in an email to the Mirror.
“While the human cost is an important component of this story, it is not part of the FBI’s scope or jurisdiction to address the social aspect of this case,” he added.
Smith said the FBI is working to track down the other people who create and manage those frauds to remove them from the health care formula so they can no longer victimize other people and deter others from trying.
By December, more than 300 behavioral health care providers, both residential and outpatient, had been closed. AHCCCS updates the list of suspended providers on its website.
When the closures were announced in May, Capriotti said there was some concern that fraudulent providers would disappear and leave others stranded without follow-up care or care coordination for patients.
That’s why the AHCCCS introduced the 211 helplines, Capriotti said, so that those affected by the provider shutdowns have a chance to receive help.
“We are very involved in the humanitarian aspect of this situation,” Capriotti said, which is why AHCCCS only issued suspensions after having put in place a “mitigation strategy” with the 211 help lines.
Capriotti said AHCCCS works with Solari, the statewide crisis provider, which manages this hotline with state partners to locate transitional housing or other transportation and behavioral fitness services, if needed.
“As of Aug. 22, we had responded to more than 11,700 calls to this hotline,” Capriotti said, but not all of the calls are from others affected by the closures.
Capriotti added that AHCCCS has deployed seven crisis cells and coordinated more than 13,000 nights of transitional accommodation.
“We’ve helped over 4,000 people,” he said, adding that the AHCCCS has also taken the time to reach out to law enforcement officials across the state and supply them with fabrics to distribute on the 211 hotlines.
“If they run into other affected people on the street, they know how to direct them to 211,” Capriotti said.
To combat fraudulent billing, Capriotti said AHCCCS has made several innovations throughout the Medicaid payment system.
Some of the changes include eliminating the ability for members to switch enrollment plans over the phone, disallowing providers to bill on behalf of others and setting a specific rate for billing related to drug and alcohol treatment services.
“We are very involved in ensuring the protection of our American Indian Health Plan members and getting what they need,” Capriotti said.
Although this fraudulent scheme resulted in what state officials now call a “humanitarian crisis” and a “resounding failure of the government,” the StolenBenefitsStolenPeople team still believes that not enough is being done for the indigenous peoples who have been victimized.
Long said it’s not that officials are aware of the work of their grassroots organization, but rather that they don’t need to acknowledge it.
“It’s one of those things where justice isn’t served,” said Long, who is Navajo. “There’s no accountability, there’s no action, there’s nothing, and they wouldn’t possibly pay attention to us. “
For instance, the team has provided reports and reached out for collaboration with state agencies and local tribes, but it has often resulted in little to no commitment on their end.
The team explains how the Navajo Nation introduced Operation Rainbow Bridge as a reaction to the May crisis and how the Navajo Nation Police Department deployed efforts on the ground for a few weeks over the summer.
But he hasn’t noticed much progress since.
“We don’t understand why so many tribes are stepping up and helping,” Long said.
More recently, the team worked on organizing a mass transport with the White Mountain Apache Tribe to get some of their citizens who were displaced by the fraudulent facilities back home from the Phoenix area.
Shaye, who belongs to the White Mountain Apache tribe, said that since she began her outreach work, she has detected that many members of her network have fallen victim to her, adding that some have died of overdoses in fraudulent homes.
“We counted 38 deaths,” Shaye said.
Most of the work the organization does is based on the budget raised through its GoFundMe page, which helps fund its outreach efforts and transportation costs to bring Indigenous people home.
Long said they paid for bus and plane tickets and even drove other people home. People called them in the middle of the night asking for help.
“We’re getting a lot done, and a lot of people trust us now,” Long said. “We want to help as many as we can. We can’t save everybody, but we want to help as many as we can who want the help.”
Long said their efforts have helped many other people and have been able to place other people in valid treatment centers or bring them home safely.
Families have asked them to help them find one they’re missing, and Long said they’ve made it and they haven’t.
Long said the existing crisis affecting indigenous peoples is not appropriate, and it is not appropriate for an already underserved population to continue to be ignored and for what is happening to be swept under the rug through leaders who have promised them.
“Don’t keep thinking that it’s something that happens to happen, when many of them expect it to happen. It probably won’t go away. It gets worse. Do something,” he said. “Be guilty of your actions. Be guilty for the words you said in May.
Stewart said the purpose of the group is to make sure displaced people know that someone cares about them and will let them know what their characteristics are if they return home, seek medical care or go to a valid facility.
“Regardless of how they feel, they need to know that you care about you,” Stewart said.
Stewart said their group still tries to utilize the state resources set in place, like 211, but since they launched, she has seen a decrease in the sense of urgency to provide help.
“There’s so much backlog that they’re told to go to homeless shelters,” she said. “That’s all they do or call us. “
It’s frustrating, Stewart said, because it can be “convenient” for 211 operators to move assistance to a homeless shelter, but in the end, it doesn’t do much good because shelters end up calling their organization for help. attendance.
“CASS, the downtown Phoenix homeless shelter, reached out to us,” she said, and tribal officials, state officials, family circles and others reached out to her organization for help.
“It’s for us,” Stewart added.
Since the state created the 211 helpline services, Stewart said they were very helpful at first, but now agents working with 211 are sending other people in need to their organization for help.
“211 tells them to call us,” he said. We help, but why are we as a resource when we deserve to be?
Stewart said he’d like to know why 211 rarely does what it was originally created to do, which is help ensure the health of displaced indigenous peoples.
Many displaced indigenous people were promised some kind of help and then ended up being deported because the center they entered turned out to be a fraud.
Stewart said the fraudulent facilities are such a massive scheme in Arizona that officials across the state should have been on board with the efforts to combat it, regardless of which city they were in, because these facilities are spreading.
“They’re popping up everywhere,” he said, adding that he has lines of those places being set up in Wickenburg, Prescott, Pinetop, Camp Verde and Tucson.
In September, the city of Tucson experienced its first significant shutdown of those fraudulent services, resulting in the displacement of dozens of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from the apartments and the Ocotillo Hotel.
The issue has been discussed within the Tucson community before. Victoria Boone, the wellness director for the Tucson Indian Center, held a town hall about the topic over the summer.
Boone said fraudulent processing centers began appearing in the Tucson domain over the past year and have become more frequent in the past six months.
“It attracts a lot of other people because it’s a roof over their heads,” Boone said. He watched recruiting take place outside his office in downtown Tucson, where other people were handing out flyers, flyers and business cards.
He said he understands the call because they are Americans from the streets or their tribal lands, who are promised food, shelter, clothing, paintings and the hope of getting sober. But when they get to those places, that’s not what happens.
Boone said Americans have come to the Tucson Indian Center and shared their reports with those fraudulent households. She heard others say that their documents had been stolen or asked to lie about their addictions so that families could simply bill for services.
“They’re getting genuine help,” Boone said.
Stewart said she wants accountability from the Tribal, state and federal leaders who promised to help those impacted by this crisis.
“I need accountability for all the families who are dealing with this,” she said, because many families are not being heard and others have died because of those fraudulent facilities.
“This has never happened,” Stewart added. »
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by Shondiin Silversmith, Arizona Mirror January 2, 2024
By loading supplies into the back of a Subaru Outback, three Indigenous people ensure they have enough water, food, and care packages to care for displaced Indigenous people in other parts of the valley.
“It’s gotten worse,” Reva Stewart of StolenPeoplesStolenBenefits said of the displacement of indigenous people in the city.
Most of the displacements are the direct result of the fraudulent behavioral health facilities that proliferated unchecked for years across the Phoenix area, targeting Indigenous people who are enrolled in Arizona’s Medicaid program so that the facilities can bill the program, often for services they never provided.
“Deaths are still happening (as a result of these fraudulent facilities),” Stewart said. “We shouldn’t be having any deaths if they’re in a (legitimate) sober living facility or a home.”
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Stewart, who is Navajo, has been advocating for displaced Indigenous people through those fraudulent services for about two years.
At the time, he said the number of Indigenous people brought to the Phoenix region, some even from out of state, through those fraudulent services was only increasing, and he doesn’t see any genuine effort on the part of the government to help them.
“We’re going through genocide,” Stewart said of the severity of the crisis. “Let’s acknowledge that it’s happening. “
Stewart and StolenPeoplesStolenBenefits, a volunteer organization of indigenous peoples founded in the Phoenix area, are the actors on the court in the Phoenix area and faint almost every day to help in any way they can.
The organization is led by 4 people: Stewart, Jeri Long, Raquel Shaye, and Jared Marquez.
During one of their outreach efforts this fall, the group first visited a park near Phoenix Indian Medical Center at 16th Street and Indian School Road. The team loaded a cart full of materials and walked around the park, talking to anyone who might want help.
Stewart pulled out the cart full of water and care packages as Shaye approached people, many of whom were Indigenous, to ask if they needed help. Long walked past Stewart with a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and handed one to those who approached.
Even when they’re doing outreach, she said they’re constantly running into other people handing out brochures about rehab or trying to convince others to stop by them.
Once they’ve finished one area, they move on to the next. The organization has learned of spaces throughout the valley where displaced indigenous peoples can gather.
“They recognize us now,” Shaye said. She added that the group members try to help everybody because many feel alone, unwanted or as if they’re a burden.
Through their group’s outreach efforts, they have managed to get the indigenous peoples they serve to accept them as true, by knowing exactly where the fraudulent rehabilitation houses are located and in what situations citizens are being held.
“I report what my loved ones tell me,” Stewart said. “Once they’re comfortable with you, they’ll tell you, they’ll give you the deal, and I’ll report it. “
Stewart said many other displaced people have been traumatized by those amenities and are in a worse state than before they arrived. According to her, these fraudulent facilities offer promises of stability with jobs and housing, but also of sobriety. But those promises don’t make sense.
Stewart recalls how local, state, federal and tribal leaders publicly declared they would help Indigenous people left on the streets after a broad crackdown on fraudulent halfway houses in May 2023, but their attention was short-lived.
“They said they were going to be out here helping,” Stewart said. Still, the last time she saw any government official make an effort to help was shortly after Gov. Katie Hobbs and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced they would start shutting down these fraudulent facilities.
“There have been closures, but we don’t see us helping our family members off the streets,” Stewart said.
Stewart has been raising awareness about fraudulent rehab centers for the past two years. During this time, he collected testimonies from others who had suffered injuries at those facilities, documented meetings with others who recruited for them, maintained a list of missing persons, and counted other people who lost their lives after spending time in those places.
“It’s like our government doesn’t care,” he said. “I don’t get it. “
Stewart said he has written many reports about his findings and shared them with the governor’s office, the attorney general’s office, the FBI, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), Arizona tribal leaders and the inspector general’s office.
“They never responded,” Stewart said, and it’s been a year and a half since he sent his reports. He has about 3 giant boxes full of papers documenting his work.
When Hobbs and Mayes publicly addressed the issue for the first time in May 2023, they called it a “humanitarian crisis” and a “stunning failure of the government.”
Since then, the state has shut down many behavioral health care providers, residential and ambulatory after investigators uncovered evidence that they had defrauded the state’s Medicaid program out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
AHCCCS spokesperson Heidi Capriotti said there will be an updated list of suspended providers almost every Friday and the company continues to suspend providers when it can.
“We cannot impose a suspension of payment on a contractor until a law enforcement company accepts our referral and verifies our findings,” Capriotti said.
When suppliers are suspended, it’s only for payments, he added. The provider can still supply to their patients but will not be reimbursed for claims filed.
Provider payment suspensions, known as credible allegations of fraud suspensions, are the first step of required action when Medicaid payment fraud is identified and the beginning of multi-agency investigations.
In an interview with the Arizona Mirror, Mayes reiterated his stance on fraudulent behavioral fitness facilities, saying it was “without a doubt one of the worst government scandals in the history of our state. “
“The scale of this scandal and the high human cost it takes on those suffering from addiction cannot be overstated, and their suffering has only been exacerbated through the systems that deserve to have them,” he said. “The Arizona Attorney General’s Office “continue to aggressively investigate and prosecute Americans and entities that defrauded the state of millions of dollars by exploiting vulnerable Americans. “
The most recent case from Mayes’ office involving fraudulent facilities was announced on Dec. 6, when a grand jury indicted 10 people on charges of illegal control of an enterprise and other charges related to patient brokering.
The defendants allegedly ran sobriety houses or unlicensed halfway houses in the valley. These other 10 people are accused of agreeing to send 75 patients, many of whom were beneficiaries of the American Indian Health Plan administered through AHCCCS, to a fake behavioral health care facility. .
Mayes said his workplace is in a position to assist AHCCCS and the governor’s workplace in any way it can as the state continues to manage the humanitarian consequences resulting from the fraudulent sober living facilities.
The Arizona Mirror reached out to Hobbs’ workplace several times for an update, but did not receive any reaction.
The FBI’s Phoenix field office was another company that decided to tackle the crisis. The office has appealed to patients who may have been recruited to live and receive services in the organization’s homes.
In an email response to the Mirror, FBI spokesman Kevin Smith stated that it is still an active investigation.
“The FBI’s involvement here is a federal investigation into health care fraud, necessarily the misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars,” Smith said in an email to the Mirror.
“While the human cost is an important component of this story, it is not within the FBI’s scope or jurisdiction to address the social aspect of this case,” he added.
Smith said the FBI is working to track down the other people who create and manage those frauds to remove them from the health care formula so they can no longer victimize other people and deter others from trying.
As of December, more than 300 health care providers for behavioral health, residential, and outpatient treatment services have been shut down. AHCCCS updates the list of suspended providers on their website.
When the closures were announced in May, Capriotti said there was some concern that fraudulent providers would disappear and leave others stranded without follow-up care or care coordination for patients.
That’s why the AHCCCS introduced the 211 helplines, Capriotti said, so that those affected by the provider shutdowns have a chance to receive help.
“We are very involved in the humanitarian aspect of this situation,” Capriotti said, which is why AHCCCS only issued suspensions after having put in place a “mitigation strategy” with the 211 help lines.
Capriotti said AHCCCS works with Solari, the statewide crisis provider, which manages this hotline with state partners to locate transitional housing or other transportation and behavioral fitness services, if needed.
“As of Aug. 22, we had responded to more than 11,700 calls to this hotline,” Capriotti said, but not all of the calls are from others affected by the closures.
Capriotti added that AHCCCS has deployed seven crisis cell phones and coordinated more than 13,000 nights of transitional accommodation.
“We’ve directly helped more than 4,000 individuals,” she said, adding that AHCCCS also took the time to educate law enforcement officers across the state and provide them materials to hand out about the 211 hotlines.
“If they run into other affected people on the street, they know how to direct them to 211,” Capriotti said.
To combat fraudulent billing, Capriotti said AHCCCS has made several innovations throughout the Medicaid payment system.
Some of the adjustments include eliminating members’ ability to replace enrollment plans over the phone, prohibiting providers from billing on behalf of others, and establishing an express billing fee similar to drug and alcohol treatment services.
“We are very involved in ensuring the protection of our American Indian Health Plan members and getting what they need,” Capriotti said.
While this fraudulent scheme resulted in what state officials now call a “humanitarian crisis” and a “resounding failure of the government,” the team at StolenBenefitsStolenPeople still believes that not enough is being done for the indigenous peoples who have been victimized.
Long said it’s not that officials are aware of the workings of their grassroots organization, but that they don’t want to acknowledge it.
“It’s one of those things where justice isn’t served,” said Long, who is Navajo. “There’s no accountability, there’s no action, there’s nothing, and they wouldn’t possibly pay attention to us. “
For example, the team provided reports and sought collaboration from state agencies and local tribes, but this resulted in little or no participation from them.
The team explains how the Navajo Nation introduced Operation Rainbow Bridge in reaction to the May crisis and how the Navajo Nation Police Department deployed efforts on the ground for a few weeks over the summer.
But he hasn’t noticed much progress since.
“We don’t understand why so many tribes are stepping up and helping,” Long said.
More recently, the team has been working to organize mass transit with the White Mountain Apache Tribe to bring home some of their displaced through fraudulent services in the Phoenix area.
Shaye, who belongs to the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said that since she began her outreach work, she has noticed that many members of her network have fallen victim to her, adding that some have died of overdoses in fraudulent homes.
“We counted 38 deaths,” Shaye said.
Most of the work the organization does is based on the budget raised through its GoFundMe page, which helps fund its outreach efforts and transportation costs to bring Indigenous people home.
Long said they’ve paid for bus and plane tickets and even driven people back to their homes. They have had people call them in the middle of the night asking for help.
“We’re accomplishing a lot of things and a lot of other people trust us now,” Long said. “We wish as many other people as possible. We can’t save everyone, but we want those who want it as much as possible.
Long said their efforts have helped many other people and they have been able to place others in valid treatment centers or bring them home safely.
They’ve had families reach out to them for help locating a missing loved one, and Long said sometimes they’ve been successful, and sometimes they’re not.
Long said the existing crisis affecting indigenous peoples is not appropriate, and it is not appropriate for an already underserved population to continue to be ignored and for what is happening to be swept under the rug through leaders who have promised them.
“Don’t continue to think that this is just gonna go away, which a lot of them are hoping that it’ll just go away. It’s not going away. It’s getting worse. Do something about it,” she said. “Be accountable for your actions. Be accountable for the words that you said back in May.”
Stewart said the group’s goal is to make sure displaced people know someone cares about them and will let them know what their characteristics are if they decide to return home, receive treatment or go to a valid institution.
“Regardless of how they feel, they need to know that you care,” Stewart said.
Stewart said his organization still needs to use the state resources they have available, such as 211, but since introducing it he’s noticed less of a sense of urgency to provide help.
“There’s so much backlog that they’re told to go to homeless shelters,” she said. “That’s all they do or call us. “
It is frustrating, Stewart said, because it may be “convenient” for the 211 operators to shuffle the ones seeking help away to a homeless shelter, but in the end, it doesn’t accomplish much because these shelters end up calling their group for help.
“CASS, the downtown Phoenix homeless shelter, reached out to us,” she said, and tribal officials, state officials, family circles and others reached out to her organization for help.
“It’s non-stop for us,” Stewart added.
Since the state implemented the 211 hotline services, Stewart said it was very helpful initially, but now, agents working with 211 have often sent people in need to their group for help.
“211 tells them to call us,” he said. We help, but why are we like a resource when we deserve to be?
Stewart said he’d like to know why 211 rarely does what it was originally created to do, which is help ensure the health of displaced indigenous peoples.
Many displaced indigenous people were promised some kind of help and then ended up being deported because the center they entered turned out to be a fraud.
Stewart said fraudulent facilities are such a big task in Arizona that officials across the state have been involved in efforts to combat them, regardless of which city they’re in, because those facilities are spreading.
“They’re popping up everywhere,” he said, adding that he has lines of those places being set up in Wickenburg, Prescott, Pinetop, Camp Verde and Tucson.
In September, the city of Tucson experienced its first significant shutdown of those fraudulent services, resulting in the displacement of dozens of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from the apartments and the Ocotillo Hotel.
The issue has already been discussed within the Tucson community. Victoria Boone, director of wellness for the Tucson Indian Center, hosted a conference in the city on the topic over the summer.
Boone said fraudulent processing centers began popping up at the Tucson domain over the past year and have become more prevalent in the past six months.
“It attracts a lot of other people because it’s a roof over their heads,” Boone said. He watched as recruiting took place outside his office in downtown Tucson, where other people handed out flyers, flyers and business cards.
He said he understands the call because they are Americans from the streets or their tribal lands, who are promised food, shelter, clothing, paintings and the hope of getting sober. But when they get to those places, that’s not what happens.
Boone said Americans have come to the Tucson Indian Center and shared their reports with those fraudulent households. She heard others say that their documents had been stolen or asked to lie about their addictions so that families could simply bill for services.
“They’re getting genuine help,” Boone said.
Stewart said he needs accountable tribal, state and federal leaders who have made a commitment to those impacted by this crisis.
“I need all the families who have to deal with this to be held accountable,” she said, as many families are not being heard and others have died because of those fraudulent facilities.
“This has never happened,” Stewart added. Why does this keep happening?»
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Arizona Mirror is owned by States Newsroom, a network of grant-backed news bureaus and a coalition of donors as a 501c public charity(3). Arizona Mirror maintains its editorial independence. Please contact Editor Jim Small if you have any questions: info@azmirror. com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.
Shondiin Silversmith is an award-winning indigenous journalist with the Navajo Nation. Silversmith has been covering Native communities for over 10 years, covering Arizona’s 22 federally identified sovereign tribal nations, as well as domestic and foreign Native issues.
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