Tribes receive first grants from $6 million Arizona fund for victims of sober living home fraud

Two years after the widespread fraud that targeted Indigenous people with phony sober living homes was exposed, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is directing $6 million toward recovery efforts led by tribal nations and community nonprofits.

“These are not statistics,” said Herminia Frias, a councilmember representing the Pascua Yaqui tribe, which was among the first to receive some of those funds. “This is not something that happened to someone else. But this is something that happened to somebody, to somebody that, that even if they didn't lose their lives, they still went through that thinking they were going to get into recovery. And they were taken advantage of and exploited.”

Frias emphasized that now, the real danger is allowing people to forget what happened.

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Hear the voices of families, victims at a town hall on Arizona’s sober living home scandal

Gabriel Pietrorazio

On Tuesday night, both rural and urban Natives traveled from near and far to the site of a former boarding school at Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix to share the devastating impacts of a sober-living-home scandal that gained widespread notoriety after the shutdown of more than 300 facilities last year.

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Mayes explained that the Sober Living Home Support Program pulls from the state’s anti-racketeering fund, and there are plans to sustain it.

“But I also call on the Legislature to join me in this effort and to, at a minimum, match these funds,” she said, “in fact, if not dramatically increase these funds.”

Mayes said that kind of match is crucial because even after years of working with tribal leaders, there's still no full picture of how deep the harm went.

“When you look at the fact that it’s likely that the amount of fraud will top $2 billion or more,” said Mayes, “you can extrapolate from that that thousands, if not tens of thousands of people were harmed by this.”

As her office moves forward with prosecutions related to the Arizona Medicaid abuse, Mayes said they’re also warning other states to watch for similar patterns in their systems.