Carine Werner & Wendy Rodgers Demand Action on Tribal Sober Living Fraud

State Senators Carine Werner (R-AZ) and Wendy Rogers (R-AZ) say the sober living fraud crisis that devastated Native American communities across Arizona never truly ended; it just moved somewhere harder to police.

Sen. Werner organized a May 18 Capitol press conference to expose what she described as a new chapter of the scheme, one that has migrated onto tribal lands where state licensing rules don't reach, and oversight remains thin.

On display were photographs of more than 100 missing or deceased Indigenous people alongside boxes containing over a thousand reports filed with state health officials.

"Fraudsters reorganizing themselves, finding vulnerable or easily compromisable Native Americans and using them as frontmen to staff facilities on tribal lands where DHS licensing is not required," Werner said. "Criminals that were trafficking, abusing, drugging and often killing our most vulnerable citizens and Native Americans continue to operate."

Werner said two Native American women approached her office as whistleblowers, handing over evidence she then forwarded to the Arizona Attorney General's Office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI.

The suspected fraudster, she noted, was already known to state authorities with prior enforcement actions on record.

Reported Mistreatment

Nho News reported that the roots of the crisis stretch back to between 2019 and 2023, when thousands of Native Americans were transported under false pretenses to unlicensed sober living homes, given drugs and alcohol, subjected to fraudulent mental health billing, and ultimately abandoned.

Those homes billed Arizona's Medicaid program for care that was never legitimately provided.

"Make no mistake, the perpetrators of these acts need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Werner said. "It is disgusting and reprehensible what these criminals did to our community."

Sen. Rogers, whose district covers Rim Country, the White Mountains, and tribal lands across northern and eastern Arizona, was direct about what this crisis means to her constituents.

"The people being harmed by this crisis are not statistics to me. They are my constituents. They are families. They are elders, vulnerable patients," Rogers said. "Government cannot turn a blind eye to my people."

Werner also highlighted the difference between Arizona's response and a similar crackdown in Minnesota, where authorities moved before vulnerable people were placed in fraudulent facilities.

"In Minnesota, they had empty buildings," Werner said. "In Arizona, they were full of human beings."