Palestinians rebuild in West Bank's Jenin — only to watch Israel destroy it again and again

JENIN IS A CITY NOT A CAMP

Nabih Bulos
Thu, January 4, 2024 

A cacophony of gunfire and sorrowful praise to God punctuate a mass funeral for 14 Palestinians killed after Israeli forces raided the refugee camp in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Nov. 10. (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)


When the raids come, a lot of things happen at once in this Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

Residents shout and round up family members. Many flee on foot, while some speed to safety in cars, honking to rouse others before gunning the engine. Instead of a call to prayer, mosque loudspeakers crackle with warnings of another Israeli army incursion.

Residents react to the presence of Israeli army vehicles cruising through the Al Mahata street as Israeli forces conduct raids throughout the city and inside the refugee camp in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 13. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Then there's the bass-clef rumble of the D9 bulldozer. That's the sound 33-year-old Issa Hweil listens for.


He knows it's the prelude to a bout of destruction that will turn the camp's roads into a churned-up swamp of mud, cracked asphalt and broken pipes.

The morning after one such raid, Hweil climbed into a friend's skid loader to try to stitch the street back into usable form.

But there was little point.

Local youth and paramedics help hoist Fouad Abahreh, 36, onto a stretcher after he was shot twice by Israeli soldiers in an alleyway near Shifa Hospital, as Israeli security forces conduct raid operations throughout Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 12. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

In the aftermath of Hamas' attack on southern Israel, the Israeli army not only invaded Gaza, it also escalated assaults on areas it considers sources of Palestinian armed resistance in the West Bank.

Read more: In war-stricken Gaza, hunger is a constant companion

The Jenin refugee camp, a ramshackle, claustrophobic neighborhood of old buildings and labyrinthine streets, has been the main target of that strategy.

"Twenty-three? Twenty-four? I've lost track of how many times I've done this since Oct. 7," Hweil said as he nudged a pile of masonry away from a storefront, then lowered the loader’s bucket to tamp down on the dirt.

Just the other day, he said, he got a message from an Israeli intelligence officer assigned to monitor the camp, advising that he “shouldn't bother repairing the roads since 'we're coming back soon.' "

Residents react to the presence of Israeli army vehicles cruising through the Al Mahata street and the sound of gunfire nearby as Israeli forces conduct raids throughout the city and inside the refugee camp in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 13. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Israel has raided the Jenin camp more than any other West Bank location, killing at least 78 Palestinians here since the war began. That’s around a quarter of all West Bank Palestinians who have been killed in attacks by the army and settlers since the latest hostilities began, according to the United Nations.

Israel says the attacks are aimed at preventing the kind of Oct. 7-style onslaught that left about 1,200 Israelis dead.

A young boy plays along a street filled with detritus of past Israeli raids in Jenin camp in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 11. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

But residents and rights groups say the military campaigns in Jenin have been the most destructive of any Israeli actions outside of Gaza, where the Palestinian death toll now stands at about 22,000. Jenin residents insist the intention is to collectively punish centers of resistance and leave them uninhabitable.

"It's a battle of harassment, not just rifles," said Ibrahim Diab, 59, who works in Jenin for the Palestinian Authority. "They're attacking the basics of life here."

Jenin is the home of one of the 19 refugee camps established to house Palestinians driven from their homes after Israel’s 1948 founding. But more than any other, its name has grown into a symbol of generational dedication to resistance.

Almost every wall, street corner, intersection and light pole bears a poster — some sun-bleached, others newly printed — bearing the face of someone seen here as a martyr. Until a D9 bulldozer demolished it in November, the arches that marked the entrance to the city carried an inscription reading: "A way station until we return [home]."

Locals react to the presence of Israeli army vehicles cruising through the Al Mahata street as Israeli forces conduct raids throughout the city and inside the refugee camp in Jenin, Occupied West Bank , Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Young men put obstacles on the street in an attempt to block passage for Israeli army vehicles cruising through the Al Mahata street during Israeli raid operations throughout the city and inside the refugee camp in Jenin, Occupied West Bank , Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Israeli soldiers stop and inspect ambulances traveling on Al Mahata street as Israeli forces conduct raid operations throughout the city in Jenin, Occupied West Bank , Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Civilians take cover inside Shifa Hospital, as an Israeli army vehicle approach the building while security forces conduct raid operations throughout Jenin, Occupied West Bank , Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023.More

Residents here say they've endured Israeli campaigns before. But nothing like this.

"The Israelis are coming in so often, we don't know if we'll have the chance to eat the food we cook for lunch or dinner," said Mahmoud Abu Saber, sitting in front of his bakery in the camp's main square — now a muddy, rutted space interspersed with craters brimming with fetid water.

Abu Saber opened his shop five years ago, selling frisbee-sized discs of taboon bread adorned with red pepper paste, cheese or zaatar. It had always been hard in the camp, he said, but the situation seems more untenable by the day. Tatfeesh, he and other residents call it, an Arabic word that means driving people away.

"How can I sell anything? Who would come to me with the place like this? I'm a baker, and all I do these days is work here in the mud," he said, gesturing toward a mound of debris left in front of his shop earlier in the day by Israeli bulldozers.

Across the square, a work crew wrestled a thick cable into a trench as Hweil cleared more of the earth to lay it down.

Ehab Maher Nafeer Mareei, 23, looks up to examine the remnants of his home after an Israeli airstrike destroyed it during a multi-day raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 15. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

The raids on water, sewage and other infrastructure are taking a toll, even on the battle-hardened residents of Jenin. "People love the resistance, but they're getting tired," Hweil said.

Ahmad Hatatrah, a 30-year-old municipal worker donning a yellow vest, and Mahmoud Shraim, 52, who heads the electricity company's cable division, said two bulldozers recently clawed out three feet of earth to get to the high-voltage cable and then yanked it out.

"Every raid we have a problem with the electricity," Shraim said. "Poles. Cables. Generators. Every time. And it's huge losses." He said it was the seventh time he had been called to oversee the same repair.

After one recent raid, residents returned the day after to take stock of the carnage to their homes.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

At top, a mass funeral takes place for 14 Palestinians killed after Israeli forces raided the refugee camp in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Nov. 10. Above, Layan Jalamneh, 14, who hopes to be a doctor one day, cries as she talks about what life is like in Jenin, while her sister Ayla, 11 months, sleeps in the bedroom where Israelis shot bullets through it and damaged their home in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 6. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)More

Ehab Mareei, 23, stepped over the rubble of his apartment, which was destroyed in an airstrike. Mohammad Sabbagh trudged through the charred hallways of his family home, salvaging what toys he could find for his 5-year-old son Hamzah.

Every night, most of the camp's residents go to relatives and friends living in the city or its surrounding villages and suburbs.

Khaldiyah Bzour, 33, did that for a while, corralling her two daughters to a friend's place at dusk. "I'd take a pot of food — I didn't want to be a burden. But it felt like it was too much," she said.

Working as a house cleaner, she doesn't make enough to rent anywhere else. Now during raids she and her children hole up in a corner by the bathroom, where another wall separates them from their one-room apartment's exterior. "Every time I hear the D9, I start to shake," she said.

A few hours later, another raid began. A windowless white van drove down one of the camp's main thoroughfares and then sped away in reverse when residents became suspicious.

A man tries to step across a muddy street a day after Israeli forces conduct a raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 6. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

"Quwaat Khaasah," they shouted — Israeli special forces. The clack of assault rifles being fired punctured the air. Activists on the messaging app Telegram warned of a convoy of Israeli army vehicles rolling out of a nearby checkpoint toward the camp. Merchants hurried to ring up purchases and shuttered storefronts.

Fleeing cars deluged the road leading away from the camp as young militants streamed the other way, toward a roundabout, and assembled just out of sight of the Israeli military vehicles blocking the entrance to the state hospital down the street.

Read more: Israel's military campaign in Gaza seen as among deadliest in recent history, experts say

One of the men strode up, raised an assault rifle and fired a few rounds toward the Israelis. Another waited with he called an ashlaga — a small canister loaded with a mix of sugar, coal and other materials to make an incendiary device.

The crowd recoiled and ran back up the street. From another direction, people started to shout: "Army! Army!" Eight armored Israeli vehicles drove through the street, the last one shooting from its rear port.

A week later brought another raid, this time a 60-hour onslaught that killed 12 Palestinians, according to local health authorities. Troops went house to house, detaining hundreds. They also surrounded all of Jenin's hospitals and blocked ambulances from picking up wounded people for treatment, Palestinian medical staff said.


Bullet holes could be seen on the walls and in items inside a home after Israeli security forces conducted a raid in Jenin Camp, Occupied West Bank , Monday, Dec. 11, 2023. Muhammad Meerai looks out at a hilltop view of Jenin Camp, Occupied West Bank , Monday, Dec. 11, 2023.

Israel denies its actions in Jenin are aimed at harassing Palestinians or making the camp unlivable.

Officials say they have launched numerous targeted assaults designed to dismantle "terrorist infrastructure" or capture militants accused of killing Israelis or plotting attacks.

They said the raids have killed several militant leaders who were taking refuge in the Jenin camp and cut down groups like the Jenin Battalion, an umbrella of Palestinian fighters financed by the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad group.

They also say that their soldiers have seized explosive devices and other weapons, and uncovered tunnel shafts and labs for manufacturing explosives.

Read more: Pro-Palestinian UC students feel they are not supported. Some on the faculty are organizing to change that

Two recent Israeli drone strikes in Jenin targeted militants who were hurling explosives and shooting at troops, Israeli officials said.

At least three Israeli soldiers have been killed and at least 17 wounded in the West Bank since the conflict began, including seven who were ″lightly wounded″ during one recent raid in Jenin, the army said. Officials did not respond to requests for more specific casualty figures for Jenin.

Residents say the raids have gone far beyond what is needed to flush out weapons and militants, targeting the city's cultural and religious symbols and institutions.

Bulldozers have smashed murals and shrines commemorating Palestinian resistance. During the three-day raid in December, Israeli soldiers painted a Star of David or slogans like "Long live Israel" on walls and ripped up posters of Palestinians killed in the violence.

Abu Muhammad, a fruit seller whose own home was damaged by Israeli forces, looks at the damaged main road that goes through Jenin in occupied West Bank on Dec. 11. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

A widely circulated video on social media showed an Israeli soldier reciting a Jewish prayer in the camp's mosque; the words "We came to eat hummus" were spray-painted on its dome.

The Israeli army later said it suspended the soldiers in the mosque video from operational activities, saying the behavior was ″serious″ and ″in complete opposition″ to its values.

Israel also struck the Freedom Theater, which was founded in 2006 and has become one of its cultural touchstones.

"Everything is destroyed and I don't know why," said Ahmad Tobasi, the theater's artistic director, in a recent television interview. "It's a theater. Not a military base. Not a terrorist house."

He added that he was among more than 100 men detained by the Israelis. He was arrested in front of his children, blindfolded and taken to a nearby checkpoint, where he said he and others were subjected to beatings. The theater's manager, Mustafa Sheta, remains in custody with no word as to his whereabouts, his family said.

Hamzeh Sabbagh, 5, tries to recover and play with his charred tricycle inside his home, which was completely burned after Israeli forces destroyed it during a multi-day raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 15. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Layan Jalamneh, 14, was in the bedroom when one of the raids began, along with her mother, Sanadi, and siblings, including 11-month-old Ayla. When bullets blasted through the window and the wall, the children started screaming and bundled into another room. One round narrowly missed a hiding spot in the closet.

A good student, Layan hopes one day to be a doctor. But for the last month, she had not been able to go to school, with parents too afraid to send their children outside.

"The school is gone. My friends are gone," she said, breaking into tears. "It feels like we have no childhood."

— Marcus Yam contributed to this story.

This is how Black women leaders do not survive

Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores
Thu, January 4, 2024 

OPINION: Former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation is now a reminder of the irreconcilability of successful Black womanhood with powerful, wealthy and predominantly white institutions.

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

Reading of Dr. Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday from the Harvard presidency, the words of Audre Lorde in the poignant poem “A Litany for Survival” come to mind: “For all of us / this instant and this triumph / We were never meant to survive.”

A presidency that for many of us stood — in and outside of academia — as a symbol and actualization of the possible quickly became a demonstration of the power of forceful campaigns that coalesced against Black women leaders. Her resignation is now a reminder of the irreconcilability of successful Black womanhood with powerful, wealthy and predominantly white institutions. Even when you have all the accolades, all the knowledge, all the skills and attributes, it is hard to know the way forward. How is success achievable when the scrutiny is so vast and extensive? This is how we die, even if it may have felt for a moment that we triumphed.

The challenges of being a Black woman and woman of color academic are well documented. National statistics display severe underrepresentation of Black faculty. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that in the fall of 2021, only 6% of faculty were Black and 6% were Latino. Underrepresentation is but one problem. For those who do make it, academia proves to be a tough terrain. Women, faculty of color and first-generation faculty face grave challenges in navigating university structures that inhibit advancing to and beyond tenure, promotion and achieving overall fulfilling and “successful” careers.

In a synthesis of 252 scholarly publications on the topic of faculty of color in the academy, the authors of “Faculty of Color in Academe: What 20 Years of Literature Tells Us” sum up the challenges facing faculty of color as undervaluation of their research interests, approaches and theoretical frameworks; student challenges to their credentials and intellect in the classroom; isolation/marginalization; and perceived biases in hiring processes. More recent qualitative and testimonial scholarship paints a fuller picture that faculty of color, and Black women specifically, are, as one volume aptly notes, “presumed incompetent.” During the 2020 racial justice awakening, Black academics reported exhaustion when the claims for diversity collided with their experiences, according to an Inside Higher Ed article. One leader described that institutions need to examine how “white supremacy culture is baked into the structures and practices of the campus.”

As hard as it is being a Black woman faculty, becoming and being a Black woman leader reveals the iron bars above the glass ceiling. The public view may think of an academic career path as cryptic at worst but rather comfortable. More accurately, the path is arduous and long. At every turn — through four years of undergraduate education, four to six years of master’s and doctoral work, dissertation writing and defense, getting an academic position, six plus years of tenure probationary period, tenure and promotion reviews that scrutinize every word you have said and written, and ongoing considerations for promotion, professional advancement and consideration for leadership — there are hoops to jump, points to prove, checks to cross. For underrepresented scholars, and particularly for Black women, there are also gender and racial biases to challenge. Every step of the way research shows that every single one of these steps is more pronounced and taxing for people of color.

For the few Black women academics who find their way to leadership positions — inevitably by demonstrating talent, skill, qualification, impact and vocation — success is hard-fought.

Academic leadership remains largely white and inhospitable to Black women. According to an American Council of Education survey that oversampled presidents of color, only 5.4% or 3% of all university presidents are Black or Latina women, respectively. Black women academic leaders report greater scrutiny and the need to prove and validate their qualifications.

The scrutiny manifests in multiple ways. Black women university presidents exhibit a longer time between aspiration to presidential leadership and application, and they report less overall transparency from universities and boards about expectations and institutional conditions. And the scrutiny and challenges come at great personal and professional cost.

As a Black Puerto Rican-Dominican Caribbean Latina scholar currently serving as a departmental chair, I know the academic path. Being an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1990s always came with questions — within and beyond — about capacity, belonging, being intelligent enough and being an “affirmative action” student. The questions haven’t stopped, though they might have changed in style. Later, in my first graduate department, I was asked to leave by a department that, at the time, saw most students of color as incapable of earning a Ph.D. Indeed, I have managed to disprove many but not all of these structural blocks to continue an academic career. The questions, as a scholar and a leader, nonetheless, creep in.

The educational road for academics of color through political climates continues to make us susceptible to whatever adaptable policies, practices and language of racism emerge, whether it’s the attack on affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory or accusations of being a “diversity hire,” or “unprofessional behavior” and “incompetence,” etc. The story of racism is not only about how scholars of color are overly scrutinized. It is also about how our non-Black counterparts hardly ever face the same levels of scrutiny. How many Harvard presidents’ works have been scrutinized at such levels as Claudine Gay’s? Given the documented widespread racial disparities in evaluation across a wide variety of society’s institutional settings, it is not hard to understand the disparate lens applied to research. As scholars of race know, the findings about racial disparities are numerous and conclusive.

Being aware of the vast landscape of racial disparities proves daunting. When I consider putting myself up for professional scrutiny of any ilk, I think of the experiences of Black people and people of color in all sectors. The personal, health and professional costs of such relentless sieges and discrimination are as true for the common citizen as they are for the academics and academic leaders. I can only imagine the professional and personal dimensions of the storm that has enveloped Dr. Gay. Her and the Harvard Corporation’s letter briefly hint at the racial content of the attacks. I can not imagine what kinds of attacks have been privately levied at Dr. Gay from the moment of her appointment as Harvard president.

More than a century ago, a young African-American man from Massachusetts by the name of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois became the first African-American to earn a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree from Harvard after earning a college degree there in 1890. W.E.B. Du Bois would bring great glory to Harvard, but only in hindsight. For many years and into the 21st Century, Du Bois has been recognized as the founder of the NAACP and perhaps most famously known for making an impossibly prescient declaration in 1903 that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

More recently, as a corrective to the history of American science, Du Bois has been lauded as one of the founders of American sociology. Praise for Du Bois is unending, though, in his time, Du Bois struggled to get an academic position in the top institutions such as the one that trained him. His published study on the Black community in Philadelphia, “Philadelphia Negro,” conducted as a temporary assistant in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is now celebrated as a masterpiece of social scientific research. On the occasion of honoring the 150th anniversary of Du Bois’ birth, the Harvard Gazette describes him as one of “America’s intellectual giants” and “a revolutionary thinker far ahead of his time.” On the topic of attending Harvard, Du Bois famously said: “I’m in Harvard, not of it” and, upon completion of his Ph.D., “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.”

With the rabid political and social push to undo the gains in inclusion that Claudine Gay’s appointment as president signaled, universities and all institutions need to decide who they want to be. If they value a democratic, inclusive and diverse society, they need to do the work and take preemptive, actionable steps to safeguard those values. This means taking responsibility and educating themselves in the machinations of gendered racism to understand the protections and support needed to ensure the success of Black and underrepresented leaders, students, staff and faculty. And they have to be firm, clear and unapologetic about how unacceptable the alternative is for all, and especially our future generations.

No amount of evidence is sufficient to convey the devastating impact that comes from Claudine’s Gay resignation. Are we, as Lorde reminds us, not meant to belong and survive in these environments, despite the gains we have supposedly made across centuries? I hope that history will prove Du Bois’ point right and that Harvard remains proud and does the work to retain the honor of naming Claudine Gay as president and signaling to the world, and to those of us who have an affiliation with the university, that we indeed are “of” and not merely “in” those institutions. One way or another, we will survive, as we have always, even when we weren’t meant to.

---

Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores is a sociologist and urban planner specializing in the study of race, class, and the built environment. She is currently an associate professor in sociology and the Department of Latino and Caribbean studies, where she serves as chair. She is the author of “Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City” (University of Pennsylvania Presss, 2013).

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With U$ Government Help Lacking, Volunteers Scramble to Help Indigenous Victims of Health Care Fraud

Stolen Benefits Stolen Peoples

 volunteers Raquel Shaye and Reva Stewart drag a wagon filled with bottled water and other supplies to start handing out at a bus stop on 19th Avenue and Dunlap in Phoenix during an outreach effort in September 2023. 

(Photo by Shondiin Silversmith for the Arizona Mirror)

LONG READ

BY SHONDIIN SILVERSMITH, 

ARIZONA MIRROR

 JANUARY 05, 2024

Loading the back of a Subaru Outback with supplies, three Indigenous women make sure they have enough water, food and care packages to serve Indigenous people who have been displaced in different parts of the Valley.

“It’s gotten worse,” StolenPeoplesStolenBenefits Advocate Reva Stewart 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.”

Stewart, who is Navajo, has been advocating and helping Indigenous people who have been displaced by these fraudulent facilities for about two years. 

In that time, she said the number of Indigenous people who have been brought down to the Phoenix area, some even from out of state, by these fraudulent facilities is only increasing, and she does not see any genuine efforts from officials to help. 

“We’re going through genocide,” Stewart said of how bad the crisis has gotten. “Acknowledge that this is actually going on.”

Stewart and StolenPeoplesStolenBenefits, a volunteer group of Indigenous people based in the Phoenix area, are the boots on the ground across the Phoenix area, and they go out 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’s first stop was a park near the Phoenix Indian Medical Center at 16th Street and Indian School Road. The team loaded up a wagon full of supplies and walked around the park, talking to anyone they believed may need help. 

Stewart pulled the wagon full of water and care packages as Shaye approached people, many of whom were Indigenous, asking if they needed assistance. Long walked alongside Stewart with a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, offering one to everyone they 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.

“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.

Due to the amount of outreach their group has done, they’ve built trust among the Indigenous people they help, often being told precisely where the fraudulent rehabilitation houses are located and the conditions residents are kept in.

“I report what relatives tell me,” Stewart said. “Once they get comfortable with you, they’ll tell you, they’ll give you the address, and I report that.”

Stewart said many of the people being displaced have been traumatized by these facilities and are often left in worse states than before they entered. She said these fraudulent facilities offer promises of stability with jobs and housing but also sobriety. But those promises are empty. 

‘It’s like our government does not care’

Stewart remembers how local, state, federal and tribal leaders made public statements that they would help the Indigenous people left on the streets after a sweeping crackdown on the fraudulent rehabilitation facilities 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.

“The shutdowns have happened, but you don’t see anybody helping our relatives get off the street,” Stewart said.

Stewart has been raising awareness about the fraudulent rehabilitation facilities for two years. During that time, she gathered testimonies from people who these facilities have harmed, documented encounters with individuals recruiting for them, maintained a list of people who have gone missing and kept count of the people who lost their lives after spending time in these places.

“It’s like our government does not care,” she 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’ve never responded,” Stewart said, and it’s been a year and a half since she started sending out her reports. She has about three large boxes full of papers documenting her 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 hundreds of providers for behavioral health, residential, and outpatient treatment services after investigators found evidence that they defrauded the state’s Medicaid program out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

AHCCCS spokeswoman Heidi Capriotti said an updated list of suspended providers is available almost every Friday, and the agency continues to suspend providers when they can.

“We cannot impose a payment suspension on a provider until another law enforcement agency has accepted our referral and basically verifies 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 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 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 magnitude of this scandal and its profound human toll on those grappling with addiction problems cannot be overstated, and their suffering has only been exacerbated by the systems that should have protected them,” she said. “The Arizona Attorney General’s Office will continue to investigate and aggressively prosecute the individuals and entities who have defrauded the state of millions of dollars by exploiting vulnerable individuals.”

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 unlicensed sober living or transitional living homes around the Valley. Those 10 people are accused of agreeing to send 75 patients, many of whom were on the American Indian Health Plan administered by the AHCCCS, to a fake behavioral health care facility. 

Mayes stated that her office is ready to assist AHCCCS and the Governor’s Office in any way possible as the state continues to manage the humanitarian fallout resulting from the fraudulent sober living facilities.

The Arizona Mirror contacted Hobbs’ office multiple times for an update, but no response was received.

The local FBI office in Phoenix was another agency committed to addressing the crisis. The office put a call out to victims who may have been recruited to live in and receive services in group 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 healthcare fraud that is occurring, essentially the misuse (of) millions of taxpayer dollars,” Smith said in an email to the Mirror. 

“While the human toll is very much a part of this story, it is not within the FBI’s scope or purview to work on the social service side of this case,” he added. 

Smith said the FBI is working to find the people setting up and running the fraudulent services to remove them from the health care system so that they can no longer victimize 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 shutdowns were announced in May, Capriotti said there was some concern that fraudulent providers would disappear and leave people stranded with no follow-up care or care coordination for the patients.

That is why AHCCCS launched the 211 hotlines, Capriotti said, so that anyone affected by the provider closures has a place to get help.

“We are very concerned about the humanitarian side of this,” Capriotti said, and that is why AHCCCS did not start issuing suspensions until there was a “mitigation strategy” in place with the 211 hotlines. 

Capriotti said AHCCCS is working with Solari, the statewide crisis vendor, which manages that hotline with various state partners to find temporary lodging or other behavioral health services and transportation, if needed.

“As of Aug. 22, we had fielded more than 11,700 calls to that hotline,” Capriotti said, but those calls are not all from people affected by the shutdowns.

Capriotti added that AHCCCS has deployed seven mobile crisis teams and has coordinated more than 13,000 nights of temporary lodging.

“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 come across people on the street who have been affected, they know how to refer people to 211,” Capriotti said. 

In order to eliminate fraudulent billing, Capriotti said that AHCCCS has made multiple system-wide improvements to 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’re very concerned about making sure our American Indian Health Plan members are safe and getting the services they need,” Capriotti said.

Lots of talk, little action

While the fraudulent scheme has resulted in what state officials are now calling a “humanitarian crisis” and a “stunning failure of government,” the StolenBenefitsStolenPeople team still believes not enough is being done to help the Indigenous people who were preyed on.

Long said it’s not that officials are not aware of their grassroots organization’s work, but it’s more along the lines of them not wanting to acknowledge it.

“It’s one of those things where there’s just no justice being done,” Long, who is Navajo, said. “There’s no accountability, there’s no action, there’s nothing, and they won’t listen 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 recalls how the Navajo Nation established Operation Rainbow Bridge in response to the crisis in May and how the Navajo Nation Police Department set up on-the-ground efforts for a few weeks during the summer. 

But the team has yet to see much progress since.

“We don’t understand why a lot of the tribes are not 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 is from the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said since she started the outreach work, she has noticed that there are a lot of her community members who were victimized, including some who died of overdoses in the fraudulent homes. 

“We counted 38 deaths,” Shaye said. 

A majority of the work done by the group relies on funds they raise through their GoFundMe page, which helps pay for their outreach efforts and transportation costs to get 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 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 a lot of people, and they’ve been able to place people in legitimate treatment facilities or get them safely home. 

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 current crisis impacting Indigenous people is not okay, and it is not okay for an already underserved population to continue to be ignored and for what is happening to be swept under the rug by leaders who promised they’d help. 

“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 whole purpose is to make sure that those being displaced know that somebody cares who will share with them what their options are if they choose to go back home, get treatment, or go into a legitimate facility. 

“Regardless of what they’re feeling, they want to know you care,” 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 is such a delay that they tell them to go to the homeless shelters,” she said. “That’s all they do, or they 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 homeless shelter in downtown Phoenix, they have reached out to us,” she said, and they’ve had tribal officials, state officials, family services and other entities reach out to their group 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,” she said. “We’re helping, but why are they using us as a resource when they should be a resource?”

Stewart said she’d like to know why 211 is not doing what it was initially set up to do, which was to help ensure the health of the Indigenous people being displaced.

Many of the Indigenous people being displaced were promised some form of help and then ended up being put out because the facility they entered ended up being 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,” she said, adding that she has records of these places setting up in Wickenburg, Prescott, Pinetop, Camp Verde, and Tucson. 

In September, the city of Tucson dealt with its first significant shutdown of these fraudulent services, which displaced dozens of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike from the Ocotillo Apartments and 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 treatment homes started popping up in the Tucson area within the past year, and it’s become more prevalent in the last six months. 

“It appeals to a lot of people because it’s a roof over their head,” Boone said. She’s seen the recruiting happen right outside their office in downtown Tucson, where people would hand out pamphlets, brochures and business cards. 

She said she understands the appeal because they are pulling individuals off the street or from their tribal lands, promising food, shelter, clothes, work and the hopes of getting sober. But when they get to these places, that’s not what happens. 

Boone said they’ve had individuals come into the Tucson Indian Center and share their experiences with these fraudulent homes. She’s heard people say they’ve had their documents stolen or were instructed to lie about their addictions so the homes could bill for services.

“They’re not getting true 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 want accountability for all the families that have to deal with this,” she said, because so many families are not being heard, and people have died due to these fraudulent facilities.

“This should have never happened,” Stewart added. “Why is it still happening?”