Some stories don’t need a political framing. They just need to be told, and the outrage builds itself. This is one of those.
In Tigard, Oregon, a 67-year-old Haitian immigrant named Marie Gertrude Jean Valmont and her 31-year-old daughter Yolandita Marie Andre are facing federal indictments for forced labor, human trafficking, Medicaid fraud, and patient neglect. The victims? Their own family members — three Haitian relatives, including a teenager, whom they imported from Haiti to serve as unpaid labor in a fraudulent adult daycare operation.
Seventeen-hour days. Two dollars a day. Sleeping on the living room floor. Documents confiscated. Constant threats of deportation.
That’s not employment. That’s slavery with a state license.
How the Scheme Worked
Valmont and Andre ran an adult home daycare that was licensed by the state of Oregon in December 2022. They billed the Oregon Department of Human Services and Medicaid for staffing costs — claiming they needed to pay employees for additional hours to care for foster residents with exceptional needs.
They collected the money. They didn’t pay the workers. The three Haitian relatives who were doing the actual labor — one of them a child — got two dollars a day and a spot on the floor. The difference between what the government paid and what the workers received went straight into Valmont and Andre’s pockets.
That’s federal healthcare fraud funded by Medicaid — which means funded by you. Every dollar they stole came from a system designed to care for vulnerable adults, and they used it to run a forced labor operation out of a residential home.
The Patients Paid Too
The fraud wasn’t limited to labor exploitation. The patients in their care were neglected so badly that state officials cited the operation for violations. At least one patient — a person suffering from dementia — fell and broke his hip, developed bed sores, and was mistreated. The facility was cited for being understaffed and for failing to provide basic care. Another patient required hospitalization.
Understaffed. Of course it was understaffed. The “staff” was three trafficked family members working slave hours for pocket change. When your business model depends on exploiting your own relatives, patient care isn’t really the priority.
The state of Oregon licensed this facility. Oregon’s Department of Human Services was writing checks to fund it. And state regulators didn’t shut it down until the damage was already done — broken bones, bed sores, and a hospitalized patient.
The Immigration Layer
Valmont and Andre didn’t recruit strangers. They brought their own family from Haiti — including a minor — and turned them into indentured servants. They held their legal documents hostage. They threatened them with deportation. They created an environment where three people had no money, no identification, no autonomy, and no way out.
Each count of human trafficking carries up to 20 years in federal prison. Their trial is set for May 11.
Meanwhile, the broader immigration context can’t be ignored. The Trump administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitian migrants after the Biden administration expanded the program. A Biden-appointed judge blocked that decision, ruling that Trump didn’t have the authority to end it.
So the program that enables Haitian migration to the United States remains intact — defended by the courts — while a federal grand jury indicts Haitian immigrants for trafficking their own relatives into forced labor on American soil, funded by American taxpayers, inside a state-licensed facility that couldn’t be bothered to keep a dementia patient from breaking his hip.
The System That Failed
Every institution that was supposed to prevent this failed. Oregon licensed the facility. Medicaid funded it. The Department of Human Services wrote the checks. State regulators eventually cited violations but didn’t prevent the harm. And the immigration system that brought the victims into the country offered them no protection once they arrived — because the people exploiting them were the same people who sponsored them.
This is what happens when systems operate on paperwork instead of oversight. When a license is a rubber stamp instead of a guarantee. When government funding flows based on claims nobody verifies. When the people responsible for protecting vulnerable adults and vulnerable immigrants are too bureaucratically bloated to notice that a teenager is sleeping on a living room floor and working seventeen hours a day for two dollars.
Valmont and Andre will face justice. The system that made their scheme possible will keep running exactly the way it does now — until the next indictment, the next broken hip, the next teenager forced to work for pocket change in a country that was supposed to be their refuge.