Mississippi’s funding formula for colleges and universities will remain in place for now after the Board of Trustees of the Institutions of Higher Learning met Thursday, Aug. 20, without taking up a proposed performance-based funding model.

IHL, the board that governs Mississippi’s eight public universities voted June 18 to move toward a funding formula that would tie state dollars to graduation rates, student retention and how much graduates earn.

Some lawmakers have warned that measuring universities this way could penalize Jackson State University, Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University because the metrics take no account of the decades those schools went underfunded by the state.

(More after the video)

Under the timeline the board set in June, the model returns for discussion at its annual retreat on Sept. 17 and 18 in the Hattiesburg area, following a round of feedback from university staff on the plan’s performance-funding categories—Excellence Funding, Improvement Funding, and Administrative and Financial Efficiency Funding—layered atop a foundational “floor” meant to cover each institution’s basic operating needs.

The formula will shape the budget requests IHL sends to the legislature, where lawmakers who shelved their own version this year plan to return to it in 2027. Its sharpest stakes fall on Jackson State, Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State, HBCUs that critics warn the performance metrics could penalize for the decades those schools went underfunded—the disparity at the heart of the Ayers case.

That underfunding is documented. In 1975, Jake Ayers Sr., a civil rights activist from Glen Allan, sued Mississippi on behalf of his son, a Jackson State student, arguing that the state ran one system of higher education for white students and another for Black students. The suit became a class action. The United States intervened, as did Bennie Thompson, who later was elected to Congress representing the 2^nd District. The case went to trial in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on it in 1992, and in 1995 a federal district court found that vestiges of segregation remained in the state’s university system.

Mississippi settled in 2002, over the objections of the Ayers family, agreeing to pay $503 million during 17 years to the three universities. The package included $246 million for academic programs, $75 million for buildings, a $70 million public endowment and a $35 million private one. The universities could not draw on the endowment income until each campus enrolled at least 10 percent non-Black students for three consecutive years.

The state’s obligation ended in 2022.

Image: Alcorn State University welcome sign near Lorman (via Wikimedia Commons)

When a group of white DeSoto County residents asked a federal court to block a new judicial subdistrict drawn to give Black voters a better chance to elect a judge, arguing that it diluted their own votes by race, the case seemed to pose an unexpected test of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in the landmark case Louisiana v. Callais.

Yet U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock denied their request, finding that they had “wholly failed to carry their burden” and were “entitled to no relief at this stage.”

The lawsuit ran the logic of Louisiana v. Callais in reverse. Callais hinged on white voters in Louisiana challenging a new majority-Black congressional district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In DeSoto County, four white residents borrowed the same theory to attack a majority-Black judicial subdistrict, and the judge used Callais’s own language to turn them down.

The subdistrict grew out of judicial redistricting that the Mississippi Legislature passed in 2025. Lawmakers made DeSoto County its own circuit and chancery court district and added a judgeship on each side, to be elected from a subdistrict of nine precincts around Horn Lake and Southaven. That subdistrict has a voting-age population that is 50.52 percent Black, in a county that is about 25 percent Black and 67 percent white. The judges elected from it will have authority over the entire county. Elections for the seats are set for Nov. 3, 2026, with the new judges taking office in 2027.

The plaintiffs, led by county supervisor and former gubernatorial candidate Robert Foster, argued the arrangement gave residents inside the subdistrict more votes for the county’s judges than those outside it. One plaintiff, Kirby Carter, is a white voter who lives inside the subdistrict and claimed her vote was “unconstitutionally diluted based on race.” They asked the court to strike the subdistrict and hold the elections countywide.

Aycock rejected the request on two independent grounds. The first was timing. Under the Purcell principle, federal courts are told not to change election rules on the eve of an election, and she found the case fell well inside that window, with the vote less than 90 days away when the hearing closed. She noted the plaintiffs had known about the subdistrict for more than a year before suing and observed that the white plaintiffs in Callais had challenged Louisiana’s map within nine days of its creation while the DeSoto plaintiffs waited 14 months. “The Plaintiffs’ conduct constitutes a textbook example of undue delay,” she wrote.

The second ground was the merits, and there Aycock turned Callais against the people invoking it. A one-person, one-vote claim fails because that principle does not apply to judicial elections, she wrote, citing decades of precedent. On the racial-gerrymander claim, she found the plaintiffs offered almost no evidence, no illustrative map, no proof of racially polarized voting, nothing to show white voters in DeSoto County face discrimination at the polls. Their own witnesses noted that the county elected a Black sheriff countywide with white support, which cut against their argument.

Even if the plaintiffs had shown race drove the map, Aycock wrote, that would not end the case. She quoted the Supreme Court’s holding in its Callais ruling that “compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting,” and pointed to the floor statement of state Rep. Kevin Horan (R-Grenada), chair of House Judiciary B committee, that the subdistrict would let an “increasing majority-minority population” elect a candidate of its choice. Creating that opportunity, she found, was a lawful reason grounded in the Voting Rights Act, and the plaintiffs offered nothing to rebut it. She invoked the presumption that legislators act in good faith.

The ruling is preliminary. Aycock was careful to say she was not foreclosing the plaintiffs’ claims, and that they “may very well eventually be able to prevail” after discovery and a full trial. The DeSoto County NAACP, the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and Malenda Harris Meacham, one of the candidates running from the subdistrict, intervened to defend the map.

For now, the November election will proceed as drawn. Two candidates have qualified for each of the two subdistrict seats. The case leaves standing, at least through the election, a majority-Black judicial district in one of the fastest-growing and whitest counties in the state, and it offers an early answer to a question Callais raised across the South. The decision that white plaintiffs have used to dismantle Black districts also, in its text, protects the ones the Voting Rights Act supports.

Image: Water tower in Hernando, seat of DeSoto County (via WikiMedia Commons)

At a time when municipal water systems in seven states have suffered cyberattacks, the need to guard against malicious hacking has taken on greater urgency. Mississippi’s hospitals and other institutions have meanwhile been subjected to their own run of attacks, yet for years the state has not required the facilities to defend against them.

Against that backdrop, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has created a Senate Select Committee on Cybersecurity to study the security of state and local government computer systems and review how Mississippi prosecutes cybercrime.

Hosemann points to the most severe recent Mississippi case, in February 2026, when a ransomware group that security researchers link to Russia took the University of Mississippi Medical Center offline for more than a week, which resulted in the closure of its clinics, forced doctors to work with pen and paper, and demanded an $800,000 ransom. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security joined the recovery in that case. UMMC houses the state’s only children’s hospital, its only Level I trauma center and its only organ transplant program. Hosemann said cybercrime costs the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

The medical center was the fourth Mississippi hospital system hit in three years. A 2023 ransomware attack on Singing River Health System in Ocean Springs exposed the health information of nearly a million people. North Mississippi Health Services and OCH Regional Medical Center in Starkville were struck the same year. UMMC had been breached before that. A decade ago, it paid $2.75 million in federal fines after the 2013 theft of a laptop exposed about 10,000 patients’ records, and federal investigators found the center had known of the vulnerability since 2005 and left it unaddressed.

Through all of this, Mississippi has had no state law requiring hospitals to guard against cyberattacks. Only the federal health-privacy law, HIPAA, imposes that duty, and the federal government enforces it. The select committee is the state’s move to close the gap.

The state Senate committee will be co-chaired by Bart Williams (R-Starkville) and Tyler McCaughn (R-Newton), with members Bradford Blackmon (D-Jackson), Scott DeLano (R-Gulfport), Jeremy England (R-Ocean Springs) and Rod Hickman (D-Macon).

Hosemann, a Republican who presides over the Senate, said state agencies protect their systems separately and without a shared standard. “Everybody has siloed their own security stuff, which is for self-protection,” he said in announcing the committee on his official website. “Now we want to be able to have those protections done on a universal basis.” The committee will hold hearings this fall and make recommendations to the 2027 legislative session.

This is the second cybersecurity effort that Hosemann has driven through the Senate this year. During the 2026 session, a Senate committee advanced two bills that would create a state Department of Cybersecurity and require the governor to appoint a cabinet-level chief information officer for data protection and cyber strategy. Lawmakers have said they plan to keep working on the measures, and the new committee’s recommendations are set to feed the coming session.

Hosemann is considering a run for governor in 2027 but has not yet entered the race. The Republican primary so far includes Attorney General Lynn Fitch, Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, State Auditor Shad White and former House Speaker Philip Gunn, with businessman Tommy Duff also weighing a bid. Current governor Tate Reeves is term-limited.

All of which means the committee hearings this fall and any legislation that results will unfold in the months leading up to the election.

Image: Delbert Hosemann (R) meets with representatives of Mississippi State University’s Cyber and Technology Center on the Coast in July 2026 (via his official Facebook page)

TUPELO, Miss.—One after another, the majority of people who stood at the microphone at a hearing here on Tuesday told the state’s redistricting committee the same thing: Do not redraw electoral maps.

During a roughly hour-long hearing at Itawamba Community College, a pastor, the president of the state NAACP, a Democratic Party official, a woman who came straight from work, and a man who moved to Mississippi from Chicago all urged the panel to leave the state’s current districts in place, arguing that there is no legal reason to change them and every reason not to.

The hearing was the first of eight that the Joint Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting will hold across the state through Sept. 24, 2026, before the Mississippi Legislature takes up crafting new maps for its state legislative, judicial and congressional districts. Sen. Dean Kirby of Rankin County, the committee’s chair, opened by telling the audience the panel had come “to listen, not to answer questions, not to make speeches, not to politic.” Speakers were held to five minutes each. Nearly all of them used the time to oppose the exercise that brought the committee to town.

The Rev. Jeffrey Gladney, a pastor from Shannon who chairs a group called Lee County Get Out to Vote, spoke first and framed the stakes around the seat held by U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, whose Second District he lives in. “There is nothing in the Callais case that says Mississippi has to draw new maps,” Gladney said, arguing that redrawing the lines would split neighborhoods and cost majority-Black communities their representation. If the maps were redrawn, he said, “we would lose his influence, his voice and the resources that he’s able to bring back to his district.”

The Rev. Robert James, president of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP, told the committee that partisanship in the state has long served as “a pretext for race” and warned that reverting to older maps would reveal intentional discrimination. Anna Cunningham, speaking for the NAACP and the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, reduced her testimony to two points: “Do not change the maps,” she said, adding that the committee should consider the public’s testimony “collectively and thoughtfully.” The 2025 maps, she noted, were drawn by legislators and approved by a court, and no census has been taken since to justify redrawing them.

The objections came in many registers. Chris Traylor asked the panel why the state would change something that works. “If 87 is working in my car, I don’t need 89 [octane] gas,” he said, then pressed for a reason that no one on the committee would give him, because the members had said at the outset they would not answer questions. Katie Gilbert, a Tupelo native, tied the effort to the state’s loss of young people. “It’s the backward thinking like this decision to redistrict Mississippi when we don’t have to, that keeps Mississippi stuck in the past,” she said, noting that Tupelo is already split among four districts.

Jim Newman, chair of the Lee County Democratic Party, put the process in a national frame, tracing it to President Donald Trump’s push for Republican-friendly maps in Texas and pointing to Georgia, where he said lawmakers recessed and declined to redistrict after large crowds turned out. “You want to get rid of the one black representative they have?” Newman asked. Walter Jones, a Mississippi transplant who lives near Emmett Till’s old home, said the state had been improving and that redrawing the maps would carry it backward. Charles Moore, president of the Lee County NAACP branch, urged the committee to “let the old Confederacy go.”

Two speakers struck a different note. Mike Walker said he represented his grandchildren and the state, and told the room the fight was “good versus evil,” not Democrat versus Republican. Bonnie Bear, who described herself as a concerned citizen, urged the committee, if it proceeds, to weigh the “disparate impact” the Callais decision removed from the legal calculation, and to consider the representation it would take away.

The testimony echoed a position the state’s Black lawmakers had already put in writing. In a letter sent in June to House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the leaders of the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, House Minority Leader Rep. Robert Johnson, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Derrick Simmons and caucus chair Rep. Kabir Karriem argued that there is no need for mid-decade redistricting and that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais does not require it. Mississippi is about 38 percent Black, the letter noted, yet Black voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice in only one of four congressional districts, 16 of 52 state Senate districts, and one of nine seats on the state Supreme Court.

Kirby told the audience the Supreme Court’s ruling “has changed everything,” and that the committee’s priorities are the legislative and Supreme Court maps. It is widely expected that Gov. Tate Reeves will call a special session later this year to redraw legislative districts before the 2027 qualifying period, with congressional and judicial maps left for the regular session.

Those who cannot attend the committee hearings can send written comments to the committee’s staff counsel. The next hearing is Aug. 27, 2026, in Senatobia.

Image: Members of the legislative committee at the Tupelo hearing (credit Derrion Arrington)

Given persistent, bogus claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election and the U.S. Justice Department’s willingness to investigate people the Trump administration views as political enemies, the announcement of a new DOJ program to root out alleged fraud in public assistance programs has sparked its share of skepticism. Questions about the program’s foundational data have also raised doubts.

Still, officials who have signed on to what’s known as the Southeast Regional Fraud Enforcement Partnership are eager to highlight their roles, including seven in Mississippi whose involvement was announced at a press conference July 30, 2026. The officials are state Attorney General Lynn Fitch (who is also a candidate for governor); Secretary of State Michael Watson; Auditor Shad White (likewise a gubernatorial candidate); Treasurer David McRae; U.S. attorneys for the state’s two federal districts; and a representative of the FBI’s Jackson field office.

According to the announcement, the partnership will share benefits and corporate data across seven southern states to detect fraud in public programs including registration and payment data for SNAP (food assistance); Medicaid; Small Business Administration loans; and housing assistance. The seven targeted states are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The partnership is part of the Trump administration’s push to root out what it deems to be waste, fraud and abuse in public benefits programs. Investigators will cross-check public benefits applicants’ information across states and against other programs to flag people receiving benefits for which they may not qualify. Fitch’s office secured $2.5 million in federal funding to add five prosecutors for the purpose as well as a legal analyst and a law enforcement officer.

How much of what the system flags is actual fraud is subject to debate. Food assistance is the program most often cited. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program had an improper-payment rate of about 10.6 percent last year, a statistic that officials frequently invoke as evidence of fraud.

Yet the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, states plainly that the rate is not a measure of fraud. It counts every overpayment and underpayment above a small threshold, most of which are the result of administrative errors, agency mistakes and the tangle of rules that govern who qualifies. Studies that isolate intentional abuse put the number far lower, at around 1.6 percent of benefits.

The distinction matters for who gets caught in the enforcement net. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which studies programs that serve low-income families, found that pressure to lower error rates can lead states to wrongly deny or cut off benefits for households that legitimately qualify. Wrongly terminating a poor family’s food aid, the group notes, causes more harm than modestly overpaying one because it withholds assistance that a household needs to eat. A state can lower its overpayment rate and raise its rate of wrongful denials at the same time, becoming more accurate on paper while pushing eligible people off the rolls.

Mississippi is already building the kind of data-matching that the partnership seeks to expand. The state has begun cross-checking SNAP recipients’ information against other programs and piloting a system that checks applicants’ reported income against credit-bureau data. Those tools can catch people who understate income or receive benefits in more than one state. They can also flag households whose records are merely out of date, whose paperwork lagged a reporting deadline, or whose circumstances the data describes incompletely—the same households the accuracy research finds are most often cut off in error.

The approach fits a longer pattern in the state, which has had the lowest cash-assistance benefits in the United States for more than 50 years, and where a family of three now receives an average of about $260 per month. Mississippi is among 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid and its system imposes a mandatory 30-day job search and drug-screening requirement on applicants for public assistance.

In 2017, the legislature passed House Bill 1090, titled the Medicaid and Human Services Transparency and Fraud Prevention Act, known as the HOPE Act. The law ended a policy that had eased the resource test for many families and required the state to evaluate all household assets, tightening who could qualify. Its title paired fraud prevention with a narrowing of access—the same combination the new partnership features.

Real fraud in the targeted programs is known to exist. External thieves have stolen benefits through card-skimming schemes. Some retailers illegally exchange benefits for cash. Some applicants lie about their income. Federal and state agencies refer those cases to law enforcement and the new task force adds prosecutors to pursue them. The question the partnership raises is where the line falls between catching fraud and unnecessarily burdening the people the programs exist to serve.

Organizers have not said what safeguards Mississippi’s task force will use to keep eligible residents from being wrongly denied or how it will separate intentional fraud from routine errors. Nor did Fitch’s office detail any such protections in announcing the partnership. In the coming year, hearings and prosecutions will provide answers to which side of that line the effort lands on.

Two Mississippi officials participating in the partnership—Fitch and White—are candidates for the 2027 governor’s election. Both have made rooting out fraud and waste a theme of their public work, and the partnership places them alongside a Trump-administration priority as the campaign season begins.

Image: File photo of DOJ building (via Creative Commons/NBC News)

My son turned 12 today.

Twelve.

The same age as Tamir Rice when he was shot by police while playing with a toy gun.

My Honor was born during the summer of Ferguson. I wanted to disappear into the soft things of new motherhood. Diapers and onesies. ABCs and tiny fingers and toes. I wanted to nurse my baby, breathe him in and pretend the world outside our little sanctuary could wait.

But another mother’s brown son lay dead in a Missouri street.

So, alongside lullabies came another lesson.

The Talk.

It is a conversation Black folks have been having with our children their entire lives.

And the country keeps giving us new material.

Keep your hands visible. Be mindful of your movements. Know where you are. Know who is around you. Understand that sometimes your Blackness will enter the room before your humanity is allowed through the door.

I know something about inheritance.

I was raised in Mississippi.

My grandmother heard the screams of Bootjack McDaniels as he was lynched yards from her home. At eight years old, I learned the power of a white woman’s tears. As a teenager, I watched trucks carrying guns and Confederate flags pull into our driveway.

This soil holds blood.

Mississippi has earned its scars.

But somewhere along the way, America became comfortable pretending the wound belonged only to us.

Racism became Southern. Mississippi became shorthand for America’s sins—cotton fields and Confederate flags, burning crosses and Black bodies swinging from trees.

Point South and everybody else gets to feel clean.

Except Ferguson isn’t in Mississippi.

Tamir Rice wasn’t killed in Mississippi.

George Floyd wasn’t murdered in Mississippi.

And Donald Trump ain’t just president of Mississippi.

White supremacy has never respected state lines.

That truth sits heavy as unanswered questions remain around the death of Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old Black Mississippian who left for Horn Island on the Fourth of July and never came home.

I don’t know what happened to Nolan.

I won’t pretend that I do.

But I know The Talk.

I’ve been preparing my son for it since he was small enough to nurse. Years ago, I wrote that after teaching Honor his ABCs, there would come a time when I would have to teach him how to live. No realistic-looking water guns in public. Keep identification with you. Be mindful of what you wear. Keep your hands visible when stopped by police.

Today he is twelve.

And I hate that 12 means something different to me because Tamir never got to be 13.

Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong parents to do all the talking.

Black children already know they are Black.

What if white children were taught what it means to be white in America? What if they learned the history beneath their feet, the inheritance waiting for them and their power to refuse the ugliest parts of it?

Our children inherit more than our eyes, noses and smiles.

They inherit our stories.

Our wounds.

Our lies.

Our silences.

I wish I could point beyond Mississippi and tell my son there is some place where this history cannot reach him.

There isn’t.

The Talk was never about surviving the South.

It’s about surviving America.

Image courtesy Talamieka Brice

Mississippi’s only dedicated immigrant detention facility received its worst inspection report since operations began in 2019, with inspectors finding 23 use-of-force violations after the CoreCivic-owned facility failed to investigate whether detainees were subject to excessive pressure on their throats, heads and chests, or whether video evidence contained unexplained gaps or missing sequences.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspectors noted that facility staff failed to follow the detailed procedures contained in the Performance-Based National Detention Standards in four of the 15 use-of-force incidents selected for review, according to the previously unreported inspection released in June 2026 by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight.

The findings expose a breakdown in the safeguards designed to determine what happens when force is used against people in federal immigration custody, which includes many who have never been convicted of a crime. They come as ICE rapidly expands a detention system now holding tens of thousands of people. Detainee deaths have risen sharply to two-decade highs amid the dismantling of one of the government’s principal independent detention watchdogs. Despite receiving 26 violations overall, Adams County received a passing grade.

“We take seriously our obligation to adhere to all applicable federal detention standards in our U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)-contracted facilities, including Adams County Correctional Center (ACCC),” Ryan Gustin, CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs, told The Mississippi Independent in an email. “An onsite ICE Detention Standards Compliance Officer ensures we follow their strict standards and policies. All our facilities are subject to robust oversight and accountability measures. Our government partners all require regular review and audit processes.”

The inspection, which was conducted from May 7 to May 9, 2026, also found instances in which supervisors failed to check whether inmates had been placed in the correct housing units and found lengthy delays in ICE’s response to detainees. It was also discovered that CoreCivic staff had failed to conduct any inventory of some detainees’ baggage and non-valuable belongings.

The result represented a dramatic reversal from the previous year. Adams County had four deficiencies in its 2025 inspection and received a “Superior” rating.

The inspection report does not explain why staff failed to follow procedures in some use-of-force incidents but not others, or what happened during any of the unexplained events. The Performance-Based National Detention Standards note in precise detail when staff can resort to use-of-force, which is defined as a last resort after efforts to gain voluntary cooperation have failed. It can involve physical restraint, planned cell extractions, use of chemical agents and other efforts to gain control of a detainee.

According to the standards, each incident should be documented, investigated and reported within two days to senior ICE staff, while all incidents are to be recorded and reviewed for a range of compliance issues.

Internal ICE records obtained by The Washington Post documented at least 780 use-of-force incidents at 98 immigration detention facilities during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, up 37 percent from the previous year. More than 1,300 people were involved, a 54 percent increase from the year before. The incidents are summarized in daily ICE emails, meaning private facility employees and ICE staff are well-versed in procedures after use-of-force incidents. The New York Times also reported on substandard healthcare and detainee deaths.

ICE did not respond to questions about the Adams County inspection report or what happened during the four incidents it reviewed.

CoreCivic’s Gustin told The Mississippi Independent that the company is committed to treating detainees with care and respect.

“We have a detailed Human Rights Policy that clearly outlines our commitments regarding resident rights and treatment, including legal rights, safety and security, healthcare, visitation and standards of living,” Gustin said in his email to The Mississippi Independent.

Growing problems

The inspection deficiencies emerged amid growing scrutiny of the nation’s problematic immigrant detention system, which has included living conditions described as “cruel and inhumane” and a “graveyard for living people.”

Medical neglect has become a particular concern. In June, DHS’s Office of the Inspector General agreed to review the high number of detainee deaths since 2021 to the end of March 2026.

Two men died at Adams County in the 17 months between inspections. An Iranian man died in March 2026 from complications related to heart disease. The death of Delvin Francisco Rodriguez in December 2025 is particularly controversial. He was found unresponsive in his cell after an alleged attempted suicide by hanging, according to an ICE detainee death report. His death came about 10 days before he was due to be deported back to Nicaragua. He had been arrested by ICE for the offense of failure to appear for careless driving and driving without a license.

Reporting by Mississippi Today noted that nurses at the Merit Health hospital in Natchez told an immigration advocate that Francisco Rodriguez’s injuries were not consistent with ICE’s explanation that he hanged himself with a sheet and that he had an injury on his forehead that likely did not result from a suicide attempt.

ICE did not respond to questions about whether Rodriguez was among the four use-of-force incidents mentioned in the inspection report.

Previous investigations by The Mississippi Independent have documented an alleged years-long taxi extortion scheme run by a senior CoreCivic employee and her husband. The scheme involved directing detainees about to be released to a taxi service run by the husband, who charged hundreds of dollars per person for rides from Adams County to transportation hubs in Louisiana and Mississippi. One juvenile detainee said that he was threatened with being sent back into detention if he did not pay the $300 fare. Two adult detainees were also charged $300 each.

Failing the inspections is almost unheard of. Of 241 inspections reviewed by the Government Accountability Office between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, 239 resulted in ratings of acceptable or better. Only two failed. Other Department of Homeland Security watchdogs, using different inspection methods and often examining targeted concerns, found violations far more frequently.

Any facility that fails two consecutive inspections has its contract payments withheld, per federal law. That has never happened.

The difference between the oversight standards has fueled longstanding criticism that ICE’s inspection regime can document serious deficiencies without meaningfully observing the actual conditions detainees experience.

“Even with the level of medical neglect that is happening in the detention centers, the food—everything is so bad, and there is such a level of apathy in how the system treats people,” Francis Kelley, the Shreveport coordinator for the Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention, or LA-AID, told The Mississippi Independent.

The end of detention oversight

The question of who watches over ICE has become more consequential as the detention system has rapidly expanded and deaths have become more frequent. ICE’s detained population increased 71 percent between Trump’s inauguration and April 2026, according to the GAO. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights counted 52 deaths during the administration’s first 500 days and found that the mortality rate had more than doubled since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

As the system becomes more chaotic and unwieldy, some of the independent offices designed to scrutinize detention conditions have either disappeared or been scaled back considerably. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, created by Congress in 2019 as a watchdog independent of ICE, was dissolved by DHS in March 2025. The agency blamed the government shutdown for its demise. DHS said at the time that the OIDO “obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles.”

OIDO’s statutory duties included conducting unannounced inspections, investigating concerns about detention conditions and examining violations of facility contracts. The OIG, another independent source of detention oversight, remains in operation, but reports that a lapse in appropriations affected roughly 85 percent of its inspections and could delay its routine reporting moving forward.

More than 140 staff at OIDO were placed on administrative leave in early 2025. Human rights groups have since sued DHS over the office’s closure, while U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced an amendment this June that would reopen the office and use its inspection findings to enforce current laws that withhold contract payment when OIDO finds potential misconduct, use of excessive force or violations of detention standards.

Allison Posner, the former director of external relations for OIDO between 2021 and 2025, told Mother Jones in a May 2026 interview that the ombudsman office staff had been quickly and effectively solving detainee issues during weekly or fortnightly visits to facilities.

“We were getting to a place where we were doing it well,” Posner said, “but now there’s no one doing it at all, and that’s the part that’s particularly heartbreaking.”

With Congress’s oversight system shelved for now and the OIG conducting far fewer detention inspections, the Office of Detention Oversight has no agency or office to answer to.

The vacuum is already being felt. Some detention facilities haven’t been inspected in more than a year. The lack of oversight can have profound consequences for detainees, including those who have never been convicted of a crime but were simply caught up in the ICE net to fulfill arbitrary deportation quotas.

The importance of that oversight is best explained by what happened at CoreCivic’s Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico. ICE inspectors identified 21 deficiencies across eight detention standards in late 2021 but still awarded the facility a “Superior” rating.

Months later, OIG inspectors arrived unannounced and found severe staffing shortages, inadequate medical staffing, security failures and widespread plumbing and sanitation problems. The facility was operating with just 54 percent of its required staff, and more than half of detainee cells faced plumbing problems.

The findings were serious enough that in March 2022 the OIG recommended that ICE immediately remove every detainee unless conditions were rapidly corrected.

ICE did not close Torrance.

A later inspection by OIDO identified even more problems and ultimately issued eight recommendations to ICE and CoreCivic. Huge chunks of the report were redacted. Torrance remains in federal use.

At Adams County, the questions left unanswered are the ones the detention standards were designed to resolve: How much force was used, whether detainees were already subdued and whether the video record was complete, among many other issues stemming from use-of-force incidents.

Even with independent oversight flailing against the Trump administration’s eagerness to arrest, detain and deport as many immigrants as possible, ICE’s own inspectors documented that standards at Adams County had hit rock bottom.

It was still acceptable.

Image: Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Homeland Security Investigations worksite enforcement operation in Canton, Mississippi (Via ICE)

“Why do Black people still choose to live in Mississippi?”

“As a Black person, I’ll never step foot in Mississippi”

Those are real statements being posted on social media in the wake of the deaths of Nolan Wells and Tasia Fortune in recent weeks.

But this framing misses how the state got here in the first place. Mississippi policy guru Hannah Williams breaks down why in this new video.

(Click the photo to view.)

During the Great Migration, Williams says, millions of Black Americans left the South chasing safety and opportunity, escaping Jim Crow — but that history rarely accounts for what was left behind: Black political power, Black economic power, Black institutions, and the people who stayed. A common misconception outside the South is that Mississippi’s racism still looks like 1963 — lunch-counter refusals, slurs shouted in public. It doesn’t. Everyday life is often more integrated than outsiders imagine; the real tension today lives in who holds power.

And still, Black Mississippians remain some of the proudest people around. The same soil where enslaved people were forced to labor is now where generations gather for family reunions, where someone’s grandfather can live in a trailer on 250 acres of family land and be one of the wealthiest people in the county. It’s the home state of Walter Payton, B.B. King, and Alice Walker — and the churches, HBCUs, juke joints, blues music, and civil rights organizing that continue to shape American culture, evidenced by how enthusiastically audiences embraced Sinners and the wave of memes it spawned.

So before you talk down to Black Mississippians, please remember: The path to freedom, as the saying goes, still runs through Mississippi.

The legislative committee redrawing Mississippi’s voting maps will take public comment at eight hearings in August and September, and the locations it chose fall mostly outside the state’s majority-Black areas. Five of the eight are in counties that are majority white. Three are in majority-Black counties.

The committee will gather comment on the state’s legislative, congressional and Supreme Court maps, which Republicans moved to redraw after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act this spring in Louisiana v. Callais. The districts most likely to change are the majority-Black ones, including the Second Congressional District held by U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and the three Supreme Court districts a federal court has found dilute Black voting strength.

The five hearings in majority-Black counties will be in Cleveland, Natchez and Jackson. Those in majority-white counties will be in Tupelo, Senatobia, Meridian, Hattiesburg and Gulfport. The Delta hearing, at Delta State University in Cleveland, is the only one in that region. Cleveland sits in Bolivar County, which is about 63 percent Black, though the city itself has a smaller Black demographic than the county. No hearing is scheduled in Greenville, Clarksdale, Greenwood or Indianola, the majority-Black Delta towns within the districts under review.

The interior Delta that the schedule skips was a center of Mississippi’s voting-rights movement. During the 1964 Freedom Summer, organizers registered Black voters in Delta towns including Greenwood and Indianola, and many were arrested and beaten. Fewer than 7 percent of the state’s eligible Black residents were registered to vote that year. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and federal courts later used it to require Mississippi to draw districts in which Black voters could elect candidates of their choice. The Callais decision narrowed that law.

State Sen. Jeremy England (R-Ocean Springs), who co-chairs the committee, said the panel is looking statewide. “We’re really hitting all the corners of the state,” he said. Each hearing begins at 6 p.m. and will be broadcast on the Mississippi Legislature’s YouTube channel, and residents may speak at any of them. The first is Aug. 18 in Tupelo and the last is Sept. 24 at the Capitol in Jackson.

The committee will begin drawing maps after the hearings.

Image: Legislative redistricting committee members (composite via Mississippi Legislature’s lawmaker profile pages)

When Assma Ali was sworn in as municipal judge of Benoit on Aug. 5, 2026, she became a rare practicing Muslim holding judicial office in Mississippi. The town has fewer than 400 residents and sits in the Delta flatland of southwest Bolivar County. The office is small, handling municipal ordinance violations and misdemeanors.

The reaction to her appointment was not small.

Within days, a false claim spread online that Ali had been appointed in Ridgeland, 130 miles away, where her law office is located. The city of Ridgeland issued a release refuting the claim, noting that it had made no new judicial appointments. The correction accomplished little. Ali, who is Muslim and wears a hijab, said her office began receiving threats. State Sen. Michael McLendon, a Republican from Hernando, called for the town to remove her, posting that he believes “in God we trust not Mohamed.” Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, a Republican running for governor, pledged to ban Sharia law in Mississippi if elected. “I only represent one law, and that’s the U.S. Constitution,” Ali said.

Mississippi has a very limited history of Muslims in public office (Ali Shamsiddeen, a former municipal judge in Jackson, is Muslim). The state’s other Muslim figures of note include Yazoo City-born journalist Askia Muhammad; McComb civil rights organizer Curtis Muhammad; activist Hollis Watkins Muhammad; and NBA player and activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a Gulfport native. None were officeholders.

Otherwise, the state’s closest parallel runs through a family whose story shows what acceptance once required. In 1911, a Lebanese immigrant named Hassan Mohamed, born Hussein Mohamed Asim Shuman in the Shiite village of Sir’een, settled in Belzoni and opened a dry-goods store. He was Muslim. In 1924, he married Ethel Wright, a Baptist woman from near Eupora, and together they raised eight children and ran the H. Mohamed general merchandise store in the Delta town. Their children were raised in their mother’s faith, as Baptists.

Their oldest son, Ollie Mohamed, went into politics. He was elected alderman of Belzoni in 1957, entered the Mississippi Senate in 1964, and served, across two stretches, into 1993. In 1992, his colleagues elected him president pro tempore of the Senate, one of the most powerful positions in state government, which is held by the senator who presides in the lieutenant governor’s absence. He was in all likelihood the highest-ranking Mississippi official of Muslim descent in the state’s history. He was also a Baptist, a Delta merchant and a Democrat, and his father’s religion drew no notice during his political career.

Hassan Mohamed brought Islam to the Delta, and his children took up the faith of the place the family had joined. The assimilated Baptist son, who was not a Muslim, rose to run the state Senate. What the family kept of its origins survived as heritage, in the surname and in the references to Syrian blood that appear in their obituaries, and not as a religion carried into the Capitol. For most of the last century, the Mississippians of Muslim origin who entered public life did so as converts to the state’s dominant faith.

Ali kept her faith and wears it visibly, and she reached office in a town most of the state could not place on a map. Much of the reaction has focused on that visibility. McLendon warned that Mississippi “will not become the next Dearborn, Michigan,” the Detroit-area city that in 2023 became the nation’s first with a Muslim-majority population. Gipson’s pledge to ban Sharia law addressed a change to Mississippi law that no one has proposed. Ollie Mohamed reached the top of the state Senate as a Baptist whose father’s religion stayed out of his politics. Ali entered a far smaller office as an openly Muslim woman and drew a statewide response.

Ali has said her ability to respond is limited by the office she now holds. In the few comments she has made, she has returned to the same point. “As a person born and raised in the U.S., why am I disqualified,” she said. “Just because I’m Muslim?”

It is tempting to see the backlash against her as a kind of political clickbait. Ali has never brought her personal religious beliefs into play nor expressed any interest in doing so. Despite that, a loud cacophony has been created by a conservative state senator, a candidate for governor and a national online campaign.

Image: Assma Ali (via Law Offices of Assma Ali)

“Look around.”

“Pay attention.”

“Be mindful of where you are and who you are with.”

“Check in. With us. With yourself.”

For parents of Black children, these four statements represent routine guidance they give, part of “the talk,” a well-worn ritual of racial socialization that shapes how Black children and adults learn what it means to live and get by in a white-dominated society.

The recent death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells has brought the importance of the talk to the forefront of public discussion. Wells, who was Black, was on a boat trip along the Mississippi Gulf Coast with a group of white friends when he disappeared on July 4. Wells’ mother reported him missing later that evening, and a park ranger found his body on July 6.

Mississippi’s history of racist violence casts a long shadow and has fueled intense online speculation about what happened to Wells. So far, investigations are ongoing and the nature and cause of Wells’ death remain undetermined.

Alongside this speculation are reminders to parents of Black children about the importance of the talk.

“There is a unique burden that comes with raising Black children,” wrote blogger Maui Bigelow. “We spend years preparing them for situations we pray they never encounter.”

Yet, for all the discussion now about the importance of “the talk” in Black families, the research I and others have done shows that there is no analogous discussion in white families about race. In fact, research finds that white parents have few, if any, direct conversations about race and racism with their children.

When white parents do talk with their children about race and racism, research finds those parents often minimize and ignore the role of racism in daily life, or discuss it in vague and superficial terms.

Making sense of white racial status

I’m a sociologist of race and racism. For the past five years I’ve been studying white people to understand how they make sense of their white racial status. My research focuses on white people living in the U.S. South because that region, more than any other, is responsible for creating and sustaining Americans’ shared ideas about race and its significance, including what it means to be white.

My team of graduate student researchers and I have interviewed well more than 100 white Southerners between 18 and 88 years old, the majority of whom live in Mississippi. With a median age of 42 years old, about a third of those we spoke with were raising children of their own. Another third had children who were grown and living on their own.

In our interviews we asked these white Southerners to tell us whether and how they talked about race with their children, including what it means to be white. We also asked everyone we spoke with whether and how their own parents talked with them about race and what it means to be white.

About 30 percent of those we spoke with said they never talked about race, either with their parents or with their own children. Gail, 56, said she “never wanted to make it a thing” for her six children. And 41-year-old Michael said that he and his wife don’t talk to their kids about race because his parents did not talk with him about it when he was a child. “Race is just a descriptor,” Michael told us.

Jayne, 63, also said she never talked about race with her parents or her own children. But as we talked more, it became apparent that Jayne’s parents did talk with her about race.

Jayne recalled her mother being “scared of Black men” because of a lynching that took place in her hometown when her mom was a child. “She heard stories about what this Black man had supposedly done,” Jayne told us. “It left her with that fear.” Jayne knows this story because her mother told it to her, putting the same fear in Jayne that was put into her.

Race-neutral language obscures reality

Jayne’s recollection of what her mother taught her was similar to the explicit racism received and taught by about 10 percent of those we spoke with.

Seventy-one-year-old Shirley didn’t remember her own parents talking with her about race. When it came to her own children, though, Shirley taught them “to always be polite and treat people well.” But when it comes to marriage and family, she told them to “stay with your own.”

Antonio, 87, raised three children. He taught them that “they don’t need to go anywhere or do anything with Black kids, just to stay with the whites.”

The largest share of those we spoke with—about 44 percent—recalled conversations with their parents or their own children where racism was minimized in favor of language that encouraged seeing people as “just people” and not as members of racial groups.

Lyle, 68, taught his children that, “We’re all God’s children, there’s nothing special about us.” Fifty-year-old Leanna teaches her children that everyone is created “equal in dignity” and that race doesn’t matter. And 45-year-old Ned tells his children, “We’re all humans. And just because I come from a different place, or have a different skin tone… we’re all different in some way. You’re unique.”

On the surface, this race-neutral language appears nonjudgmental and even ideal. Yet Americans live in a social world in which racism remains powerfully stitched to the daily fabric of their lives, structuring where people live, the schools they attend, the places they work and the people with whom they interact.

In this context, I and others argue that race-neutral language obscures the reality of racism and works directly against efforts to meaningfully address concrete racial inequalities.

Functionally speaking, race-neutral lessons have the same effect as the more explicit racism taught by a smaller share of white parents to their children.

When white parents tell their children that race does not matter, they are implying that racism does not exist. And so their children may fail to understand how their own life chances are shaped by the same racist forces that limit opportunities for others who are not white. Importantly, they may fail to understand the role they can play in challenging racism within their own lives.

The talk for white children

Would things have been different if Wells’ friends had been well versed in Mississippi’s history of racial violence, including violent backlash toward integration? Or if they had considered the concerns many Black parents have of their children navigating all-white spaces? We don’t know the answer, nor whether their parents did talk to them about this history.

To be clear, this is not to claim that Wells’ death was the result of racial violence, but rather to acknowledge that the minute Wells stepped onto a boat as the only Black person in his group of friends, the underlying racial context was established. Based on my research and the research of others, that context was also likely misunderstood or not understood at all by his white friends.

Having “the talk” with white children entails talking plainly with them about what it means to be white. This includes explaining to them why they grow up in mostly white neighborhoods, attend mostly white schools and have few nonwhite friends.

Having this kind of plain talk with white children can better equip those children to recognize white-dominated spaces, the challenges Black children face while navigating them, and what white children and adults can do to help.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The legislative committee charged with redrawing Mississippi’s voting districts met for the first time Monday and approved a schedule of eight public hearings across the state, the first concrete step in a process that has stalled since spring. The hearings run from Aug. 18 through late September, and lawmakers say they will begin drawing maps after hearing from voters.

The 20-member Joint Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee—16 Republicans and four Democrats—convened at the Capitol and elected Sen. Dean Kirby (R-Pearl) as chair, Rep. Noah Sanford (R-Collins) as vice chair and Rep. Rodney Hall as secretary. The committee voted to hire the law firm Butler Snow as its general counsel and retained staff from the legislature’s watchdog arm, the PEER Committee, to advise it. The first two hearings are set for Aug. 18 at Itawamba Community College in Tupelo and Aug. 27 at Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia. Each begins at 6 p.m., and the legislature will broadcast all eight on its YouTube channel.

The committee’s priorities are the state legislative and Supreme Court district maps, Sen. Jeremy England (R-Vancleave) said after the meeting. The three Supreme Court districts also determine the boundaries for the state’s public service and transportation commission districts. England said the committee may take up the congressional map as well but is in less of a hurry there, because candidates who win the coming midterm elections will hold their seats for two more years regardless.

The process follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this spring in Louisiana v. Callais, which raised the bar for proving that a voting map discriminates and prompted Mississippi Republicans to seek new lines. It also follows a federal court ruling that the state’s Supreme Court districts, unchanged since 1987, dilute Black voting strength, a case that remains unresolved and has frozen elections for those seats. Gov. Tate Reeves has signaled that a special session to adopt new maps is likely before the end of the year.

Lawmakers will treat the three majority-Black legislative districts added under a 2025 court order as a starting point, England said, though he said the committee is looking statewide. “We’re really hitting all the corners of the state to try to find out” what communities consider their shared interests, he said.

Not everyone accepts that the hearings will shape the outcome. U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, whose 2nd District covers much of the city of Jackson and the majority-Black Delta and is the seat Republicans have most openly discussed eliminating, has said he wants the work done in the open. Voting-rights advocates have gone further, calling the hearings a formality and arguing that lawmakers intend to reduce Black political power whatever the public says. That suspicion frames how the coming meetings will be watched.

The committee will hold its hearings over the next two months, then begin drawing maps for the legislature to consider. Whatever it produces will face the same court that has already found the current Supreme Court lines unlawful, and the same federal standard that the Callais decision reshaped. The hearings are where Mississippians can give input before the lines are drawn. What weight their words carry is the question the next two months will answer.

Image: Mississippi Capitol (Credit: R.L. Nave)

In formally kicking off her campaign for governor, Attorney General Lynn Fitch leaned into the two accomplishments she’s most proud of: helping overturn Roe v. Wade and being a Donald Trump-style Republican. Yet both issues carry more political complexity in Mississippi than the campaign’s launch suggests.

“I’m the woman who protected life by overturning Roe v. Wade,” Fitch says in her announcement video, while also touting her support for President Donald Trump, her lawsuits over transgender rights, cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and efforts to combat human trafficking.

Fitch repeatedly invokes Trump throughout the nearly four-minute video, saying she backed him “from the beginning” and highlighting instances where she says his administration chose Mississippi as a partner on issues like immigration enforcement and anti-trafficking efforts.

Whether that strategy will be effective in 2027 is an open question.

While Trump remains popular in Mississippi, a new survey shows the president’s approval rating cratering nationally. Even in Mississippi, a state he won handily—twice—and hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in two decades, Trump’s approval has fallen below 50 percent with more Mississippians disapproving of the president than approving of the job he’s doing.

Mississippi’s voters have also not always embraced anti-abortion measures when asked directly. In 2011, Mississippians rejected the so-called “personhood” constitutional amendment, which would have defined life as beginning at fertilization, and thus providing a path to banning abortion. The proposal failed by a 58 percent to 42 percent margin despite the state’s conservative electorate.

The case that would overturn Roe started with a law Mississippi passed in 2018 to ban abortion at 15 weeks. The state’s only abortion clinic at the time, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, sued. Representing the state as attorney general, Fitch kept appealing lower courts’ decisions to strike down the law until it reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 and the six-justice conservative majority ruled to overturn Roe, a precedent that stood for five decades.

Mississippi voters no longer have a way to place constitutional amendments on the ballot. The state Supreme Court invalidated the citizen initiative process in 2021 over a constitutional defect tied to congressional districts, and lawmakers have repeatedly failed to restore it. Since then, proposals to revive the process have often included restrictions preventing voters from using it to change abortion law.

Voters in several states, including Arizona, Missouri and Ohio, have in recent years voted to reinstate abortion rights using those states’ ballot referendum processes.

She joins a field to succeed Gov. Tate Reeves, who is term-limited, that includes Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, who has campaigned for more than a year, and former House Speaker Philip Gunn, who entered this spring. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, State Auditor Shad White and businessman Tommy Duff are among the Republicans still weighing bids. No Democrat has announced. The primary is set for August 2027.

If she wins, Fitch would be the first woman elected governor of Mississippi. The state has never had one. The woman who came closest was Evelyn Gandy, a Democrat who was the first woman elected to statewide constitutional office in Mississippi and the first to serve as lieutenant governor. Gandy ran for governor three times. In 1979 and again in 1983, she led the first primary, and both times she lost the runoff, to William Winter and then to Bill Allain. She never reached the office. In the decades since, no woman has come as near.

Fitch enters the race as the official whose office is defending the state in the voting-rights cases now before the federal courts. Her office is the state’s lawyer in the suit over the Mississippi Supreme Court districts, which a federal judge has found dilute Black voting strength, and it defends the state’s election laws when they are challenged. Her chief of staff called an earlier ruling in the state’s favor in that case “a very good outcome for the State.” The next governor will inherit those cases, the fights over redrawing the congressional and legislative maps, and the disputes over who can vote that Fitch’s office has argued throughout her tenure.

The three declared Republicans have all worked closely with the groups that have shaped Mississippi policy for years. Gunn presided over the House that eliminated the state income tax, a goal the free-market Mississippi Center for Public Policy had pushed for more than a decade. White worked at that organization’s legal arm, the Mississippi Justice Institute, before he won statewide office. Fitch built her national name on Dobbs and her support for Trump. The 2027 primary will test which of the three Republican voters prefer.

Fitch has held statewide office since 2012, when she was first elected treasurer, and she became the first Republican elected attorney general since Reconstruction in 2019. Her tour opened Tuesday and runs through the week, with stops in Jackson, Hattiesburg, Gulfport, Meridian, Columbus, Tupelo, Cleveland and Southaven. The qualifying deadline for the 2027 elections is Feb. 1.

Image: Republican Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (via Lynn Fitch for Mississippi Facebook)

Years of Republican-led efforts to disenfranchise Black citizens appears to be having the opposite effect, new data show.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which stripped away core protections for majority-Black districts under the Voting Rights Act, when Republican legislatures moved to redraw Black congressional seats, Black voters in Southern states responded by turning out well above their historical baseline, the report from independent political media organization VoteHub shows.

“The early evidence suggests Callais may have produced an unintended consequence,” write the report’s authors. “While the decision strengthened Republican efforts to protect their House majority, it also appears to have reenergized Black political participation across much of the Black Belt, a region where Democratic engagement had largely plateaued.”

Mississippi’s primaries took place before the Callais decision came out, but the state’s majority-Black counties came in more than a percentage point ahead of the statewide rate, at 17.1 percent. Jefferson County — Mississippi’s second-most-Black county, behind Claiborne — posted the largest positive turnout differential in the state, 9.5 points above the state rate.

Overall, turnout statewide in Mississippi’s primary was low, with fewer than one in six eligible voters casting a ballot, the report shows. But a surge of interest in Mississippi’s race for U.S. Senate has put the state on the radar of national political observers and donors and could shape the midterms.

Black voters in Mississippi already turn out in higher numbers than their white counterparts.

In the 2024 and 2020 elections, Black Mississippians were national leaders in voter turnout. In the 2024 general election, according to research and policy nonprofit KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation), 70.8 percent of eligible Black Mississippians voted — slightly ahead of the state’s white turnout rate of 69.4 percemt, and ahead of the statewide rate overall.

That 1.4-point turnout margin is the largest of any state in the country. Mississippi’s raw Black turnout rate also ranks second nationally, trailing only Oregon, a state with a Black population too small for the comparison to hold significant meaning.

Black turnout was even higher four years earlier, when 72.8 percent of African Americans in Mississippi turned out compared to 68.9 percent of white Mississippians. Mississippi is one of only a handful of states where African Americans register to vote at a higher rate than white voters — 82.1 percent to 81.3 percent.

After Republican redistricting efforts in light of Callais, Black turnout surged to a nearly six point average turnout differential in majority-Black counties in Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, where the state held primaries for governor and Senate but postponed its primaries for House of Representatives until August.

Image: Voting booths (via C x 2, Flickr Commons)

CoreCivic and the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, have partially dismantled an alleged, yearslong predatory scheme that exploited immigrants released from one of the nation’s largest detention centers, following an investigation by The Mississippi Independent.

CoreCivic, which operates the Adams County Correctional Center outside Natchez, said it reviewed questions raised by the investigation that one of its senior detention officers had since at least 2020 helped steer released detainees to a taxi service operated by the officer’s husband, Otis Anderson. Former detainees and immigration advocates have accused Anderson of using threats and charging fares of more than $300 per passenger. His service was repeatedly selected despite cheaper alternatives, including free transportation offered by regional nonprofit groups, though CoreCivic has not explained how detainees made those choices.

While the for-profit company said it was unable to confirm the allegations against its employee, Tameka Moore-Anderson, it said it had taken steps intended to prevent any future improprieties.

“We take seriously our responsibility to adhere to all applicable detention standards and policies that our government partners expect of us at our Adams County Correctional Center (ACCC), as well as our own CoreCivic policies and procedures,” Ryan Gustin, CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs, said in an email to The Mississippi Independent. “While we have not substantiated any of these claims, additional measures to ensure that there is no conflict of interest have been taken.”

The company did not say whether Moore-Anderson, a lieutenant who works in the unit responsible for discharges and arranging onward transport for released detainees, had been removed from duties due to the accusations.

Gustin also said that ICE stopped offering Anderson’s service as a transportation option to released detainees in response to The Mississippi Independent’s investigation.

Years of costly rides

The Mississippi Independent, reporting in collaboration with the Spanish-language newspaper El Molino Informativo, found that Anderson had for years charged immigrants hundreds of dollars each for rides from the Adams County facility to transportation hubs in Mississippi and Louisiana, according to text messages between Anderson and detainees’ relatives, accounts of former passengers and interviews with longtime immigration advocates who had dealt with him directly.

In April 2026, Anderson allegedly charged $900 to drive three released detainees from Adams County to the airport in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to a juvenile passenger who spoke with El Molino. The journey is approximately 75 miles. The juvenile said he had asked to be taken only to the bus station in Natchez, approximately 12 miles from the detention center. At the time of the reporting, Uber estimated that a trip from the detention center to the Baton Rouge Airport would cost approximately $110.

The juvenile also said Anderson threatened to have him returned to detention if he refused to pay. Anderson has declined to address the allegations, instead asking The Mississippi Independent not to contact him again. Moore-Anderson has not responded to repeated questions about whether she helped direct detainees to her husband.

CoreCivic previously said it has no contracts with private transportation companies providing such rides and received no financial benefit from the services used by detainees.

Unexplained transportation list

CoreCivic’s statement leaves a central question unresolved.

ICE said it removed Anderson’s taxi service from a list of taxi services. But Anderson’s company does not appear on either of the two lists obtained by The Mississippi Independent, one from 2022 and another from November 2025.

CoreCivic did not provide the list that it referred to nor explain when Anderson’s service had been added.

The discrepancy also does not explain how Anderson repeatedly obtained passengers from inside the detention center or collected groups of immigrants in a large passenger van, which a fellow taxi driver in Natchez said he witnessed.

Anderson owned a 15-passenger van until October 2024, according to online records.

Immigrants in detention have limited access to phones and the internet. Their only access to transportation options would have been on the ICE-approved taxi lists given to them by CoreCivic staff as they prepared for release. Likewise, their relatives and legal representatives—independent and scattered across the United States and abroad—make it unlikely that any of them would be able to coordinate a group collection of detainees.

Those circumstances raise the possibility that someone with access to the detainee release process arranged for Anderson to collect groups.

CoreCivic previously said that when ICE orders a detainee released directly from Adams County, facility employees provide information about local transportation options to help the person reach a preferred destination.

“Individuals are free to make their own transportation arrangements, including those arranged by their legal representatives,” the company said in a previous statement to The Mississippi Independent.

Federal transportation requirements

Immigration advocates explained to The Mississippi Independent that the taxi exploitation scheme has been fueled by CoreCivic and other detention operators failing to follow ICE’s Performance-Based National Detention Standards stringently.

The rules govern conditions and operations at privately operated and government-run immigration detention facilities and cover matters ranging from food service and sexual-assault prevention to marriage requests and release procedures.

Since at least 2021, immigrant advocacy organizations have complained to the federal government that detention centers in Louisiana and Mississippi routinely fail to follow provisions requiring facilities to transport certain released detainees to public transportation.

Under the standards, when a facility is more than one mile from public transportation, officials must ordinarily provide transportation so that a detainee can reach a bus, train or other transit service before it stops operating for the day.

Gustin said an ICE detention-standards compliance officer stationed at Adams County monitors CoreCivic’s adherence to federal requirements.

“All our facilities are subject to robust oversight and accountability measures,” Gustin said. “Our government partners all require regular review and audit processes.”

Reports by other outlets indicate that some private contractors have successfully lobbied ICE to revise the standards in ways that benefit their bottom lines.

The standards do not say anything about taxis or indicate that detainees purchase taxi rides as a substitute for the facility’s obligation to deliver them to public transportation.

The Mississippi Independent has found that high-priced taxi services are common around remote immigration detention centers in Louisiana and Mississippi, where public transportation is scarce and released detainees often have few alternatives.

Potential conflict of interest

Gustin said CoreCivic had reminded Moore-Anderson of company policy in the aftermath of The Mississippi Independent investigation.

“We have reviewed all applicable policies and procedures with the staff member cited in your inquiry,” Gustin said. “We have verified that our staff members are not listed as part of the ownership of Anderson and Son Transportation.”

A formal ownership stake, however, is not the only element of a potential conflict. A central question that remains unanswered is whether Moore-Anderson used her position, access to detainees or role in the release process to benefit a taxi service operated by her spouse.

CoreCivic’s ethics code requires employees to disclose potential conflicts involving government work and allows the company to discipline employees for violations. Federal contracting rules also require covered contractors to maintain ethics and internal-control systems designed to detect similar improper conduct.

Despite ICE’s decision to stop offering Anderson’s service, Gustin said it does not stop Anderson from being hired independently.

“It’s worth noting that those individuals in our care, family members, advocates or legal representatives could still independently contact this company to arrange transportation services,” Gustin said.

Image: Aerial view of Adams County Correctional Center (via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, one of seven members of the state board that issues environmental permits in Mississippi and a candidate for governor, will require data center developers to disclose their water, energy, air-quality and financial details to his office before he votes on their applications.

Gipson, a Republican who is running for governor in 2027, issued the requirement in a July 14, 2026, memorandum to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality Permit Board and laid out his reasoning in an accompanying opinion column that his office released July 20. The move puts one statewide elected official at odds with the data center expansion that Gov. Tate Reeves has made central to his economic agenda.

Gipson issued the requirement as a statutory member of the MDEQ permit board, citing his authority under state law to weigh a project’s effects on agriculture and commerce. The memo directs that the information be submitted to his office at least 30 days before any public hearing or vote on a data center permit, and it demands the information under the Mississippi Public Records Act.

“I will ask questions,” Gipson wrote in his column. “And my vote will depend entirely on the answers to those questions, or lack thereof.” He noted the limits of the position, writing, “I’m only one vote out of seven, but I believe I can get some answers on the record.”

The memo sets out four categories. It requires identifying the sources of water and estimated usage, the cooling system a data center would use, and its effect on water availability and utility ratepayers. It specifically requires the sources of energy, whether a plant draws from the electrical grid or operates “behind the grid,” and the effect on grid reliability and energy ratepayers. Estimates of heat, air quality and noise are also included. And it requires audited financial statements for the last two fiscal years along with the identification of any person or entity with the authority to direct the applicant through ownership of 10 percent or more of its voting securities, by contract or otherwise.

Gipson framed the disclosure as a matter of protecting taxpayers.

“If Mississippi taxpayers are being asked to invest our tax dollars, incentives, natural resources and utility costs into these projects, we the taxpayers deserve clear and honest answers before those investments are made,” Gipson wrote. “Not after.” He said residents have “real and legitimate concerns about water, energy and utility rates, as well as public health,” and that the secrecy around the projects had left people “fed up.”

Gipson’s move comes amid a growing backlash against data centers in Mississippi and across the United States. His larger argument is financial. Gipson, who spent a career reviewing financial statements before entering politics, wrote that he had examined a major artificial intelligence company’s filings showing its AI segment lost $6.4 billion in 2025, and that such losses stem from data center construction costs that have yet to return a profit. He warned of an “AI bubble” built on debt and what he called circular financing among related companies, and he compared the risk to the collapses of Enron and WorldCom and the 2008 housing crash.

Gipson grounded that warning in an outside source. The Bank for International Settlements, which coordinates the world’s central banks, published an analysis in July titled “The AI Investment Race” which examined the buildout’s reliance on debt and circular equity ties and questioned its sustainability. The report found the sector had over-invested to roughly 1.5 times what would be efficient, and as much as three times in some conditions, and warned that stress at one firm could cascade to others. Gipson pointed readers to the report and argued that policymakers should take the risk seriously before committing public resources.

The projects Gipson wants scrutinized are the ones Mississippi has courted aggressively. Amazon Web Services has committed $25 billion to data centers in the state, with eight confirmed projects including sites in Canton, Ridgeland, Clinton and Vicksburg. The legislature approved the first package in a 2024 special session, granting sales-and-use tax exemptions, a 10-year corporate income tax exemption and a $215.1 million loan to Madison County for roads, water and sewer lines. Reeves has called the state’s approach a “blueprint” for others to follow. Near the Canton campus, residents have reported more dust, noise and traffic since construction began. DeSoto County residents complain of constant noise from Elon Musk’s nearby Grok data center.

Gipson’s move opens a rare public divide among Mississippi Republicans over that strategy of blanket endorsement. Reeves announced the Amazon projects flanked by House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, and the Republican-controlled Mississippi Legislature approved the incentives with little dissent. Gipson’s own campaign presents him as a conservative who fights regulation, which makes his call for new disclosure requirements on industry another departure. He enters a 2027 governor’s field that already includes State Auditor Shad White and former House Speaker Philip Gunn (Reeves is term-limited).

Gipson could not be reached for comment. His office issued the memo and the accompanying column through the Department of Agriculture and Commerce.

Whether the policy changes any outcome is uncertain, by Gipson’s own account. The permit board decides by majority, and he holds one seat on it. What his policy guarantees is that the questions—and any failure to answer them—will be part of the public record before the board votes. “Let’s do our proper due diligence now,” he wrote, “in advance.”

Image: Andy Gipson (via his Facebook page)

“Mississippi is the new Georgia.”

That’s how U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Delaware Democrat and vice chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, characterized the state’s political trajectory during an appearance on MSNOW Monday night.

Rochester added that she is personally paying close attention to the state’s Senate race, suggesting national Democrats increasingly see Mississippi as an opportunity rather than safe Republican territory unworthy of investment.

Currently, incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican, faces tandem challenges from Democrat Scott Colom, a prosecutor from North Mississippi, and Ty Pinkins, an independent.

Rochester’s comparison is notable: Georgia spent decades as a reliably red state before demographic shifts, the building of progressive infrastructure—notably including the 2018 gubernatorial campaign of Mississippi native Stacey Abrams—sustained organizing and national investment made it into a perennial battleground.

In 2020, the state sent two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to the U.S. Senate and delivered its electoral votes to Joe Biden. Georgia subsequently became the epicenter of President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful effort to overturn that election, and this year is home to one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races as Ossoff seeks reelection.

Mississippi Democrats point to recent polling as evidence that Mississippi may be following that path.

An April survey by progressive polling firm Impact Research found Republican Hyde-Smith with 42 percent support, Colom at 39 percent and Pinkins at 6 percent, with 13 percent of voters undecided. The poll, conducted April 8-12, carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The survey also found just 33 percent of likely voters said they would definitely or probably vote to reelect Hyde-Smith, while 53 percent said they preferred someone else—an unusually weak reelection number for an incumbent in a state Republicans have comfortably carried for decades.

Those findings help explain why Rochester and national Democrats are increasingly talking about Mississippi in the same breath as the widely watched Georgia. The DSCC posted a graphic earlier this week highlighting Colom as a Democrat who could help the party retake control of the Senate this fall. The Mississippi Republican Party quickly seized on it as a fundraising opportunity.

It remains to been seen whether national Democratic dollars will flow into the state as a result. But so far, Mississippi Democrats are raising eyebrows with better-than-expected fundraising.

According to the latest federal campaign finance reports Democratic money is starting to show up in the state’s congressional races. District 1 U.S. House candidate Cliff Johnson cleared $500,000—an enormous jump from the recent baseline, and U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom has raised a record $1.6 million.

Image: U.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Delaware (via official Facebook page)

Gov. Tate Reeves appointed a DeSoto County circuit judge to the Mississippi Supreme Court on Monday, filling one of two vacancies in a northern district that a federal court has found dilutes Black voting strength.

Celeste Embrey Wilson will take the seat Aug. 1. The election that is intended to make the appointment permanent cannot be scheduled because the map that defines her district has been enjoined and the Mississippi Legislature has not yet drawn a new one.

Wilson replaces Robert Chamberlin, who left the court in December 2025 after the U.S. Senate confirmed him to a federal judgeship in northern Mississippi. Wilson has served as a circuit judge in DeSoto County since 2017, when Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her, and as a county judge before that. She worked as an assistant district attorney in the 17^th Judicial District, and Reeves, who has repeatedly named prosecutors to judicial vacancies, cited her prosecutorial and judicial experience. She is the second woman on the nine-member court. One vacancy remains, the seat James Maxwell left when he too joined the federal bench in December.

Both seats sit in District 3, the 33-county northern district that elects three of the court’s nine justices. That district is one of the three whose lines a federal court has ruled unlawful. In August 2025, U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock found that Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts, unchanged since 1987, dilute the strength of Black voters, and she barred the state from using the map in future elections. The suit, brought in 2022 by a group of Black voters and elected officials, argued the lines fracture the majority-Black Delta.

That ruling is what leaves Wilson’s seat without an election. Under state law, a gubernatorial appointee to the court serves until the next general election, when voters choose someone to finish the term, in this case through 2032. Aycock has said those special elections cannot proceed until the legislature adopts a new map, and that she will not decide which seats appear on the ballot until one exists. The legislature had the 2026 session to redraw the districts and produced no map. The case has since slowed further, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais raised the standard for proving a Voting Rights Act violation and sent the Mississippi case back to Aycock for more proceedings, with discovery running into the fall.

The appointment adds to a court that the litigation has left in flux. With Wilson seated, one District 3 seat remains vacant. The map that governs how all three District 3 justices reach the bench is unenforceable, and no election under it can be held. For now, the governor is the only route onto the seats. Reeves fills one by appointment while the path that runs through voters stays closed.

The appointment power has a particular history on this court. In her 2025 ruling, Aycock noted that only four Black justices have served on the Mississippi Supreme Court, that all four held the same Central District seat, and that each first reached the court by gubernatorial appointment rather than election. Mississippi is nearly 40 percent Black and has never had more than one Black justice on the court at a time. The plaintiffs’ aim in the case is a map that would give Black voters in the Delta a realistic chance to elect a justice of their choice. Until that map exists, the composition of the court is determined by the governor’s office—not the voters.

When, and under what lines, the voters of District 3 will have their say remains with a federal court in Aberdeen and a legislature that has yet to act.

Image: Celeste Wilson (via BallotReady)

A Mississippi taxi driver accused of exploiting and coercing immigrants released from an Adams County prison has operated the scheme for far longer than previously known—and, according to new information obtained by The Mississippi Independent, is among dozens of drivers profiting from a broader predatory taxi market in the state and in neighboring Louisiana.

Karen Hester, a longtime immigration activist who helps facilitate the release and transportation of immigrants from detention centers across the United States, said via email that she had used Otis Anderson’s Natchez-based taxi service for years to transport immigrants to airports in Mississippi and Louisiana.

“I have over the course of perhaps the last 5-6 years paid $325 plus for maybe 5-6 asylum seekers leaving Adams with Anderson taxi,” she told The Mississippi Independent, referring to the Adams County Correctional Center just outside Natchez, Mississippi. “I’ve always thought it was a racket as ICE should be transporting them,” she added, citing the agency’s gargantuan funding.

It turns out Anderson’s operation is not an isolated case.

Interviews with immigration advocates and lawyers, along with fare quotes obtained from Louisiana and Mississippi taxi companies listed in ICE documents, reveal that Anderson’s business is part of a broader system of apparently independent drivers who charge immigrants between $300 and $1,150 per person to reach airports and other transportation hubs after their release from detention.

Immigration advocates say the exploitative market has taken root amid ICE’s years-long failure to enforce federal detention standards requiring ICE officials and staff at privately operated facilities to transport detainees to local transportation hubs during operating hours. Instead, immigrants are routinely released from remote facilities with few practical ways to leave, creating a captive market for drivers able to demand exorbitant fares from people with little money, limited English and no knowledge of the area. Sometimes the drivers have well-connected spouses or partners on the inside.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations offering free transportation have been sidelined, advocacy groups say.

“We have always cared a lot about the taxi situation,” said Frances Kelley, Shreveport coordinator for the Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention, or LA-AID. “Because it was what was right in front of us, and what we were seeing, and we were hearing about people having to pay these exorbitant amounts of money.”

Kelley added: “There’s some kind of arrangement because the taxi drivers would get called and we wouldn’t.”

Rulebreakers

As The Mississippi Independent reported last month, Anderson was accused of threatening to have a recently released immigrant child returned to detention at the Adams County facility if he could not find a way to pay the $300 taxi fare to Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport. The child, Aurelio Cornejo Serrano, said two other immigrants were also charged $300 each for the same trip.

His uncle paid the fare, according to text messages between the uncle and Anderson that were shared with The Mississippi Independent and the Spanish-language newspaper El Molino Informativo. The cellphone number in the messages was confirmed as Anderson’s after he responded to texts from The Mississippi Independent.

What distinguishes Anderson from other drivers charging rates as much as three times a standard Uber fare is that his wife is employed by CoreCivic, the private company that operates the Adams County detention facility. Tameka Moore-Anderson works on the receiving and discharge team. One of the unit’s responsibilities is arranging and approving transportation for immigrants being released.

CoreCivic, like all private companies and government agencies operating immigration detention facilities, is legally required to follow a series of federal rules when preparing detainees for release. Those rules include allowing a detainee one free telephone call to “facilitate release arrangements,” according to the latest National Detention Standards, updated in June 2026. The standards also say that “when appropriate,” detainees are to be taken by facility staff to a transportation station while it is still open.

The exception applies when a public transportation hub is within one mile of the facility, in which case detainees are to be given an information sheet with directions and available transportation options, according to the standards. The Adams County detention facility, like almost every immigration detention center in Mississippi and Louisiana, is not located within one mile of public transportation, meaning transportation should be provided by the facility, per federal rules. The nearest town with transportation options is Natchez, 12 miles away.

Yet transportation is rarely provided and is unlikely to be in the future, advocacy groups say.

“If they’re not going to fix the things where people’s lives are at risk, they’re not going to fix this,” Kelley said, referring to a slew of other complaints made against ICE facilities, including disgusting, barbaric, negligent, abusive and unsafe conditions.

For years, nonprofit organizations and volunteers collaborated with staff at detention facilities to transport large groups of released detainees. LA-AID regularly collected people from facilities in Louisiana and from Adams County. The organization operated out of an abandoned church where immigrants could shower, eat, find clothing and receive advice. Those without money could sometimes receive help paying for a plane or bus ticket.

But after the White House ended discretionary releases in early 2025, the need for such a large transport operation dried up.

“They told me that they were not allowed to release people anymore,” Kelley said. “And then they obviously stopped asking me to receive people.”

For years, immigrant advocacy groups have argued that detention centers in Louisiana and Mississippi have failed to meet the Performance-Based National Detention Standards, even as government audits declared the facilities compliant.

LA-AID filed a civil rights complaint with the Office of Inspector General in 2021 regarding what it described as “blatant” violations at facilities across Louisiana and Mississippi. The complaint focused in particular on failures to allow detainees to contact family members and instances in which people were left waiting in detention-center lobbies or outside overnight without being able to contact anyone.

A response from the OIG said the agency had shared the letter with internal departments “for their consideration as they plan future oversight activities.”

Why free transportation disappeared

How the situation reached this point is wrapped up in a series of complex and overlapping legal interpretations.

Federal policy changes in 2025 sharply curtailed ICE’s use of discretionary release and barred immigration judges from granting bond to immigrants who entered the country without inspection, regardless of how long they had lived in the U.S. The Fifth Circuit, which governs federal courts in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, upheld that interpretation, although four other appellate courts rejected it and some warned that it raised serious due-process concerns. Immigrants in detention began to swell to record numbers, by design: In January 2025, the Trump administration established quotas to increase the number of arrests from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500, increasing the chances that non-criminals would be detained; the following June, that number was increased to 3,000 per day.

With no bond remedy available and a shortage of immigration judges under the Trump administration, detainees filed more than 63,000 habeas petitions in federal court, asking judges to determine whether their detention was lawful and, in some cases, to order a bond hearing or release. Nearly 650 such cases have been filed in Mississippi’s Southern District, though the court has not granted relief to any detainee or issued substantive decisions in more than a handful of cases.

Declining releases has meant far less demand for nonprofit organizations and volunteers to transport released detainees. Yet some people who do not fall under those rulings are still being released, which should, in theory, make it easier for ICE and the private companies operating the detention centers to provide transportation or contact nonprofit organizations to help.

Taxi list doesn’t add up

Instead, detainees awaiting release are given a list of suggested local taxi options. The ICE-approved list serves seven of Louisiana’s nine detention facilities and the Adams County facility in Mississippi.

The Mississippi Independent obtained a November 2022 version of the list from an attorney representing an immigrant released from the Adams County facility in October 2025. Of the 23 taxi companies on the 2022 list contacted by The Mississippi Independent, two were no longer operating as taxi services, two telephone numbers were disconnected, two companies said the trip was too far, one number belonged to a limousine driver and another connected to the main office of Monroe, Louisiana’s public bus service. The two numbers listed for local Adams County taxi services, which would presumably be the most convenient and least expensive, were either disconnected or did not belong to a taxi service.

Ten taxi services did not respond. Four reported offering quotes ranging from $300 to $1,150. The quotes included some combination of a taxi ride, hotel stay and flights from Baton Rouge to New York City, a destination selected at random. One driver quoted $650 for the taxi ride alone. All four responding drivers were based in Monroe or Alexandria, Louisiana, both about two hours from Adams County.

The detainee released in October 2025 was ultimately transported by Anderson, even though his taxi service does not appear on the 2022 ICE taxi list provided to the detainee’s attorney. The Mississippi Independent obtained a separate ICE taxi list, from November 2025, from LA-AID. Anderson’s taxi service was also absent from that list. What is odd about the omissions is that James Wynn, another Natchez taxi driver, told The Mississippi Independent that he had seen Anderson at the detention facility repeatedly over several years, loading groups of newly released immigrants into a passenger van.

An individual detainee, relative or attorney could have found Anderson’s services online, but it is hard to explain how groups of detainees—independently detained, with limited access to phones and internet—would all somehow locate the same unlisted driver and coordinate a shared pickup. Their relatives and attorneys, when they had them, would have been scattered across the country and generally would have had no way to coordinate with one another. These circumstances raise a fundamental question: Who was arranging for Anderson to collect large groups of detainees simultaneously?

The Mississippi Independent also found a 15-passenger van advertised for sale by Anderson on an Adams County Facebook listing page, alongside a smaller minivan, suggesting that his business was equipped to transport larger groups. The larger van had “Anderson Transportation Natchez” printed on the door. The Mississippi Independent asked Anderson and CoreCivic whether Anderson’s wife, a senior officer in the receiving and discharge unit, or any other employee at the facility, had referred released detainees to his service or arranged the group pickups. Anderson did not respond. CoreCivic said only that its employees provide released immigrants with information about local transportation but do not select or contract with private drivers.

“When our government partners direct that an individual is to be released directly from our facility, our staff provide these individuals with information regarding local transportation options to help them reach their preferred destination,” CoreCivc said in an emailed statement. “CoreCivic does not have any contracts with private transportation companies for this purpose, nor do we receive any financial benefit from such companies. Individuals are free to make their own transportation arrangements, including those arranged by their legal representatives.”

The company also pointed to its Human Rights Policy, which outlines its commitments regarding the rights and treatment of people held in its facilities.

Moore-Anderson did not respond to questions about whether she helps provide transportation information to detainees, whether she or discharge staff recommend Anderson’s service or whether she had disclosed her relationship with him to CoreCivic. The company did not answer questions about the safeguards it uses to identify potential conflicts of interest among employees involved in releases.

Complaints do not prompt changes

Hester said she and fellow immigration activist Pat Leach had complained about transportation practices at detention facilities in the past but saw little change.

“I am sure we all know we are being scammed but have no choice as the power is with Adams—the internment camps,” Leach said in an email to The Mississippi Independent.

Leach said he had encountered similar “extortion” practices in California, suggesting the problem extends beyond Louisiana and Mississippi. At the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, he said, drivers charged what he described as very expensive fares to people with few other options.

In another case, Leach said, a woman released at night from an ICE detention facility in California City refused to leave because no transportation was available.

“It is in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “She refused to leave the detention until mid-morning next day when her lawyer paid for an Uber to Los Angeles to her office.”

Questions remain about how transportation options are selected at Adams County, why advocates stopped receiving advance notice of releases and whether CoreCivic has adequately addressed the potential conflict created by a discharge officer’s husband repeatedly transporting people from the facility for hundreds of dollars per passenger.

For immigrants leaving detention, the opening of the facility doors may mark the end of their incarceration. But in remote parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, it does not necessarily mean they are free to leave.

Image by Mike Williams

This article has been updated with further details, including a map of the spray area.

People living in the vicinity of Arkabutla Lake are worried about a government plan to spray herbicides across 5,500 acres of the basin starting in August. Among their concerns are that aerial spraying of the chemicals will endanger public health, damage fish and wildlife and kill important native plants.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District, which operates Arkabutla and three other flood control reservoirs in north Mississippi, insists that there is no cause for concern. But many residents, including Harry Babb, a local naturalist and content creator who maintains the social media sites Habitat Harry, remain wary.

“It’s about our natural heritage,” Babb, the most visible objector to the herbicide spraying plan, told The Mississippi Independent. “I’m advocating for a better approach.”

Babb has been pushing for a different method to reduce intrusive vegetation in sections of lakebed exposed by a drawdown of water levels beginning in 2023. He said he has called elected officials from his county supervisor to his congressional representatives asking them to support reevaluating the plan but that, “Their response is, this is for flood mitigation and whatever we have to do, we have to do.”

Arkabutla Lake, completed in 1943 as part of a massive series of flood control projects in the Mississippi River basin, required damming the Coldwater River to retain floodwaters above the low-lying Delta and moving the entire town of Coldwater from within the impoundment area. The Corps of Engineers says the herbicide spraying is necessary to eradicate woody plant growth that followed a major drawdown of the lake’s water levels to repair its failing dam.

In the spring of 2023, a sinkhole and seepage were discovered in the dam and engineers concluded emergency repairs were needed at the outflow channel, the Corps reported. The agency’s warning to area residents that the dam was compromised by “potential breach conditions” prompted the Memphis office of the National Weather Service to issue a standing flash flood watch for parts of seven northwest Mississippi counties located downstream.

Work has since begun to stabilize the dam, though major construction, including of a new discharge outlet, is not expected to begin until 2030. The projected date for refilling the shrunken reservoir is 2035.

During ongoing repairs, water levels in the lake have been significantly lowered, exposing mud flats on which woody plants including black willow, water elm and button bush have taken root. The plants would not survive inundation once the lake refills, but the Corps says leaving them to die following a decade of growth would cause problems, including the potential for debris within the lake. The $340,000 spraying contract has been awarded to Provine Helicopter Service of Greenwood, Mississippi, with a start date around Aug. 1.

Following the announcement of the spraying project, local residents launched an online petition asking for revisions to the plan that has so far garnered almost 2,500 signatures, with the numbers growing significantly with each passing day. On July 21, a group calling itself Arkabutla Concerned Citizens posted an announcement on social media urging people to meet at the lake’s main entrance at 11 a.m. on Saturday, July 25, for a peaceful protest. The date coincides with the closing of public comments on the Corps’ draft environmental assessment of the dam repair project.

Babb said a more reasonable approach than the planned broadcast herbicide spraying would include mechanical removal of young trees or targeted applications of a less dangerous herbicide. “It’s hard to be careful with aerial application by helicopter,” he said. More targeted spraying or the establishment of a buffer zone would also reduce the potential for damaging or killing existing mature stands and seedlings of bald cypress trees around the lake’s perimeter, he said.

The Corps says it investigated alternatives including prescribed burning, mechanical removal and simply leaving the vegetation, but concluded that none of those options was viable. No further explanation was given for the rejection of less intrusive measures.

The selected plan calls for broadcasting the herbicides glyphosate (brand name Roundup) and imazapyr (Arsenal), which will kill all vegetation sprayed in the lake bed, not only target species. Glyphosate is a controversial pesticide with potential risks for humans and wildlife. Imazapyr can damage or kill mature trees and persist in soil for long periods. Both are approved by the EPA for aquatic application and both kill any plant they come into contact with.

According to this site, the greatest risk of aerial herbicide application is the potential for drift, which can carry pesticides miles from target areas. Drift is also sometimes a problem in farming areas like those that Arkabutla is designed to protect. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ecological assessment of glyphosate notes that it poses a “potential risk to terrestrial and aquatic plants, mammals, and birds, and low toxicity to honeybees for most uses.”

Under the Trump administration, the EPA has cast doubt upon the World Health Organization’s warning that glyphosate may cause cancer in humans, and last month, the Supreme Court sided with the manufacturer of Roundup in a ruling expected to block thousands of lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn people the product is potentially carcinogenic.

As for imazapyr, the EPA warns that it should not be applied to water “except as specified” on the label. Among the EPA’s warnings for the herbicide are that it should not be used on food crops, Christmas trees or within one-half mile upstream of an active potable water intake in flowing water, including a lake, pond or reservoir.

Most area residents are concerned about the impact of the herbicides on water quality and the potential for drift, Babb said.

Babb said he has enjoyed seeing the river basin return to a more natural ecosystem since the lake’s drawdown and would be pleased to see the Coldwater “rewilded,” though he concedes that is unlikely to happen. “I’m not advocating against a refill [of the lake] and I’m not opposed to using herbicides,” he said. What he is against is the indiscriminate poisoning of native species like buttonbush, hibiscus and, potentially, mature cypresses and overcup oaks. He suggested there should be a buffer zone to protect sensitive natural areas from the herbicide spraying.

Asked if there will be a buffer zone, Vicksburg District spokesperson Christi Kilroy said in an email that the spraying “will focus solely on areas of the lakebed between elevations of 206’ and 212’.” For comparison, the Corps reports that the lake’s pool elevations range from 189.3 feet near the bottom to 209.3 feet in what is called the conservation storage area, with additional areas inundated as needed that range up to an elevation of 256.3 feet. Those figures do not make clear whether the spray area would include the established forests that Babb has expressed concern about, though in one of his videos he reports that he is standing amid mature cypress trees at an elevation of 212 feet, which would place it within the spray zone.

Kilroy said the treatments will be limited to the exposed lakebed and, following publication of this article, sent a map of the targeted area:

Currently, the Corps maintains a target pool of 204 feet, though preliminary repairs including grouting in the foundation of the discharge outlet were recently paused to release water because the pool reached 220 feet, Kilroy said.

The exact timeline for the spraying will depend on weather and pool elevations, Kilroy said. Numerous posters on Habitat Harry social media pages have pointed out that regrowth is inevitable during such an extended period. Asked if the project will involve multiple sprayings, as plants regrow during the decade-long drawdown, Kilroy said only that the current contract is for one application. She was unable to cite other examples of water bodies in which the Corps has used such broadcast herbicide applications.

According to the Arkabutla project fact sheet, killing the vegetation is “a critical component of preparing the reservoir for future operations. If allowed to mature and remain in place as normal pool levels are eventually restored, the vegetation could interfere with the operation, storage, and long-term maintenance of the dam and reservoir.”

Though it was built primarily for flood control, Arkabutla, like the other three Corps lakes, has become popular for recreation. Some public sites have been closed due to the drawdown or the risk of a breach, but the Corps fact sheet notes that in conjunction with the spraying, “No widespread closures are anticipated. Campgrounds and recreation areas are expected to remain open, though visitors will likely see aircraft operating in the area.”

The fact sheet does not say how the agency or the aircraft operators will ensure that no one enters the spray zones during aerial herbicide applications.

Image: Harry Babb stands along part of the Arkabutla lake backwater (via Habitat Harry Instagram page); Arkabutla reservoir, July 22, 2025 (credit Erin Hern, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District)