Phillip Callais is suing Louisiana over its new congressional maps—not because they limit Black representation, but because they increase it. The state added a second majority-Black district, even though the Deep South has long had large Black populations but disproportionately low representation in Congress.

This case centers on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting laws or systems that result in racial discrimination—even if they don’t explicitly mention race. In plain terms: if maps make it harder for a racial group to elect candidates of their choice, that’s illegal.

If the Supreme Court sides with Callais, it could weaken those protections. That would likely mean fewer majority-Black districts—and less representation—not just in Louisiana, but across the South, including Mississippi. It could also affect local elections, from city councils to school boards.

Bottom line: this case could reshape voting rights nationwide. Representation—and who gets a voice—are on the line.

In the second installment of an ongoing collaboration, Mississippi policy guru Hannah Williams breaks down the case.

Click the image for the full video.

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Mississippi’s Second Congressional District runs from the outskirts of Memphis through the Delta to south of Natchez and touches the suburbs of Jackson. It hugs the Mississippi River and its fertile floodplain for more than 200 miles, encompassing all or part of 24 rural counties where the contrast of wealth and poverty seems frozen in time from the days when local plantations were worked by enslaved people and cotton was king. It is one of the poorest congressional districts in the nation. For more than 60 years, it has also been the place where Mississippi has argued with itself about what democracy means and who it serves.

Every serious fight over political representation in the state has been waged inside its boundaries—or over the shape of those boundaries themselves. Fannie Lou Hamer tried to unseat Jamie Whitten from it. Robert Clark lost it twice, then handed his research to the man who won it. Mike Espy broke through and held it for six years. Bennie Thompson has represented it since 1993. And now the United States Supreme Court is considering a case that could eliminate it altogether.

The district is the ground.

In the spring of 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer went before Secretary of State Heber Ladner to qualify as a candidate for Congress from the Second Congressional District. She was 47 years old and had been a registered voter for barely a year. Two years earlier she had been fired from the plantation where she had worked for 18 years—the same day she attempted to register. Ten days after that, 16 bullets were fired into the house where she was staying. She found it easier to qualify as a congressional candidate than it had been to pass the literacy test.

The district she was running in was 68 percent Black. Only six to eight percent of Black residents were registered. Jamie Whitten, the incumbent, chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture and had used that position to kill a bill that would have trained 2,400 tractor drivers—600 of them white. Hamer’s campaign directed itself at whites as well as Black people. Her thesis was that all Mississippians, white and Black alike, were victims of the all-white, one-party power structure, and that Whitten’s defense of that structure came at a cost even to the white people he claimed to represent. She told her audiences she was only saying what they had been thinking all along.

She gathered more than 300 signatures for her nominating petition, well above the legal requirement. County registrars refused to certify the names. She was blocked from the general election ballot and ran instead in the Freedom Election, where she received 33,009 votes to Whitten’s 49. The regular Mississippi Democratic Party went for Goldwater. The Freedom Democratic Party was the only organization in the state that supported Johnson and Humphrey.

A July 1964 radio report prepared weeks before the Atlantic City convention laid out the economics alongside the franchise numbers. Of 422,000 Black Mississippians of voting age, 28,000—6.6 percent—were registered, against 525,000 whites. Wages in Sunflower County ran $300 a year for a cropper and $150 for a laborer, lower than pre-revolutionary Cuba. Senator Eastland sat on the Judiciary Committee—the graveyard of civil rights bills—while Whitten killed nutrition and training programs from Appropriations. Cotton mechanization was transforming the Delta’s labor economy, and plantation owners like Eastland had no constructive response to the displacement it caused. The one-party system locked everyone into an arrangement that served the people at the top and failed everyone else. The Second District was a node in the national infrastructure of white supremacy, and that infrastructure impoverished white Mississippians alongside Black ones.

By 1972, the tactics had shifted but the logic remained. Hamer told a Chicago radio audience that she had been shuffled between the First and Second Congressional Districts depending on when Black voters achieved a registration majority. They moved her out when the numbers threatened white control and moved her back when the danger passed. The district was a weapon wielded against the people who lived in it.

On July 10, 1982, Robert Clark stood before 210 delegates at the Leflore County Civic Center in Greenwood and accepted the unanimous nomination of the Black political coalition to run for Congress in the Second District. He had entered the Mississippi Legislature 14 years earlier as the only Black representative in the body. He had chaired the House Education Committee, built the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, and authored the state’s landmark education reform legislation. David Jordan, president of the Greenwood Voters League and a viable candidate himself, stepped aside. Clark, Jordan said, was better known in the legislature and could draw more white votes.

Both men understood the math. The district’s total population was 52.8 percent Black, but only 44 percent of its voting-age population was Black, and whites still made up a majority of registered voters. The gap was the residue of decades of suppression. Victory required near-total Black mobilization and at least 12 percent of the white vote.

Clark framed his campaign in the language of coalition and shared economic interest. He proposed a regional council for rural development in the Mississippi Delta modeled on the Appalachian Regional Commission, pointing to the stark imbalance in federal investment between the Delta and neighboring regions. He committed himself to fighting for farmers—easing grain restrictions, extending federal emergency farm loans—while insisting the Delta could not survive on agriculture alone. He identified Reaganomics as the central threat to the district’s prospects, arguing that the administration’s policies were reversing years of incremental progress through rising unemployment, declining farm income, and cuts to social programs. These were issues that crossed racial lines.

Gov. William Winter endorsed Clark publicly, declaring that his election would lay to rest the claim that Mississippi still practiced racist politics. Sen. John Stennis endorsed him too. Ed Perry, Clark’s white colleague from Lafayette County, organized a fundraiser in Oxford and justified it plainly—white Democrats had been asking Black Democrats to vote for them for years, and now it was time for white folks to return the favor.

Webb Franklin, Clark’s Republican opponent, ran on a slogan that operated with layered precision. “He’s One of Us” signaled shared values on the surface. Underneath, the message was unmistakable. Franklin posed before a Confederate monument in television advertisements. His newspaper inserts paired his photograph as a district attorney with an image of Clark alongside references to George McGovern. On the courthouse steps in Vicksburg, a white roofer greeted Clark—”Hey boy, they been talkin’ bad about you hea”—then told a reporter he would never vote for a Black man.

Clark carried the district’s Black-majority counties as expected. White voters consolidated behind Franklin, and Black turnout fell short in roughly six counties. Franklin won by 2,914 votes. Clark had secured 12 percent of the white vote—the threshold that was supposed to guarantee victory—but Black participation had not met projections. The distance between possibility and power was 1.5 percentage points.

Two years later, Clark ran again. Every variable improved—better district lines, a stronger campaign, broader institutional endorsements. White crossover support dropped from 12 percent to seven. The margin widened to 4,358 votes. Clark had improved his operation and lost by more. The coalition required to win the Second District could not be assembled under the conditions Mississippi imposed on a Black candidate assembling it.

Ed Perry had crystallized the problem at a Washington fundraiser between the two races, praising Clark’s extraordinary qualifications—14 years in the legislature, chairmanship of a major committee, architect of education reform—and then adding a sober observation. “I think if Robert were white, there wouldn’t be a race.” Former Sen. James Eastland, still formidable in retirement, stated it without adornment. “It’s racial. Whites will vote for Franklin. Blacks will vote for Clark.”

In early 1985, Clark decided he would not run a third time. The personal cost had been enormous. He had nearly lost his family. The structural conclusion arrived alongside the personal one—white crossover had declined even as everything else got better—and he accepted both.

He stepped aside and stayed close. Clark passed his research to Mike Espy, a 32-year-old Yazoo City attorney who began organizing in November 1985. The research identified precincts where federal poll monitors had been absent during Clark’s races and mapped voting variations in locations with consistent patterns across election cycles. Espy studied Clark’s campaigns with the precision of an engineer reverse-engineering a failed prototype. Clark’s 1984 loss had come down to fewer than 10 votes per precinct across the district. That was the threshold Espy’s operation would have to clear.

Espy came from a family whose roots in the Delta’s institutional life ran deep. His grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Huddleston Sr., had founded the Afro-American Sons and Daughters—a fraternal organization with 35,000 members by the 1930s—and in 1928 established the Afro-American Hospital of Yazoo City, the first hospital for Black people in the state. The Espy family operated funeral homes across the Delta. Espy understood the district’s economy from the inside, and he ran on it.

His campaign stayed low-profile until mid-October—radio ads on Black stations, one organizer per precinct, no television exposure until a final debate less than a week before the election. He avoided a runoff because he knew his coalition could mobilize only once. The approach looked quiet from the outside. Underneath, it was intense. When Espy finally engaged Franklin on the issues, he went after him on farm policy, Social Security, and the congressman’s legislative record. Clark saw the agricultural argument as the blow that landed. White farmers had traveled to Washington to press Franklin on their concerns, and Franklin had dismissed them. That indifference, in a district where farming was survival, cost Franklin the margin he needed.

On Nov. 4, 1986, Espy defeated Franklin by 3,900 votes, carrying approximately 12 percent of the white vote—five points more than Clark had managed in 1984. Clark had endorsed Espy on radio two days before the election, invoking Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King and warning voters about Republican voter intimidation tactics. At his victory rally in Vicksburg, Espy said Mississippi had matured a little bit. He likened the Second Congressional District to a patchwork quilt, unified by shared values—faith, family and the aspiration for economic improvement.

In Congress, Espy reached out as much to the white landowners and agricultural businesses in the district as he did to the largely poor Black majority. He was accused at times of abandoning his core supporters, but others saw a coalition builder pursuing the nonracial politics needed to improve the state’s economy and unify Mississippi’s Democratic Party. He rarely got more than 20 percent of the white vote, but in a district defined by racial polarization, that alone represented ground that no one before him had held.

When Espy resigned in January 1993 to become Secretary of Agriculture, the special election to replace him drew eight candidates and compressed decades of political evolution into a single contest. Henry Espy ran on his brother’s coalition-building model. [Mayersville Mayor] Unita Blackwell represented the movement generation. James Meredith appeared as the lone-wolf integrationist. And Bennie Thompson—a Tougaloo graduate, former Bolton alderman and mayor, Hinds County supervisor since 1980, organizer of the state’s first association of Black mayors and its first association of Black county supervisors—represented the consolidation of institutional power built in the decades since the Voting Rights Act.

A white Delta newspaper columnist compared Thompson to David Duke and called his candidacy a dose of rat poison. A white businessman in Vicksburg hosted a fundraiser for Henry Espy in an antebellum mansion and described Thompson as “confrontational.” Thompson won the Democratic caucus in Greenwood with 87 percent of the delegate vote. In the April runoff, he defeated Republican Hayes Dent 71,701 to 58,544, powered by an 11,000-vote margin out of Hinds County—the mostly Black, urban section that had been added to the district two years earlier. Thompson told a crowd of about 600 that it was time for Democrats to unite. “We want to show Gov. [Kirk] Fordice and the Republicans that they are not the only folks in the 2nd Congressional District who can get together.”

He has held the seat for more than 30 years. The institutional infrastructure built in the years after the Voting Rights Act—the Black supervisors, the Black mayors, the network of county-level elected officials who turned organizing energy into governing authority—delivered the district to Thompson and kept it.

Now the Supreme Court may take it away.

Louisiana v. Callais, argued in October 2025, challenges the legal framework that has required states to draw majority-minority districts when voting is racially polarized and minority voters are sufficiently large and geographically compact to form a majority. The plaintiffs contend that states cannot intentionally draw voting districts to achieve a certain racial composition, even when done to remedy a demonstrated disadvantage. If the Court agrees, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—the provision that has undergirded decades of redistricting law—could be gutted.

In Mississippi, the consequences would be immediate and cascading. A federal judge found last year that the voting districts used to elect Mississippi Supreme Court justices illegally diminish Black voting power. The judge ordered the legislature to redraw one of the three districts. Powerful committee chairs in the statehouse are stalling, waiting to see whether Callais erases the legal obligation before they have to comply.

The fallout extends well beyond the state Supreme Court. Republicans could redraw the congressional map and eliminate the majority-Black Second District entirely—the district Hamer challenged Whitten in, Clark lost twice in, Espy broke through in, Thompson has represented for three decades. Mississippi, with a 35 percent Black population, could end up with all five of its House members white. A state whose poorest counties sit in the Delta—counties where Black and white residents share the same collapsing infrastructure, the same underfunded schools, the same hospital deserts—would lose the one congressional seat whose occupant has consistently made those conditions the center of the job.

Hamer understood in 1964 that Whitten’s grip on the Appropriations subcommittee hurt white farmers alongside Black sharecroppers. Clark ran on a Delta development commission that would have served every county in the district regardless of racial composition. Espy won because white farmers recognized that Franklin had failed them. The Second Congressional District has always been the place where the argument for shared democratic interest ran up against the fact of racial polarization—and where, over 60 years of organizing, litigation, defeat, and transfer, the argument sometimes won.

Fannie Lou Hamer told a Chicago audience in 1972 that she knew the ballot was powerful because they had done everything to keep her from getting it. The methods change and the logic holds. In 1964, it was literacy tests and registrars who refused to certify names. In 1982, it was “He’s One of Us” and a Confederate monument in a television ad. In 2026, it is a Supreme Court case with a bland procedural caption.

The Second Congressional District is the product of 60 years of organizing, litigation, defeat, transfer and victory. Every generation built on what the last one left. Hamer’s Freedom Elections proved the demand. Clark’s two losses built the infrastructure. Espy’s breakthrough proved the coalition. Thompson’s tenure proved the durability. The question before the Court is whether any of it was constitutionally required in the first place—whether the ground itself can be taken back.

Hamer answered that question in 1965, testifying under oath at the Stringer Grand Lodge on Lynch Street in Jackson. “For the first time in my 47 years,” she said, “I want to see if the Constitution means anything for Negroes or is it just a law for the white people.”

Sixty-one years later, the Delta is still waiting.

Image: Collage of Black political leaders in Mississippi (via “America is Mississippi”)

A joint resolution that would have automatically reverted Mississippi’s Senate maps to district lines that a federal court previously struck down for diluting Black voting strength died in the Senate Rules Committee after no committee member was willing to move it forward.

The two senators whose districts would have been eliminated say, however, that the effort is likely not over.

Joint Resolution 201, filed by Sen. Jeremy England (R-Vancleave), would have amended the 2025 remedial redistricting plan to include a trigger provision: If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Louisiana v. Callais that Louisiana’s congressional map violates the Constitution or is nonjusticiable, Mississippi’s current Senate districts would automatically revert to Joint Resolution 202 of the 2022 Regular Session—the maps a three-judge federal panel struck down for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 2022 maps did not include the majority-Black districts now held by state senators Johnny DuPree and Teresa Isom.

Senate Rules Committee Chair Dean Kirby (R-Pearl) told The Mississippi Independent that the resolution died for lack of a motion after it was introduced on Sunday.

“The bill was brought up before the committee and died due to the lack of a motion,” Kirby said. “I believe the committee had several legal questions about the resolution.” Kirby added that the meeting was well attended by the press and other senators.

In addition to Kirby, members of the Senate Rules Committee are Vice Chair J. Walter Michel (R-Jackson); Dennis DeBar Jr. (R-Leakesville); Hillman Terome Frazier (D-Jackson); and Neil S. Whaley (R-Potts Camp).

England, who authored the resolution, did not respond to a request for comment.

Sen. Johnny DuPree (D-Hattiesburg), who won Senate District 45 with 71 percent of the vote in last fall’s court-ordered special elections, said he learned of the resolution when a reporter approached him at the Capitol. Asked if he was shocked, DuPree told The Mississippi Independent, “Yes and no. It’s been par for the course.”

DuPree called the resolution preemptive—an attempt to undo lawfully created districts before the Supreme Court has even ruled. “You don’t preemptively go and do something,” he said. “It’s, like, in hopes of it happening.” He acknowledged the resolution would put his district at risk but pushed back on the idea that it would automatically remove him from office, noting that a ruling on Louisiana’s congressional plan would not automatically apply to Mississippi’s legislative maps. “There had to be some litigation to prove that that Louisiana law applies to Mississippi,” DuPree said. Still, he conceded, the resolution “puts us at risk of having to go back to the old ’22 redistricting” and “gives them an avenue and an argument.”

Asked whether he expects another attempt, DuPree did not hesitate. “Sure. Why would I not?” he said. “This is not a session thing. This is a historical thing.” He added that the resolution could resurface in another bill before the session ends. “They seem to do things in the dark at night,” he said. “And I don’t think that’s going to stop because this one didn’t [pass].”

Sen. Teresa Isom (D-Southaven), who won Senate District 2 with 63 percent of the vote, said she learned of the resolution about an hour before it was killed. “I was very disappointed that this resolution was presented,” Isom told The Mississippi Independent, adding that she was “glad that the Senate committee members killed it before it was presented on the floor.” Isom said Senate leadership has declined to comment to her directly on the resolution.

DuPree’s and Isom’s victories in November broke the Republican supermajority in the Senate for the first time since 2019, reducing GOP seats from 36 to 34 in the 52-member chamber. Both of the new senators were sworn into office on Jan. 6, 2026.

Louisiana v. Callais was reargued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 15, 2025, and the court is widely expected to limit or eliminate Section 2’s application to redistricting. The State of Mississippi has separately appealed the three-judge panel’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

Under the Mississippi Constitution, legislative redistricting is accomplished by joint resolution and is not subject to the governor’s veto. The constitution permits redrawing state legislative lines at any time mid-decade. The 2026 session does not end until April 5.

Image: State Sen. Jeremy England (via Mississippi State Senate)

A Republican state senator filed a resolution that would rescind the election of two Black state senators if the Supreme Court guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The move, which failed in committee, illustrates how the pending Supreme Court decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case could be used to disempower minority voters.

Sen. Jeremy England, a Republican from Vancleave, filed a joint resolution Sunday that would have automatically reverted Mississippi’s Senate district maps to the lines a federal court already ruled violated the Voting Rights Act—eliminating the districts held by senators Johnny DuPree and Teresa Isom—if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the VRA in Callais.

Joint Resolution 201, which was killed in the Rules Committee the day it was filed, proposed to amend the 2025 remedial redistricting plan that a three-judge federal panel ordered after finding that the Mississippi Legislature’s 2022 maps diluted Black voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the VRA.

Video: What dismantling of Voting Rights Act could mean for you

The resolution reproduced the full text of the current court-ordered maps but added a single trigger provision at the end: If the Supreme Court issues a final decision in Callais holding that Louisiana’s congressional redistricting plan “violates the U.S. Constitution or is nonjusticiable,” then the current state Senate districts “shall be superseded” by Joint Resolution 202 of the 2022 Regular Session—the maps the court struck down.

The 2022 maps did not include the majority-Black districts in DeSoto County and the Pine Belt that DuPree and Isom now represent. Reverting to those maps would eliminate Senate District 2, won by Isom with 63 percent of the vote in DeSoto and Tunica counties, and Senate District 45, won by DuPree with 71 percent in Forrest and Lamar counties. Those victories broke the Republican supermajority in the Senate for the first time since 2019. Both senators were sworn into office on Jan. 6, 2026, less than three months ago.

Callais was reargued before the Supreme Court on October 15 and a final ruling is widely expected to limit or eliminate Section 2’s application to redistricting. The Court’s August 2025 supplemental briefing order asked parties to address whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Mississippi has separately appealed the three-judge panel’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

England’s resolution was the first legislative action to explicitly tie Mississippi’s redistricting to the outcome of Callais. Under the Mississippi Constitution, legislative redistricting is accomplished by joint resolution and is not subject to the governor’s veto. The constitution also permits redrawing state legislative lines at any time mid-decade. That the resolution was killed in Rules does not preclude the effort from being revived in the remaining days of the 2026 session, a special session, or the 2027 session that coincides with statewide elections.

On election night last November, the Mississippi Republican Party called the court-ordered districts the product of “a misapplied federal statute that has been weaponized by interest groups.”

This is a developing story that we will update with comments as we get them.

Image: State Sens. Johnny DuPree and Teresa Isom (via Facebook)

Mississippi legislators worked through Sunday evening on March 29, 2026, to adopt the bulk of a roughly $7.4 billion state budget for Fiscal Year 2027, advancing dozens of appropriations conference reports ahead of today’s deadline for final adoption and averting a repeat of last year’s budget collapse.

The Senate reconvened Sunday afternoon and unanimously approved funding for a $2,000 teacher pay raise—the first salary increase for K-12 educators since 2022—as part of an education appropriation expected to total approximately $3.4 billion.

Both chambers also approved $1.17 billion for the Mississippi Division of Medicaid, which had warned lawmakers for months that the exhaustion of federal COVID-19 relief funds left the agency facing a funding cliff without a significant increase in state dollars.

The budget work came during what is typically described as “conference weekend,” the annual stretch of late-session negotiations when House and Senate conferees reconcile competing versions of the appropriations bills that comprise the state budget.

Conference reports on appropriation and revenue bills were due by Saturday at 8 p.m., with March 30 set as the deadline for final adoption. The regular session is scheduled to adjourn by April 5.

Smaller teacher pay raise than either chamber initially proposed

The $2,000 teacher pay raise represents a significant retreat from the ambitions both chambers expressed earlier in the session. The House had proposed a $5,000 immediate increase, with an additional $3,000 for special education teachers. The Senate countered with a $6,000 raise phased in over three years at $2,000 annually. Each chamber killed the other’s proposal before reviving its own through procedural maneuvers—a pattern that has defined the 2026 session. The final compromise settled at $2,000, with competing budget demands, including the Medicaid appropriation, cited as the constraining factor.

The outcome disappointed educators. Mississippi teachers are the lowest paid in the nation on average, and the Mississippi Department of Education has reported rising teacher vacancies statewide. The last meaningful raise, approximately $5,100 in 2022, was quickly offset by inflation and health insurance premium increases.

Special education teachers, assistant teachers, speech therapists, and school psychologists will receive the same $2,000 increase. Special education teachers will receive an additional $2,000 supplement, totaling $4,000. School attendance officers will receive a $5,000 raise, with funding for nine additional positions to bring the ratio to one officer per 4,000 students statewide.

Medicaid drove the budget math

The Medicaid appropriation was among the more closely watched line items of the session. The Division of Medicaid’s own January budget presentation to the Senate Appropriations Committee put its FY 2027 state support request at $1.36 billion—roughly $390 million more than its current-year appropriation—after exhausting a reserve of pandemic-era federal dollars that had cushioned the agency’s budget in recent years. The governor’s office proposed a lower figure of approximately $969 million, close to last year’s appropriation, while the Senate initially proposed $1.07 billion. The $1.17 billion figure approved by both chambers Sunday represents a substantial increase but still falls short of what agency officials said they needed.

Senate Appropriations Chair Briggs Hopson had called Medicaid the session’s biggest wildcard. Federal Medicaid law does not allow states to negotiate the prices of services, leaving the legislature to estimate costs that fluctuate with enrollment and utilization. The agency’s enrollment peaked at 904,000 during the pandemic before falling to approximately 697,000 by December 2025 as post-pandemic redeterminations took effect.

Avoiding last year’s failure

The Sunday votes marked a departure from the dysfunction that has plagued budget-setting in Jackson for three consecutive years. In 2025, the House and Senate could not agree on a budget during the regular session, forcing Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session that cost taxpayers an estimated $100,000 per day. House Speaker Jason White had refused to participate in “conference weekend” last year in protest of what he described as a broken process. This year, appropriations leaders signaled optimism earlier in the week that the two chambers were negotiating in good faith, and WLBT reported that behind-the-scenes discussions on teacher pay and PERS had been ongoing even as bills appeared stalled on the calendar.

The FY 2027 budget of approximately $7.4 billion represents a slight increase from the $7.3 billion enacted for FY 2026. The Joint Legislative Budget Committee’s initial recommendation had left $449.7 million in General Fund dollars available for appropriation beyond the committee’s baseline spending plan. The state had entered the session with approximately $1.5 billion in cash reserves plus another $700 million in the rainy day fund, though legislative leaders have warned against increasing recurring spending as the flow of federal pandemic dollars dries up.

What remains

Several major policy items were still being negotiated or had died by Sunday evening. Efforts to address the Public Employees’ Retirement System’s $26.5 billion unfunded liability stalled after the House and Senate failed to agree on a funding mechanism. The Senate had proposed a $500 million cash infusion followed by $50 million annually for a decade. The House pushed for a dedicated recurring revenue stream, including a proposal to legalize online sports betting and earmark the proceeds for PERS. The legislature did create a new fifth tier in the retirement system for state employees hired on or after March 1, 2026, with reduced defined benefits and no cost-of-living adjustment.

House Speaker White’s signature priority—expanding school choice to allow public dollars to flow to private schools—was killed by the Senate Education Committee on the first day that it was eligible for a vote. Reeves, who had championed the effort, saw school choice stall amid uncertainty about whether it might resurface in a potential special session.

The Mississippi Legislature still faces deadlines this week on general bills and constitutional amendments before the session’s scheduled close on April 5.

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

Mississippi’s capital city has been added to the list of thousands of planned peaceful protests across the United States focused on the Trump administration’s unconstitutional or illegal actions and overreach of executive power, including by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency.

The events are part of the fifth national No Kings protests and the first focused on the killings by ICE agents of Renée Good, Keith Porter and Alex Pretti. Previous nationwide No Kings Protests were held in February, April, June and October 2025.

In Jackson, the protest is scheduled from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Museum Hiking Trail bridge on Riverside Drive. Also taking place on Saturday, March 28 is the city’s St. Paddy’s Day parade, which starts at noon.

The June 2025 No Kings protests were among the largest single-day protests in U.S. history, with an estimated five million people participating in more than 2,100 cities and towns, including Gulfport and Jackson, Mississippi. The October protests were even larger, with some estimates going as high as seven million. As part of those demonstrations, Mississippi protests were staged in Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Hernando, Jackson, Kosciusko, Oxford, Starkville and Tupelo.

This site identifies cities with protests planned for March 28, 2026. Among the Mississippi locations where protests have been announced are Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Jackson, Olive Branch, Oxford, Starkville and Tupelo (details in linked sites).

A majority of Mississippi Delta counties contain cancer clusters linked to the high use of controversial herbicides, according to two recently published reports, which place one of the nation’s most agriculturally productive regions at the center of a renewed national fight over the safety of the chemical glyphosate.

The studies focus on 500 U.S. counties that use large volumes of pesticides and have accessible cancer data, including 11 Delta counties in the fertile northwestern section of Mississippi. Of the latter, 10 counties recorded above-average rates of cancer compared to the national average, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Of particular note are Coahoma and Tallahatchie counties, both among the nation’s top 20 percent of glyphosate users, and which had above-average rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to a March study by Food & Water Watch, a California-based environmental advocacy group.

Quitman County had the second-highest overall cancer rate among the counties analyzed in a February study by Investigate Midwest, an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in Champaign, Illinois.

The glyphosate saga

The findings arrive more than a decade after glyphosate, the chemical used in popular weed-killing products including Bayer’s RoundUp, came into question as a result of an International Agency for Research on Cancer landmark study that concluded the chemical was “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The study became the basis for multi-billion-dollar lawsuits, now comprising about 130,000 claims, and a wave of academic studies that alternately supported or refuted the harms.

Glyphosate is by far the most widely used ingredient in pesticides nationwide, according to federal data. Bayer bought Monsanto, the manufacturer of RoundUp, for $63 billion in 2018.

The herbicide is used primarily to kill weeds and is in widespread use, particularly on large farms and on genetically engineered crops such as soybeans, corn, cotton, canola and sugar beets that are bred to survive herbicide application. The USDA notes that more than 90 percent of U.S. acres planted in those crops use genetically engineered varieties, including in Mississippi.

Despite the swell of research contending that glyphosate causes harm to humans, the fight over its past and future is far from settled, with support for the chemical now coming directly from the Trump administration. The White House has used the president’s sweeping executive powers to help shield manufacturers from current and future lawsuits while pressuring the Supreme Court to rule favorably a case that would eliminate thousands of civil cases at the state level.

As these legal battles play out, Bayer’s army of big-spending corporate lobbyists has also sought to create obstacles to litigation at the state level, part of what Alabama-based lawyer Rhon Jones describes as a broad, coordinated campaign to influence the narrative around glyphosate that goes far beyond politics.

“There is a multi-level strategy in the courtrooms, in legislation, in academia and in research for Bayer Monsanto to promote their point of view,” Jones told The Mississippi Independent.

Jones heads the Beasley Allen law firm’s toxic torts section and has recovered billions of dollars for states and private clients related to the BP oil spill and ongoing opioid cases, among others.

Bayer’s influence is substantial, including in Washington D.C. The company donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund in late 2024, per FEC filings, and in 2024 and 2025 tapped more than 100 lobbyists, spending in excess of $17 million, according to Open Secrets. The company hired the well-connected lobbying firm Ballard Partners, which has deep ties to the Trump administration, having previously employed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi for six years and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles for more than a decade. The company’s founder and president, Brian Ballard, raised more than $50 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to the New York Times.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the president in mid-February signed an executive order declaring glyphosate “critical to national defense and security,” effectively granting liability protection to individuals and companies involved in those efforts.

The executive order came one day after Bayer offered to pay more than $7 billion in compensation to tens of thousands of plaintiffs who claim the company’s glyphosate-based weed killer caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, allegedly the most common cancer related to glyphosate.

Bayer, which has never admitted that its glyphosate-based products are dangerous, paid out more than $11 billion in 2020 to settle similar claims. If ongoing legal and legislative actions go its way, the company may never have to pay out compensation again.

In recent weeks, the White House has urged the Supreme Court to rule in Bayer’s favor in a case that could affect current and future state-court claims against the company. The Supreme Court case will determine whether Bayer can be sued under state law for failing to warn that RoundUp can cause cancer, or whether federal pesticide law and the EPA’s previous approval of its warning label shield the company from those claims. If Bayer wins, it could create significant barriers to pending state-court claims against it and prevent future claims from being filed. Supreme Court arguments are set for April 27, 2026.

Attempts to create “shield laws” for glyphosate manufacturers, including Bayer, were underway in a dozen state legislatures in 2025. Mississippi lawmakers, alongside those in nine other states, rejected bills that would have granted liability protections to pesticide manufacturers and effectively deny legal recourse for farmers and other claimants who believed glyphosate made them sick, according to Food & Water Watch. Georgia and North Dakota were the exceptions, according to state documents.

At the federal level, the latest version of the Farm Bill, approved by the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture on March 5, includes language that would end state authority to regulate pesticides that the federal government has not regulated, even if those pesticides contain carcinogens.

Legislative and legal support for Bayer and glyphosate have also caused ideological tension within the broader Trump coalition, exposing divisions between the White House’s policy agenda and the GOP’s newer, health-focused wing associated with the Make America Healthy Again movement, also known as MAHA.

How does Mississippi factor in?

The flashpoint over glyphosate comes during a period of heightened concern over Mississippi’s farmers and the state’s overall agriculture industry, as tariffs, inflation, strained relations with major soybean importer China, the stalled farm bill, high fuel costs resulting from the war in Iran, and the GOP’s interventions in the Bayer litigation have converged into a national struggle over whom the government ought to protect: farmers, consumers or chemical manufacturers.

Mississippi’s Republican U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who sits on the Senate Committee on Agriculture, did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent about whether she plans to support legislation granting pesticide manufacturers protection from liability.

Fellow Republican U.S. Rep. Trent Kelly, who sits on the House Commission on Agriculture, likewise did not respond to questions about the liability protections in the Farm Bill or the discussions that led to their inclusion.

Several members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation received large sums from multiple agricultural business Political Action Committees during the most recent election cycle, according to Open Secrets. Kelly received $154,000; Hyde-Smith brought in $41,500; Democrat U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson raised $106,500; and Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker took in more than $185,000.

As these political and legal developments play out in the nation’s capitol, the data from the two new cancer reports provide a stark reminder of how detached the political maneuvering and high-stakes lobbying can be from the fields of the places like the Mississippi Delta.

The Food & Water Watch report found that the Delta’s Sunflower and Washington counties apply the most glyphosate per agricultural acre of any counties in the United States. Neither has particularly high rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but both have some of the higher cancer rates in the nation, alongside Tunica, Humphreys, Leflore and Sharkey counties, according to the Midwest Investigates data.

Bolivar County stood out as an exception, with below-average rates of both cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the two respective studies.

Future data analysis will be more difficult to undertake because the USDA recently ended a rule requiring farmers to record their pesticide use.

Jones, of the Beasley Allen law firm, said his office does not use geographical maps to assess new claims, but prefers to examine clients’ exposure history to glyphosate and/or RoundUp.

Focusing on geographical maps “may be something we’ll look at,” Jones said. “Either way, I’m of the opinion that glyphosate, as it’s used in Roundup, is not a good idea. I do think it’s dangerous for people who have been exposed.”

Both of the new reports showed cancer clusters stretching across the nation’s main agricultural corridors, particularly in the Midwest, with pockets in the northeast, Florida, California and the Pacific Northwest.

Scientific deadlock

Whether glyphosate causes cancer remains one of the more bitterly disputed questions in agricultural science.

“The acute toxicity of glyphosate is lower than that of aspirin,” argues Stephen Duke, a principal scientist at the University of Mississippi who specializes in the biological effects of glyphosate on vegetation. Duke told The Mississippi Independent that he has keenly followed the scientific travails of the chemical over decades. “There are a vast number of things you could correlate to cancer statistics, especially in agricultural areas of poor states like Mississippi.” He added: “I’m not saying there’s not a causal relationship between glyphosate and cancer, but Mississippi suffered from extreme health issues long before glyphosate was widely used.”

A February 2026 paper on glyphosate-resistant crops and weeds in which Duke was a coauthor noted that among the list of items and activities classed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as “probably carcinogenic to humans” are art glass, indoor emissions from combusting wood or frying food, night-shift work, consumption of red meat or hot beverages, talc, and cobalt metal.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reaffirmed in May 2025 that it does not believe glyphosate causes cancer, a position the agency has held for years. Yet independent researchers have continued to find signals of risk. A 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which reviewed decades of research, found a modest association between glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, including one study that reported a 41 percent higher risk among the more heavily exposed, though multiple studies found no statistically significant link.

That scientific divide adds context to the two recent analyses, both of which show significant correlations between where pesticides are sprayed and where cancer cases occur. The studies do not prove that pesticides caused any individual illness, and both compare pesticide use in 2022 with older multi-year cancer data.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, for example, can take anywhere from two to 20 years to develop after exposure to a carcinogen, according to a 9/11 study regarding latency periods. As Duke inferred, genetics, lifestyle and other environmental exposures can muddy the picture of what exactly causes cancer.

One of the main papers used in court to challenge glyphosate’s dangers was withdrawn at the end of 2025 after it was discovered that its three authors had received financial compensation from Monsanto (now Bayer).

The Mississippi Independent reached out to several Mississippi-based scientists to add context on how potential links between glyphosate and cancer play out in the state.

Mississippi State’s provost, David Shaw, an expert in weed science, did not respond to questions about glyphosate health risks or accusations published by the New York Times in 2015 that he was asked by Monsanto and another chemical company to persuade the USDA to approve new products by writing supportive letters and authoring complementary articles.

Shaw received significant financial support from Monsanto and Dow Chemicals, including an $880,000 research grant, additional funds and unrestricted gifts for himself and multiple faculty members--support he was reminded of when Monsanto sought his assistance, according to emails published in the New York Times article.

Mississippi State University professor Matthew Ross, who helped author the IARC study, declined to be interviewed by The Mississippi Independent.

Whether glyphosate is ultimately proved to be a major driver of cancer may take years of further research, if it can be proved at all. But in the Mississippi Delta, where pesticides are central to the state’s abundant yet increasingly strained farm economy, these studies suggest—though they do not prove—that the people who live and work there could be paying a grave cost that is only now coming into view.

Image: Field application of herbicides (via Mississippi State University Extension Service)

Mississippi’s capital city could soon face interrupted commercial air travel as a protracted federal funding impasse in Washington, D.C., continues to strain airport security operations across the country.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats are into the sixth week of tense negotiations over how to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and travelers at many large airports are waiting as long as four hours to pass through airport security. Some small hub airports, meanwhile, could be forced to close down air travel altogether due to a lack of Transportation Security Administration agents, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said last week.

“You’re going to see small airports, I believe, shut down,” Duffy said during an interview with CNBC.

Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, Mississippi’s busiest airport, is among the Federal Aviation Administration’s list of 74 small hub airports, a classification based on annual passenger boardings. Staff at Jackson-Medgar screened about 630,000 passengers in 2025, according to Federal Aviation Administration records. By comparison, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport boarded more than 50 million passengers that year.

Although relatively small, Jackson is a central hub for business and government travel in Mississippi, with more than $2 billion in annual economic impact in 2025, according to the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority. Officials from JMAA did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent about contingency plans should the airport be forced to temporarily close.

The pressure stems from a partial shutdown of DHS, which oversees the TSA. Airport screeners are classified as essential workers and required to report for duty during shutdowns, but they, along with other DHS employees, are expected to work without pay during funding lapses. Historically, that has led to increased absences as employees seek temporary work elsewhere to cover expenses.

Approximately 3,400 TSA agents, representing 12 percent of the entire workforce, did not show up to work on Sunday, according to CBS News.

At the large airport nearest to Jackson, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, 42.3 percent of TSA staff were absent on Sunday, and at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, 41.5 percent of staff called out, according to BBC reports.

In recent days, federal officials have begun implementing contingency plans, including temporarily suspending some services at smaller airports and deploying hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to augment security operations at 14 airports across the United States.

The standoff in the nation’s capital reflects a broader political deadlock. Congressional Republicans have pushed to fully fund DHS, while Democrats have sought to use their narrow margins in the Senate to impose limits on immigration enforcement activities carried out by ICE, stemming from the controversial killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota and the agency’s perceived reckless and lawless behavior during the past year.

The dispute has been complicated further by the president, who has urged Republican lawmakers to reject interim deals unless they include additional policy priorities, specifically the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.

The Save America Act is framed as a way to prevent noncitizen voting, though that is already illegal. Critics argue the bill is a ploy to disenfranchise eligible voters ahead of November’s midterm elections, in which Republicans are projected by most polls to lose seats. Injecting brazen politics into the effort, President Donald Trump has said he sees the act as a way to ensure Republicans retain congressional control in the midterm elections.

One of Mississippi’s two U.S. senators, Cindy Hyde-Smith, released a Facebook video on Monday blaming Democrats for the continued shutdown. “They won’t budge,” Hyde-Smith said. “They are not serious. They are not engaged. They just continue to play political games as usual.” She added: “Meanwhile, real Americans are paying the price. TSA agents, border patrol agents, Coast Guard men and women, hardworking public servants who show up every day to keep this country safe are doing it without their paychecks.”

U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told Fox News on Monday that a bipartisan proposal to restore funding for airport security operations had been negotiated but was ultimately abandoned after Trump refused to support it.

“It would have worked,” Kennedy said. “We could have had TSA paid by the end of the week. But the president said no deal.”

Both Kennedy and Hyde-Smith sit on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees homeland security funding. Hyde-Smith did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent about the potential closure of the Jackson airport or her views on the president’s rejection of a deal to pay TSA employees.

Despite Trump’s refusal to support the act unless it advances broader Republican policy priorities, there could be a resolution this week. A bipartisan proposal presented on March 24, 2026, would restore funding to most of DHS but exclude funding for the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants, according to multiple media reports. Republicans are expected to pursue ICE funding through the budget reconciliation process, which does not require Democratic votes.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said discussions between Republican leadership and Trump have been “very positive and productive,” according to AP. However, Trump is reportedly still not content with the deal.

Some smaller airports avoid funding vulnerabilities by participating in the federal Screening Partnership Program, which allows private contractors to handle passenger screening under TSA oversight. Tupelo Regional Airport is among those that have opted into the federal screening program. Jackson relies entirely on federal screeners, making it more directly exposed to the current funding lapse.

Image: Unidentified TSA screener and a traveler at Jackson airport (via Jackson Municipal Airport Authority)

From staff reports

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center condemned the passage of the SHIELD Act, which creates new voting restrictions, on March 24, 2026—the same day the nonprofit announced that it had filed suit against the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office and the Mississippi Department of Public Safety for not providing documents related to inmate deaths in the Hinds County jail.

Both the SPLC and the ACLU lambasted SB 2588, the Safeguard Honesty Integrity in Elections for Lasting Democracy Act, a Republican-backed bill that will require all new voter registration applicants to be checked against a federal immigration database and that critics say will erect new barriers to voting in a state with one of the most contested voting rights histories in the nation. The bill now heads to Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature.

According to the SPLC, the law will “disenfranchise more than a million Mississippians despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Mississippi elections. Once implemented on July 1, 2026, voters, many of whom have voted legally for decades, will face unnecessary barriers.”

The SHIELD Act is among multiple Republican Party efforts to impose new voting requirements in the name of reducing fraud, although there is no evidence that widespread voter fraud takes place.

The Trump administration is pushing congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a photo ID when casting a ballot. The president has said he sees the act as a way to ensure Republicans retain congressional control in the midterm elections.

The U.S. Supreme Court is meanwhile poised to rule on a case that would gut the Voting Rights Act.

The SPLC noted that an estimated 647,000 female citizens have a last name that does not match their birth certificate and only 20.6 percent of Mississippians have a passport, making the state the lowest ranked for people with passports. Passports or birth certificates are required to prove citizenship when registering to vote. A complicating factor is that many women have a different married name than the surname on their earlier IDs.

“Similarly to the SAVE Act at the federal level, the Mississippi SHIELD Act is attempting to hand-pick who will vote in this year’s midterms and future elections,” SPLC Mississippi policy director Sonya Williams Barnes said in a news release. “This will restrict many eligible voters who do not have a passport or original birth certificate such as seniors, those that are disabled and married women whose last name does not match their birth certificate from casting a ballot in future elections.”

The SHIELD Act will also require Mississippi to run its voter registration records through “a notoriously error-ridden federal database, which will almost certainly lead to Mississippi voters wrongfully flagged as noncitizens,” the SPLC release notes. The state will be required to notify flagged registrants and demand proof of citizenship. Failure to present that documentation would mean removal from the rolls. Obtaining a birth certificate can cost $25 or more and a passport $165.

According to Williams Barnes, “Asking voters to take additional and unnecessary steps to vote will place undue burdens on voters, who already have the legal right to vote. In Mississippi, rural voters may have to drive hours round trip to reach the office where they can obtain official records. For people living on fixed incomes, cost matters. We need state legislators to serve the public good, rather than their own self-interest. Protecting election integrity shouldn’t come at the expense of limiting access for eligible voters.

The legislation was authored by State Sen. Jeremy England, a Republican who chairs the Senate Elections Committee, and was later amended by State Rep. Noah Sanford, the Republican chair of the House Apportionment and Elections Committee. The House passed its version of the bill by a vote of 80 to 38, with Democrats in both chambers voting largely against it.

Under the bill, voter registrations are entered into the Statewide Elections Management System and compared against the Department of Public Safety driver’s license and identification database. If that comparison raises a question about an applicant’s citizenship, their information is then run through the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — the SAVE database. If flagged, applicants must provide proof of citizenship within a specified timeframe, or their registration is marked “PENDING” and eventually “REJECTED” if they fail to respond or produce documentation after casting an affidavit ballot. The bill takes effect July 1, 2026.

England defended the measure in floor debate and said it was not meant to disenfranchise voters. He said, “If we find that there’s unintended consequences, we can always come back and change it.”

State Sen. David Blount, a Democrat who opposed the bill, noted during Senate floor debate that a review by the Secretary of State’s office of Mississippi’s 1.7 million registered voters produced just 15 people with suspect citizenship status—and that some of those were mistakenly flagged. “I’m not aware of any case brought by any prosecutor in Mississippi for non-citizen voting,” Blount told the Senate. “I hear again and again this statement, ‘Well, just one vote’s too many.’ Well, I agree with that, but I also believe purging one person who shouldn’t be purged—that’s too many.”

The ACLU of Mississippi condemned the bill’s passage and warned that its effects would fall hardest on voters who are fully eligible to cast a ballot.

“S.B. 2588 requires new voter registration applicants in Mississippi to be checked against the federal SAVE database, a system notorious for returning incomplete data,” ACLU executive director Jarvis Dortch told The Mississippi Independent. “The reliance on SAVE, a system not originally designed for voter eligibility verification, raises risks of false matches, administrative burden on local registrars, and potential delays or barriers for eligible voters, particularly naturalized citizens or individuals with incomplete records.”

Dortch said an amendment added late in the legislative process reaches beyond applicants with documentation problems to include a much broader population. The bill now requires registrars to treat applicants with missing driver’s license information not merely as incomplete files but as potential noncitizens subject to SAVE verification—a distinction that matters in a state where a form of ID—but not necessarily a driver’s license—is required to vote and where federal law expressly permits registration using only the last four digits of a Social Security number.

“Using the state’s driver’s license database to trigger a citizenship check is likely to sweep in a very large number of voters—potentially any voter who supplied the last four digits of their Social Security number when registering to vote—and potentially block them from registering and successfully casting a regular ballot,” Dortch said.

The ACLU also argues the bill violates federal law. The National Voter Registration Act limits the information that can be required on the federal voter registration form to the minimum necessary to assess eligibility, and does not require documentary proof of citizenship. Because SB 2588 contains no exception for voters using the federal form created by the Election Assistance Commission, Dortch said the bill “likely violates the National Voter Registration Act.”

Black eligible voters make up 37 percent of Mississippi’s voting-age population and in 2020 recorded the second-highest voter registration rate among Black voters in any state nationally. That is despite disfranchisement provisions written into the 1890 state constitution and felony disenfranchisement laws that permanently barred more than 130,000 Black Mississippians from voting as of 2020—the highest rate in the United States.

Dortch said that because SAVE’s data is incomplete, many citizens will be flagged whose citizenship cannot be confirmed through the system. “This group is likely to be disproportionately older Americans and older African-Americans in particular, who may have been born in segregated or under-resourced facilities where births were not consistently documented for purposes of federal record-keeping,” he said.

On the same day the bill passed, the SPLC also filed a lawsuit that contends the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office and the Mississippi Department of Public Safety violated the state’s open records law by failing to respond to numerous requests for information about deaths at Hinds County’s Raymond Detention Center. According to the state, at least five people died at the facility between 2022 and April 2025. The SPLC said other reports cite at least six deaths at the same facility in 2025.

“Not only have these agencies violated their obligations under the law, but they have also failed to provide a full accounting of the incarcerated people who have died behind the walls of this troubled facility,” said SPLC staff attorney Andrea Alajbegovic in a news release.

“The public has a right to know the extent to which deaths are occurring in the Hinds County detention facility and why,” Alajbegovic said. “We have asked the court to direct HCSO and DPS to comply with statutory obligations and produce the requested records without further delay.”

The lawsuit, filed in Hinds County Chancery Court, seeks a full and transparent account of all deaths that have occurred since 2022. The SPLC says it will review the data to determine the best course of action regarding conditions for those incarcerated in detention facilities throughout the Deep South.

Numerous news organizations, including The Mississippi Independent, Mississippi Today and the Marshall Project, are also investigating unresolved inmate deaths at prisons across the state.

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

This case could fundamentally reshape how voting and representation work in America. And the consequences could be devastating for minority communities, especially Black communities.

In the first installment of an ongoing collaboration, Mississippi policy guru Hannah Williams breaks down what is likely to be a landmark decision and what it means for you.

Click the image for the full video.

A planned peaceful protest in Hattiesburg will be among the demonstrations across the United States focused on the Trump administration’s unconstitutional or illegal actions and its overreach of executive power, including by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency.

The events will be part of the fifth national No Kings protests and the first focused on the killings by ICE agents of Renée Good, Keith Porter and Alex Pretti. Previous nationwide No Kings Protests were held in February, April, June and October 2025.

The June 2025 protests were among the largest single-day protests in U.S. history, with an estimated five million people participating in more than 2,100 cities and towns, including Gulfport and Jackson, Mississippi. The October protests were even larger, with some estimates going as high as seven million. As part of those demonstrations, Mississippi protests were staged in Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Hernando, Jackson, Kosciusko, Oxford, Starkville and Tupelo.

This site identifies cities with protests planned for March 28, 2026. Among the Mississippi locations where protests have been announced are Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Olive Branch, Oxford, Starkville and Tupelo (details in linked sites).

Today marks the last day that lawmakers can address Mississippi’s child care crisis in 2026 due to the deadline for chambers to act on appropriations amendments from the corresponding body.

On March 13, the state Senate voted to allocate $15 million for child care vouchers, approving an amendment to House Bill 1909, the Department of Human Services appropriations bill, that would help address a waiting list of nearly 20,000 low-income families who have gone without subsidized care since pandemic-era federal funds ran out last April.

The funding is not yet law, however. The Senate Appropriations Committee added the allocation to a House-originated bill that must survive a conference between the two chambers before reaching Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk for signature. The House version of the bill carried no child care funding.

Child care advocates welcomed the vote but called it insufficient. The $15 million matches what the legislature appropriated for the first time last year, but is a fraction of the $60 million that Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson has publicly identified as necessary to clear the waitlist entirely.

Ongoing crisis

Nearly 20,000 Mississippi families are waiting for child care help they cannot afford. They’re on a government list that has grown for nearly a year while children’s caregivers, who are often grandmothers with health conditions, neighbors working for cash, or other overextended relatives, absorb the daily uncertainty that public policy has failed to resolve.

The crisis goes back to April 2025, when the department of human services paused most new applications to the Child Care Payment Program and reduced available funding following the expiration of pandemic-era federal dollars that had, for several years, dramatically expanded access to subsidized care. The consequences were immediate. Last year, 170 child care centers closed statewide, the highest number in nearly a decade. A survey by the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, compiled into a January 2026 report, found that 89 percent of child care providers reported being negatively impacted by the pause in funding, with 315 staff terminations and 218 classroom closures among the 229 surveyed centers.

The scale of the retreat is stark in raw numbers. At the height of the pandemic, Mississippi served one in three eligible children through the Child Care Payment Program; now, with the additional funding gone, the state has returned to serving only one in seven, according to MDHS’s own Division of Early Childhood Care and Development. The voucher program is currently serving approximately 18,000 children, roughly half the number it served at the pandemic peak.

Pattern written into policy

The families on that waitlist are, by every available measure, disproportionately Black. Mississippi has the largest Black population by percentage of any state in the country, and its poverty rate—one in five residents statewide and substantially higher among Black Mississippians—reflects a history of deliberate public disinvestment that stretches back well before the current crisis, well before welfare reform, and well before the federal programs now under debate were written.

The architecture of American social provision has never reached Black Mississippians on equal terms. When Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935, it excluded agricultural and domestic workers from coverage, the two occupational categories that employed approximately 65 percent of the Black workforce at the time. In a state where almost all Black women worked as domestic servants and almost all Black men worked in agriculture for white landowners, the exclusion was categorical. The NAACP testified at the 1935 congressional hearings that the provision would disproportionately exclude Black workers, and an article in the organization’s magazine later called the legislation a “sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” Those workers were not incorporated into the Social Security system until amendments passed in 1950 and 1954, two decades after the framework that would govern American old age and poverty policy was first constructed around them.

When the federal government’s War on Poverty programs and civil rights legislation of the 1960s began opening those institutions, Mississippi’s state government resisted at nearly every turn, including in the administration of federal welfare funds, which southern states exercised broad discretion to restrict. The pattern persisted through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children with the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) block grant, a structural change that gave states like Mississippi the flexibility to spend federal anti-poverty funds on purposes far removed from poor families. Critics of that transition noted at the time that the “welfare queen” rhetoric that had animated the reform debate was a coded attack on Black mothers specifically. The Children’s Defense Fund’s southern regional director, Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, observed years later that Mississippi had done a thorough job of moving people off welfare, but not into economic security.

TANF question

Mississippi now holds $156 million in unspent TANF funds. The program was designed to move poor families toward self-sufficiency. Child care, which for many—especially single mothers—is a prerequisite for workforce participation and was supposed to be a central use of those funds. The fact that Mississippi has instead accumulated reserves while 20,000 families wait for vouchers is less an administrative anomaly than an extension of a longer institutional pattern: public money structured around poor Black families’ needs, redirected away from them through layers of state discretion.

At the center of the dispute between state officials and advocates is that pool of unspent federal money. Mississippi receives approximately $86.5 million a year in TANF block grant funds and already transfers the maximum allowable 30 percent of those funds to the Child Care and Development Fund, as documented in Mississippi’s 2025-2027 CCDF State Plan. But advocates have identified a separate mechanism: Some of the $156 million in accumulated, unobligated reserves can be spent directly on child care subsidies. Federal ACF guidance establishes that unobligated TANF balances carried into future years may be expended on assistance to families, a category that includes child care subsidies delivered as direct aid.

For months, MDHS resisted the idea that those funds could be legally redirected. Agency communications director Mark Jones said that “plugging long-term holes with non-recurring funds is not feasible nor responsible.” Advocates countered that sitting on millions of unspent dollars during a documented crisis was itself a policy choice.

In January 2026, that position began to shift. MDHS director Bob Anderson announced during a Senate Public Health Committee meeting that the agency would explore using a portion of the reserves to address the waitlist, though he noted the agency had yet to fully navigate the applicable federal regulations. Carol Burnett, executive director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, called the announcement “extremely encouraging,” saying that the agency had moved from treating the transfer as impossible to acknowledging it was simply new terrain.

Four national TANF experts consulted by Mississippi Today agreed that Mississippi can legally direct more of its TANF dollars toward child care subsidies. Federal TANF financial data compiled by the Administration for Children and Families shows Mississippi’s pattern of low basic-assistance expenditure relative to its annual allotment. Figures from MDHS itself suggest that resolving the waitlist entirely would require approximately $60 million, a sum well within the range of the unspent reserves.

What legislature has done

The Mississippi Legislature, for its part, has moved incrementally. The Senate voted in late February 2026 to add $15 million for child care vouchers to House Bill 1909, the Department of Human Services appropriations bill, the same amount lawmakers appropriated for the first time last year and well short of the $60 million Anderson identified as necessary to resolve the waitlist. Sen. David Blount (D-Jackson) said on the Senate floor that he would seek to increase that figure when the bill goes to conference, noting that need has grown since the previous appropriation.

Other proposals have circulated among members of the Legislative Black Caucus. Rep. Zakiya Summers (D-Jackson), who is also communications director for the Mississippi Low Income Childcare Initiative, told The Mississippi Independent that her caucus has explored multiple funding avenues, including mandating a portion of the $156 million in unobligated TANF funds for child care vouchers, as well as appropriating general funds, State Health Department funds, and workforce development dollars. A separate bill moving through the legislature would create a tax credit for employers who provide child care stipends to employees, capping that credit at $3,000 per year per child.

As of this week, HB 1909 remains in the concurrence process, with March 20 marking the legislative deadline for chambers to act on amendments to appropriations bills from the other body. The 2026 regular session is scheduled to adjourn April 5.

Federal uncertainty

The state-level crisis has unfolded against a backdrop of federal instability. In early January, the Trump administration announced a freeze on federal Child Care and Development Fund payments nationwide, citing fraud allegations at child care centers in Minnesota. The move followed a viral video alleging fraud at several Minnesota centers, prompting U.S. Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill to announce via social media that payments would be withheld pending verification. Mississippi, which received approximately $170 million in federal child care funding the previous year, was left awaiting guidance. The MDHS’s Jones said at the time that the agency had received “no official communication regarding the pause and how it will work.”

What’s at stake on the ground

Mississippi’s child care providers operate on margins that were thin before the crisis and are now, for many, unsustainable. According to federal data compiled by the First Five Years Fund, the typical annual cost of child care for an infant in Mississippi is around $8,186, while the average child care worker in the state earns just $21,400 a year--conditions that make both affordability for families and workforce retention for providers structurally difficult. There are 214,000 children aged five and under in Mississippi, and 65 percent of them have all available parents in the workforce. The Child Care and Development Block Grant, the main federal vehicle for subsidies, reaches only 21 percent of eligible Mississippi families.

The gap between what is needed and what the state has so far committed remains wide, and the window for the 2026 legislative session to address this issue is about to slam shut.

A Harrison County Circuit Court judge revoked former state Sen. Philip Moran’s bond on March 13, 2026, and ordered him held in custody until his criminal trial in June, after prosecutors presented evidence that Moran had repeatedly left his Diamondhead home in violation of the conditions of his house arrest.

Until June 2025, Moran served on the five-member Mississippi Parole Board, the body that holds exclusive authority under state law over the granting and revocation of parole. Among the board’s routine functions is deciding whether to revoke parole for people who violate the conditions of their release—including unauthorized travel and leaving home without permission while under house arrest.

The parole board’s hearings are not open to the public. Individual vote records are not published. The Mississippi Department of Corrections posts parole decisions but does not disclose which members voted for or against a given outcome, or the reasoning behind the decision.

A 2021 audit by the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review found that the board had stopped keeping minutes of its hearings entirely in 2009, and a 2023 follow-up report found that the practice had not improved. No publicly available record shows how Moran voted on individual cases during his 18 months on the board, including revocation cases involving the kinds of release violations he is now accused of committing.

As a result, it is unclear whether Moran influenced parole board rulings to make it easier or more difficult to gain parole, or to impose lenient or rigorous terms for release such as house arrest. Moran was not on parole at the time of his alleged violations but had been released from jail while awaiting trial.

On March 13, prosecutors told Judge Christopher Schmidt that while under house arrest for a bribery indictment Moran had attended fish fries, visited Dempsey’s Seafood & Steak, shopped at Dollar General and a hardware store, and gone to a towing company where he allegedly asked the owner for a personal favor. Moran had been confined to his home and limited to visits to his attorney’s office in Hattiesburg since late January, when Schmidt imposed a $75,000 surety bond and GPS monitoring as modified conditions of release. The judge told Moran at the time that if he violated the confinement, he would be arrested and held until trial.

Moran, a Republican who represented the 46^th District from 2012 to 2024, is charged with one count each of bribery and conspiracy. His son, Alan Moran, faces the same charges. A Hancock County grand jury indicted both men in 2025 in connection with an alleged scheme to pay $20,000 to a 19-year-old Lowe’s employee in Waveland to drop stalking charges against Alan Moran.

According to court testimony and prosecution filings, Alan Moran, a former Diamondhead city councilman, summoned an associate, Jeremy Billings, to the Moran family’s pest control business in Kiln and instructed him to approach the victim with $5,000 upfront and the promise of $15,000 to follow. The victim refused and reported the offer to Waveland police. Billings and a second codefendant, Ian Schexnayder, have since pleaded guilty to one count of bribery each and agreed to testify against the Morans at trial.

Alan Moran is currently serving a 12-year sentence for violating probation tied to a 2024 guilty plea on charges of child exploitation and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He is a registered sex offender. The stalking charge that preceded the alleged bribery involved a teenage employee at the Waveland Lowe’s whom Alan Moran had repeatedly approached at work and in the store parking lot, according to a Waveland Police Department incident report. A judge found him guilty of misdemeanor stalking in April 2025.

Philip Moran’s January 2026 bond modification followed a separate set of allegations. The FBI testified on Jan. 27 that Hancock County Supervisor Bo Ladner, a longtime friend and former employee of Moran’s, told agents that Moran had invited him to his home, asked who was “setting him up” in the bribery case, and stated that if he received a cancer diagnosis he intended to “kill a bunch of people.” Prosecutors also said Moran had referenced having enough ammunition to carry out the threat. On the stand the following day, Ladner testified that he could not rule out the possibility of Moran acting on the statements. Schmidt found insufficient proof to revoke bond but imposed the stricter conditions that Moran is now accused of violating.

Gov. Tate Reeves appointed Moran to the parole board effective Jan. 1, 2024, shortly after Moran left the Senate following a failed reelection bid. The appointment was confirmed by the Senate. Under Mississippi Code § 47-7-5, board members are appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the Senate and serve at the governor’s will and pleasure. The statute provides that members be appointed “without reference to their political affiliations” and requires them to devote their full time to the duties of the office. An affirmative vote of at least four members is required to grant parole to anyone convicted of a capital offense or a sex crime.

The governor’s office did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent about Moran’s vetting for the appointment and whether he resigned or was removed from the parole board.

Cory Custer, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, told the Sun Herald that Moran’s tenure on the parole board ended on June 2, 2025. Custer did not say whether Moran resigned or was removed. No provision in state law triggers automatic suspension or removal of a board member following an arrest or indictment.

Both Philip and Alan Moran have pleaded not guilty. Their trial is scheduled for June in Harrison County Circuit Court.

Image: Philip Moran, R-center, during better days, attending Stennis Day at the Mississippi Capitol while a state senator (via NASA)

by Margaret McMullan

The Republicans are running late.

It’s 6:30 a.m. on primary election day 2026 and the Democratic pollworkers and I are at the Randolph Center in Pass Christian, Mississippi, setting up booths, tables, chairs and VOTE HERE signs—a choreography I’ve learned from 10 years of working elections.

Before long, three Republican poll workers arrive. There’s a mix of cordiality and underlying tension—a subtle wariness, like neighbors who know their fences are meant to divide.

In these moments, party lines should blur—everyone just wants to get the polls open at 7:00 a.m., but the remaining Republican still hasn’t arrived with the laptops, ballots and supplies. When he finally shows up at 7:10, wearing a cowboy hat, we scramble to assign roles and recalibrate machines that have sat idle for months.

There’s no reason to identify these people by name, as their behavior is not altogether flattering. The man I call S. lays claim to the big sturdy table that I’ve set up as his Republican table and scooches it forward. I move it back because the laptop needs to be closer to the power source. I unwind the cord and plug it in so I can check IDs. In Mississippi, photo IDs are mandatory to vote.

“This is our table, and you can’t be anywhere near here,” S. says, glaring at me with thinly veiled hostility.

“She’s with us,” S.’s wife says, and, poof, just like that, he’s all smiles, nice. He apparently doesn’t recognize me from last year, when I worked the Democratic side.

This year, politically, I’m positioned on the opposing side. The election commissioner had called me months ago to ask if I’d work the polls for the Republicans because they needed more experienced workers. I agreed, thinking maybe I could be a spy behind enemy lines.

Although the office of election commissioner says they are nonpartisan, they lean heavily Republican.

I am an older white woman, so I blend in with Republicans. But I am not, nor have I ever been, one of them. I am curious to find out if any have changed their minds as a result of the obvious horrors of this administration.

As I have done for years, I’m wearing my grandmother’s pin and my mother’s pearls for luck. My grandmother fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi back in the 1960s. My mother escaped Nazi-occupied Austria in 1939.

Working on the wrong side can be excruciating.

Today, I’m sitting with J., a 49-year-old, divorced white man with a Confederate flag as his Facebook page profile, who recently posted his doubts about the Holocaust.

Mississippi’s political climate is notoriously charged and Pass Christian, a small coastal town of approximately 6,000 residents, is no exception. Voters arrive with strong opinions and sometimes stronger suspicions. Several voters come in bad-mouthing Cindy Hyde-Smith, the incumbent U.S. senator, who said that if people can’t afford beef, they should choose another protein. Some voters refuse to speak to Democrats, waving them away like they’re flies, while others seem relieved to see familiar faces regardless of affiliation. It’s hard not to notice how party allegiance seems to shape everything from body language to small talk.

Throughout the day, our chairs squeak, making us sound like old dot matrix printers.

There are a few mistakes.

S. is playing a game on his phone while a voter signs in without registering. So, our numbers are off. Last year, during the presidential election, he made the same mistake but in reverse: Three voters registered but did not sign in.

We are not supposed to pre-initial ballots, yet J. pre-initials several as he talks on his cell phone while pacing the stage in his cowboy boots. The Randolph Center also serves as a community theater center.

Throughout the day, my counterparts consume muffins, pizza and protein shakes. I want to turn to S.’s wife and ask: Do you still support Trump and his new forever war in Iran, the failed economy, crime, fraud, child abuse, corruption and endless lying? But I don’t.

We’re not supposed to talk politics, so when she complains about the long TSA lines at airports, I can’t explain that Democrats are pushing to fund TSA, FEMA and cyber security and fighting to rein in ICE and Border Patrol. Republicans, on the other hand, are forcing TSA, FEMA and U.S. cyber defenses to do without funding as political leverage.

I sit, swinging between frustration, hope and boredom.

“Democracy is not a state, it is an act,” congressman John Lewis wrote.

Years of working elections have given me a front-row seat to Mississippi politics—a theater where the stakes are high and the actors are often at odds. But each polling day reminds me of democracy’s resilience. And its hope.

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky,” writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has written. “Hope is an ax you break the door down with in an emergency.”

At the polls, I find hope in my own persistence to welcome every voter who walks in, even when the voting process is flawed and Trump and the Republican party seem to want to make it even harder to vote.

After all, democracy isn’t forged with talk or grand gestures, but in ordinary acts—setting up chairs, checking IDs, offering facts when misinformation reigns.

At 7:00 p.m., we close the poll and check the machine totals, which line up with the rest of the state: (R) Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and (D) District Attorney Scott Colom will compete in the 2026 midterm election.

Of 2,079 registered voters in our district, 254 voted—a low turnout.

Many Mississippi voters appear to have given up. Rigid voter ID laws, no early voting, limited absentee voting, and some of the harshest felony disenfranchisement policies in the nation make the state one of the most difficult places to vote. Recently, election commissioners purged approximately 50,000 Mississippi voters using unverified credit data from Experian.

As we pack up the booths and ballots, I will myself to be grateful.

We are polarized. But maybe polarization is not so bad. I know the difference between right and wrong. Nazis are bad and they murdered most of my mother’s family in a Holocaust that did, in fact, occur.

Clarity brings a certain amount of happiness and hope.

The next day, I will take a long walk, and check the banana and fig trees coming back to life after the freeze. I’ll schedule an annual checkup, too.

My plan is to survive and keep showing up.

Image: Voter stickers, Pass Christian (courtesy Margaret McMullan)

In the first week of March 2026, as the Mississippi Legislature approached one of its final procedural deadlines, Rep. Becky Currie (R-Brookhaven) stood on the House floor and offered a number she could not fully explain.

Approximately eight people incarcerated in state prisons had died during the preceding week, she told her colleagues, all of them between the ages of 20 and 30. She did not have their names. She did not have confirmed causes of death. She did not say whether the Mississippi Department of Corrections had provided any of that information to her as chair of the House Corrections Committee. What she had was a count—partial, unverified and, by her own account, incomplete—and a set of reform bills that the Senate was preparing to kill.

The deaths Currie referenced are part of a pattern that has drawn sustained national attention. A multipart, collaborative investigation published earlier this year found that prison understaffing and gang violence likely led to the killings of nearly 50 incarcerated people since 2015, with only eight cases resulting in criminal convictions. Family members of those who died behind bars said they had received little or no communication from prison officials, learning details instead through a whisper network of incarcerated people, advocates and, in some cases, journalists.

The federal government has confirmed what the reporting revealed. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an investigation into conditions at four Mississippi prisons. In 2022, the department issued findings that conditions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. In 2024, it issued similar findings for three additional facilities—South Mississippi Correctional Institution, Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, and the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility—concluding that the state had failed to protect incarcerated people from violence; to provide adequate medical and mental health care; and to maintain safe conditions of confinement. Every major state prison in Mississippi now operates under federal findings of unconstitutional conditions.

It is against this record that Currie, a former nurse, has spent two legislative sessions attempting to force the state to confront what is happening inside its own facilities. Her 2025 omnibus reform bill passed the House 118–0 but died during late-session negotiations between the chambers, in part due to opposition from the office of Gov. Tate Reeves, who favored awarding monitoring authority to a private firm rather than the Mississippi State Department of Health. This year, Currie returned with a package of individual bills targeting healthcare, oversight, and accountability.

Several of those bills cleared the House with unanimous bipartisan support in February. H.B. 1744 mandated the creation of hepatitis C and HIV treatment programs in state prisons and required the state to obtain medications at federal discount prices through the 340B program—a response to reporting that the state’s medical contractor, Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, was treating only about 50 of more than 5,000 inmates diagnosed with hepatitis C each year. H.B. 1692 would have transferred authority to award the prison healthcare contract from MDOC to the Department of Finance and Administration, a structural change designed to prevent the agency from resorting to another round of emergency, no-bid contracts when VitalCore’s current three-year, $357 million agreement expires in 2027. H.B. 1739 would have overhauled the Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force to require investigation of all unexpected deaths in state custody and the publication of findings.

Other bills in the package died at the February 3 House committee deadline or were double-referred—a procedural move that often signals that a bill lacks leadership support. Among them was H.B. 1745, which would have redirected $690,000 from a contract MDOC awarded to the politically connected law firm Butler Snow to the legislature’s own watchdog agency, PEER, for an independent audit of the VitalCore contract. Currie, who chairs the committee with jurisdiction over corrections, was not informed of the Butler Snow arrangement until late December 2025. H.B. 1748, which would have removed a requirement that legislators give advance notice before visiting state prisons, also failed to advance.

The bills that survived the House arrived in the Senate Corrections Committee, chaired by Sen. Juan Barnett (D-Heidelberg), who told reporters he supported the principle of stronger oversight and planned to meet with Currie. But Barnett fell ill before the March 3 deadline for Senate committees to act on House bills and authority over the committee passed to vice chair Lydia Chassaniol (R-Winona).

On Feb. 26, Chassaniol convened the committee and advanced only two measures—a bill requiring MDOC to develop policies for protective equipment when incarcerated people handle industrial chemicals, and the prison deaths oversight bill. She said she was unlikely to call another meeting before the deadline and that she was honoring Barnett’s wishes by limiting the agenda. A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann did not respond to questions about whether Hosemann supported the prison reform measures. The remaining Currie bills—the hepatitis C treatment mandate, the healthcare contract transfer, and the Inmate Welfare Fund oversight—were set to die without a vote.

Hours before the March 3 deadline, Currie moved to save them. On the House floor, she introduced strike-all amendments to two Senate bills—S.B. 2041, which, in its original form, dealt with researching dyslexia in the prison population, and S.B. 2778, a repealer bill—and replaced their contents entirely with the language from her killed reform measures. The amended bills now carry the hepatitis C and HIV treatment mandates, the transfer of healthcare contract authority to the Department of Finance and Administration, provisions allowing hospitals to bid on the prison healthcare contract, Inmate Welfare Fund oversight requiring MDOC to provide a consolidated accounting to legislators, and a provision granting parolees who participate in religious services credit toward their supervision terms. S.B. 2778 includes a reverse repealer, functioning as a backup vehicle for the same provisions. Both bills passed the House and were sent back to the Senate.

The existing oversight mechanism for Mississippi’s prisons has been, by the assessment of its own members, largely symbolic. The Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force, established by statute in 2014, is authorized to make policy recommendations but has no enforcement power. Its staff is drawn from MDOC employees. State Public Defender André de Gruy, who serves on the task force, has described the arrangement as “MDOC reviewing themselves.” The task force’s January 2025 annual report made no mention of investigating prisoner deaths.

In October 2025, following published reporting on prison killings, Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain said the department would review unprosecuted homicides and deaths ruled to be of undetermined causes. Nearly five months later, there have been no additional indictments or convictions in open homicide cases. Cain, who was appointed by Reeves, has not publicly addressed the status of that review.

The amended S.B. 2041 and S.B. 2778 now sit in the Senate, where their fate depends on whether leadership allows them to reach the floor or routes them back through committee—and on whether Barnett, upon his return, supports or resists the provisions Chassaniol declined to advance. Reeves, who opposed Currie’s 2025 reforms, has given no public indication that his position has changed. He leaves office in January 2028.

Currie has framed the stakes in terms that are at once fiscal and moral. Mississippi incarcerates approximately 19,500 people in state facilities at an annual cost to taxpayers of roughly $459 million. VitalCore has received nearly $700 million in state contracts since 2020. The Department of Justice has found unconstitutional conditions at every major state prison. And people are dying at a rate that the chair of the committee charged with corrections oversight cannot fully document—because the department she oversees is not providing her the information.

“They’re a ward of the state and we pay a lot of money to take care of them, and we’re not getting our money’s worth,” Currie told the House on March 4. The question now before the Senate is whether it agrees that the deaths warrant investigations—or whether, for the second consecutive year, it will decide that they do not.

Currie did not respond to requests for comment from The Mississippi Independent.

Bonus: If you’ve been following the Hidden Mirrors podcast, about the prison book club at Mississippi’s Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, a new episode is now live. This week, club members switch from talking about reading to talking about writing their own stories, including a planned group book where each man authors a chapter. This is the penultimate of a total of 12 episodes.

Header Image: Becky Currie (via sengov.com)

It was 1 p.m. when Angel Readus received a chilling message from an inmate inside one of Mississippi’s most violent prisons.

“You need to call down to the prison, something is going on with your brother,” read the message, sent through Facebook Messenger from inside the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, in the city of Pearl. It was a disturbing sentence for Readus to read when her sibling was incarcerated inside a system with a reputation for brutality, neglect and death.

Readus began making phone calls. For two hours, she was transferred from one prison official to another before the facility’s chaplain finally told her the news she had been dreading.

“Your brother Monquel Nason passed away this morning at 7:41 a.m.,” Readus recalled being told during the Nov. 20, 2021, call.

Nason was 29.

In the days and weeks that followed, bits of information began to reach Readus from inside the prison. She discovered that her brother had double pneumonia and was admitted to an outside hospital in the days before he died, only to be returned to his cell, where he bled for two hours before fellow inmates managed to get him help. Readus also discovered that her brother had likely died a day earlier than reported.

Nason’s health was far from perfect. He had lived with kidney disease for more than a decade, starting long before his incarceration. But it had gotten far worse while in prison.

“They barely took him to dialysis,” Readus, a former Mississippi Department of Corrections employee, told The Mississippi Independent. “Why did they send him back to prison with pneumonia in both his lungs when he was already fighting kidney disease?”

Readus suspects she’ll never find out. She doesn’t know what, exactly, killed her brother or what his final words were, or whether he was scared, at peace, or crying for his mother, who had died from the same disease years earlier while he sat in jail awaiting trial.

“I do know he died alone in prison, and I didn’t get to say goodbye,” Readus said.

Readus felt helpless. Her brother’s death was shattering, but what followed—the scramble for basic information, the unanswered questions, the uncertainty that hardened into a kind of permanent limbo—is what families often endure after losing someone inside Mississippi’s chaotic prison system.

State prisons have become places where people die with alarming frequency, from medical neglect, homicide or the sheer strain of incarceration. Relatives are frequently left to piece together their last hours, days and weeks on their own, sometimes with details provided by other inmates, sometimes from rumors, and often with little help from MDOC.

About 43 incarcerated people have been unlawfully killed in Mississippi prisons between 2015 and 2025, according to a joint investigative series by Mississippi Today, The Marshall Project and several other Mississippi-based news organizations that looked into the failings of the state prison system. Very few of the homicides have been investigated or resulted in a criminal conviction.

Since that series was published, there have been dozens of additional deaths due to causes not yet established. A Nov. 23, 2025, autopsy concluded that Nason's official cause of death was endocarditis with septic emboli, a heart infection in which bacteria infect the inner lining or valves, which can be caused by issues including sharing drug needles, using dirty dialysis machines or pneumonia.

The state drastically underreports the deaths of people in law enforcement custody, whether they’re serving life in prison or sitting in a county jail drunk tank for one night. The FBI opened a homicide investigation in late February 2026 into the 2025 death of Melvin Cancer, who CMFC officials said died from a heart attack—before a Department of Public Safety report suggested that guards beat him to death.

Mississippi incarcerates people at the second-highest rate in the nation, nearly double the national average, and the potential for deadly violence is ever-present.

The crisis has once again gained attention at the state capitol, where lawmakers spent the latest session debating bills meant to improve prison healthcare and strengthen prison death oversight. But those proposals have repeatedly moved forward only to stall, leaving life-or-death problems inside Mississippi’s prisons largely unchanged. Among the likely contributing factors are chronic understaffing, crumbling and inhumane facilities, and living environments that families and former inmates have described as deadly. The result is a system where people keep dying of causes that are sometimes not fully explained, leaving relatives to try to chase down their own answers.

Such questions have consumed Mildred Washington since her son, Demetrios Washington, known as “Bubba,” died alone in solitary confinement at the privately run East Mississippi Corrections Facility in Meridian on June 29, 2023. MDOC officials told her he died of dehydration, she wrote on social media at the time. Not that she believes it.

Washington thinks her son, who suffered from schizophrenia, was destroyed rather than helped during his time in prison.

“Sadly, he was placed in a prison system where he was neglected and denied the medical care he deserved,” Washington wrote in a social media post on Feb. 10, 2026.

Washington told The Mississippi Independent that she was unable to talk about her son’s death due to an ongoing legal proceeding against MDOC. But court records offer some clues to how Demetrios Washington was treated as he was processed through the state’s criminal justice system.

In an Oct. 3, 2019 order, Hinds County Senior Circuit Judge Tomie Green wrote that Demetrios had been held in the Hinds County jail for 134 days without indictment, a delay the judge called unconstitutional, and that prosecutors had shown “callous indifference,” while noting that the defendant was in “dire need of mental health treatment and care.” Demetrios Washington was indicted later that month. A mental evaluation found him fit to stand trial.

There is little information about what happened to Washington after he was sent to EMCF.

“To this day, our family is still searching for the truth about how he passed away,” Mildred Washington wrote in the same social media post.

What the state says should happen

Mississippi law lays out a simple process meant to prevent exactly that kind of uncertainty. When someone dies in state custody, prison officials kickstart a chain of events that starts with the county medical examiner, includes a mandatory autopsy, and ultimately ends at the office of the local district attorney, who can present the case to a grand jury if foul play is suspected. Prison officials are also supposed to tell relatives, if they can be found.

In practice, families describe a messier reality.

“I talked to the coroner of Rankin County, and he said they didn’t do the autopsy because they knew my brother had bad kidney disease,” Readus said. “I didn’t understand it because I feel like there’s always more to it if someone dies in prison. They need to prove to a family that nothing happened, like assault or murder, or if they was left to die.”

Readus recalled that her brother complained about missing many of his dialysis treatments because of prison staff shortages and that the machines used to clean toxins from the blood were often dirty. Missed dialysis treatments can be life-threatening and reduce a person’s life expectancy significantly.

“I don’t believe prison staff cared about his wellbeing,” Readus said. “I’ve seen it firsthand.”

Other MDOC inmates have previously complained about non-functional dialysis machines.

The inconsistent treatment Nason allegedly received in the hands of the Mississippi criminal justice system began more than five years before he died at CMCF, according to an emotional handwritten letter the inmate wrote that is buried within hundreds of court documents relating to Nason’s manslaughter case. The July 2015 letter to District Judge John H. Emfinger begged him to reduce bond from $200,000 to $75,000 so Nason could be released from the Madison County Detention Center for better treatment. Nason said in the letter that his jailers had rarely taken him to his dialysis appointments since he was arrested in October 2014.

“My mother hasn’t long past [sic] away from the same illness I have,” Nason wrote. “Please, Judge Emfinger, help me. I don’t feel good at all because I’m not getting the proper medical attention here at this jail, and the help I really need. Please! Judge Emfinger, I really need your help. Please! Please!”

There’s no indication in court records that Judge Emfinger granted Nason’s request. Emfinger did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent.

Nason’s letter captures the fear that haunts many individuals and families long before anyone dies: that a treatable condition can become fatal when care is delayed, inconsistent or simply withheld. In Mississippi’s prisons, relatives say that medical neglect is not limited to one diagnosis or one facility; it can follow people with chronic diseases, mental illness or acute emergencies, leaving families to wonder whether a death was inevitable or preventable.

Other cases highlight how families can be left without even the basic facts and no opportunity to say goodbye. Nicholas Duell Hardy III was taken from the prison in Pearl to a hospital on Jan. 27, 2026, with liver cancer and died Feb. 4, but his mother was not notified until Feb. 11, 2026, according to his aunt, Jojo Irwin. Brandon Boone, of Boonesville, died Aug. 7, 2020, one day after arriving at Alcorn Regional Facility, according to his sister, Laken Brea. She says the family is still searching for answers five years later.

The legislative response

Politicians in Jackson are paying some attention, but it has so far been ineffective. In late January, the Mississippi House unanimously passed a raft of prison healthcare and oversight bills sponsored by Rep. Becky Currie, a Brookhaven Republican and former nurse who chairs the House Corrections Committee. The measures would expand treatment for incarcerated people with HIV and Hepatitis C, improve women inmates’ healthcare, and create a task force to review deaths in custody—a push that followed Mississippi Today’s extensive reporting on medical neglect in the prison system. But the bills effectively died in the Senate after Lydia Chassaniol, the vice chair of the Senate Corrections Committee, committed to only promoting two measures to a full Senate vote. In response, Currie, in a last-minute legislative maneuver, was able to revive the bills by inserting language in other Senate bills on prisons and probation.

Currie has spent the last two years scrutinizing the state’s prison medical contract with VitalCore Health Strategies, a Kansas-based company that won a three-year, $357 million agreement in 2024 to administer state prison healthcare. The company collected nearly $300 million in no-bid contracts between 2020 and 2023. Currie said that the state’s request for proposal was “only for VitalCore.”

The contracts have attracted extensive media coverage during those years, and a potential conflict of interest has emerged involving Catherine Fontenot, a longtime lieutenant of state corrections commissioner Burl Cain, stemming from his nearly 15 years as warden at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Cain left Angola following a series of news reports alleging corruption, though a state investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. He was then hired to head Mississippi’s prison system.

Media reports indicate that Fontenot eventually followed Cain to Mississippi, working as a consultant for MDOC while simultaneously holding a director’s position at VitalCore even as the state continued to award the healthcare provider no-bid contracts. MDOC has not responded to requests for records of any contracts involving Fontenot or an explanation of her relationship with VitalCore.

Fontenot is now the chief of corrections and warden at Louisiana’s East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office. Her biography on the office website says she served as director of a reception and diagnostic unit in Mississippi. An April 2024 court filing lists her as holding the same title with VitalCore; a January 2023 Newsweek article described her as working in that role for “VitalCore Health Strategies at the Mississippi Department of Corrections.” Fontenot did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent.

A deadly system

Despite legislative attempts, the sheer number of deaths emerging from Mississippi’s prison system suggests the crisis runs deeper than any single reform package or healthcare contract can address. Some facilities are so understaffed that inmates are left unsupervised in open units--areas that have been identified in Department of Justice reports as epicenters of violence and inhumane conditions. A February 2024 DOJ report noted that gangs operate in the “void left by staff” and use “violence to control people and traffic contraband.”

The report found that restrictive housing at East Mississippi Correctional Facility and the other privately run prison, Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, outside Woodville, was unsanitary, hazardous and chaotic, making the areas “breeding grounds” for suicide, self-inflicted injury, fires and assaults.

For those inside the system, survival can be uncertain.

“I’ve seen a guy get stabbed to death over a tray of hotdogs and people get stomped out over $10,” said an inmate at CMFC, whom The Mississippi Independent granted anonymity for fear of reprisals from prison guards and MDOC officials. “All these guys got to do is get high and kill each other.”

One inmate, the man said, ripped out his own testicles after a bad drug experience. He said he concurred with allegations that gangs run the prison and control drugs coming in. The DOJ report cited similar findings.

The well-documented violence inside Mississippi’s men’s prisons can make it easy to forget that women are living and dying inside the same system, often with far less public attention. Cheri Alicia Womack, who was incarcerated at CMCF between 2013 and 2018, said she had to drag dying friends out of cells and through common areas to get medical help.

“I’ve lost a ton of friends inside those walls,” Womack told The Mississippi Independent. She alleged that violent guards would beat inmates half to death or break an inmate’s jaw without blinking. The victims, she said, were, “Good people who deserved the chance to live outside those walls.”

Two weeks ago, 54-year-old Tonya Caradine was found dead at the women’s section of CMCF. Officials said she overdosed. Womack, who was incarcerated alongside Caradine, said “Ms. Tonya” had been medically neglected for years and had gone “insane.”

“She would pace in circles for days and days without sleep, murmuring under her breath,” Womack said. “But MDOC will never admit the ‘living conditions’ that lead to a life like that are actually death conditions, because that means they are at fault.”

MDOC did not respond to questions and data requests from The Mississippi Independent regarding the full number of deaths inside the prison system during the last decade, including how many were unexplained and what processes were being followed in the aftermath of a death. However, in late 2025, MDOC committed to reviewing more than two dozen unprosecuted and unexplained deaths going back years. MDOC spokesperson Grace Fisher did not respond to messages from The Mississippi Independent.

The Wilkinson County Correctional Facility has drawn particular scrutiny in reports over the years. Two inmates have died in the facility since the start of 2026: Myron Ward, 37, who was found unresponsive in his solitary cell on Jan. 16, and Justin Crumb, 37, who collapsed during recreation on Feb. 2, three days after arriving at the prison. Ward’s family has alleged foul play, saying he was found in a pool of blood with visible bruising, according to media reports.

Emily Lawhead, director of communications for the company that operates the Wilkinson prison, Management & Training Corporation, told The Mississippi Independent that the facility houses some of the state’s highest-risk inmates, which “increases the complexity” of maintaining safety, but said new programming has been added that focuses on mental health, substance use and reentry.

This comes after the 2024 DOJ report found that WCCF, along with CMCF and the South Mississippi Corrections Institution, allowed violence to go unchecked, failed to control gang activity and drugs, and suffered from severe staffing shortages, with a vacancy rate of about 50 percent being noted at the Wilkinson facility. This led to an alarming situation in 2019 in which the Wilkinson warden at the time reported that he relied on gangs to keep prisoners under control.

The report also faulted the prison’s handling and reporting of serious incidents, including suicides and sexual abuse allegations.

For families, the most painful part is not only how often people die inside Mississippi prisons, but how quickly those deaths slip into obscurity.

Readus has learned in the years since her brother’s death that grief is rarely accompanied by answers that make sense. It often comes with paperwork that doesn’t explain much, with shifting timelines, and with ignored emails and letters. She has tried, for years, to get someone in authority to tell her what happened in the days and hours before her brother died, why a man with kidney disease was returned to a cell with double pneumonia, why he was bleeding, and why there was no clear medical accounting of what happened.

By Readus’ estimate, her brother’s release date was around five months away on the day he died. She said she used to think about that number a lot, how it would slowly tick down to a single glorious day when her brother would finally be able to put the years trapped in the living hell of prison behind him.

“I think if I got to see him, it might have made a difference,” she said. “It might have given him strength to carry on and live, you know, a different life on the outside.”

Image: Monquel Nason (courtesy Angel Readus)

Correction: A previous version of this article erroneously reported the number of Black Mississippians disenfranchised by restrictive voting laws. It is about five percent, not one in 10.

In 1982, under the administration of President Ronald Reagan, a then 26-year-old John Roberts served as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith.

In this role, Roberts was tasked with devising the administration’s argument, in a way that avoided racist allegations, against a proposed amendment to the Voting Rights Act that would nullify City of Mobile v. Bolden—a case that weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by requiring voters to prove the “intentionality” of officials in measures that resulted in minority discrimination.

Crafting the administration’s argument against the amendment was an assignment that Roberts pursued fervently, even as colleagues recalled his frustrations with the administration’s reluctance to take stronger action against the proposal.

Despite his best efforts at the time, Congress effectively overruled the Mobile v. Bolden ruling, reauthorized the Voting Right Act and clarified that Section 2 provides protection against discriminatory voting practices regardless of a plaintiff’s ability to show intent.

Now, 44 years later, after weakening the protections outlined by the Voting Rights Act as a federal judge and now as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Roberts has an opportunity to deliver the final blow to Section 2 and break the promises originally made in the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act was enacted to fulfill the guarantee of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, ending Jim Crow-era voter discrimination in the South and expanding minority political opportunities nationwide. Section 2 is a key component of the act, necessitating minority opportunity districts where such communities account for enough of the population to have a true chance of electing their choice candidate. Despite the historical and democratic purpose of the Voting Rights Act, and this section specifically, it has now come under attack as the Supreme Court prepares to make a decision on Louisiana v. Callais.

One Voice Mississippi, a civic-engagement nonprofit that gives voice to marginalized and vulnerable communities across the South, specifically by “democratizing public policy,” observed in a statement provided to The Mississippi Independent: “Ultimately, this is about whether the courts will continue to protect equal representation or continue to allow political systems that silence marginalized communities.”

Following the 2020 Census, with Black people accounting for nearly one-third of Louisiana’s population, the state’s legislature drew a congressional map with just one majority-Black district out of six. The lack of adequate representation given to minority interests resulted in civil rights groups and Black voters taking legal action (Robinson v. Landry), arguing that the 2022 map was in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voices in the political process.

While federal judges unanimously ordered the state to remedy the likely Voting Rights Act violation by drawing a second majority-Black district to provide the state’s Black population with the representation to match, the victory was short-lived. Arguing that the 2024 map with two majority-Black congressional districts was a racial gerrymander, a group of self-described non-Black voters filed a federal lawsuit (Callais v. Landry). Simply put, this group of non-Black voters, with control of four districts, felt that they were being discriminated against by the creation of a second majority-Black district. As such, they saw the district’s creation as unconstitutional and in violation of the Reconstruction Amendments.

Although state legislators stated that their top priority was protecting powerful GOP incumbents, including U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, through redistricting, in April 2024, a three-judge panel struck down the map with two majority-Black congressional districts, citing race as the predominant factor in drawing the lines. The lower court’s ruling was put on hold by the Supreme Court, allowing the 2024 election to take place with the two majority-Black districts as Louisiana state officials and the original Black plaintiffs in Robinson v. Landry appealed to the Supreme Court.

With this appeal, the Supreme Court consolidated the cases under Louisiana v. Callais and heard arguments in March 2025. Instead of issuing its decision by the end of its term in June 2025, the Supreme Court took the unorthodox step of ordering a rehearing for the next term, with a decision now expected to come in June 2026.

When arguments were heard on Louisiana v. Callais in March 2025, the state of Louisiana defended its map that provided necessary representation to its Black population according to the Voting Rights Act. By the time the case was re-heard in June, Louisiana had changed its tone, deciding not to defend the state’s current congressional map and not to urge the court to overrule a 1986 ruling in Thornburg v. Gingles that has for years been understood to require states with significant minority communities to create districts that fairly reflect their voting power.

Louisiana v. Callais comes on the heels of other recent attacks on the Voting Rights Act. Shelby County v. Holder (2013) invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by removing the necessity of Department of Justice pre-clearance for states with long histories of discrimination in changing voting laws. In John Roberts’s majority opinion, he asserted that “things have changed dramatically” since the Voting Rights Act, making these protections no longer necessary.

After dismantling Section 5 of the Voting rights Act, Roberts joined the majorities in Abbott v. Perez (2018) and Brnovich v. DNC (2021), both of which make it more challenging to prove intentionality in discriminatory practices. In Rucho v. Common Clause (2021), Chief Justice Roberts also authored an opinion that allowed partisan gerrymandering and found that courts are incapable of determining whether such gerrymandering is illegal or unconstitutional.

Although Allen v. Milligan (2023) supported Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by reaffirming the creation of minority-majority districts, Roberts made a point of bringing attention to the fact that he and the other justices “took the precedent as a given.” However, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, the justices have acknowledged that they are reconsidering whether the existing precedent was ever constitutional in the first place.

From the rehearing of the case to the changing tone of the state of Louisiana to Chief Justice Roberts’s history of eroding the Voting Rights Act, all signs point to the Supreme Court potentially issuing a ruling that would weaken if not obliterate the protections on minority representation outlined by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

“We don’t know if the Supreme Court is going to dismantle the Voting Rights Act by holding that it violates the Constitution itself, or still leave it in place but weaken it, or leave it in place as it is,” Rob McDuff, attorney for the Mississippi Center for Justice, told The Mississippi Independent.

Similar to the court’s previous ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), which is also key to the state of Louisiana’s argument against the Thornburg v. Gingles ruling. If the court does rule that the use of race to remedy proven racial discrimination is in conflict with the Constitution’s promise of equal protection and is thus unconstitutional, the ruling would, according to Politico, threaten the very system of American democracy and undermine one of the nation’s earliest promises.

On a national level, the strike-down of Section 2 could result in 27 of the 33 congressional seats in Republican-controlled states that could be targets for mid-cycle redistricting being drawn into safe GOP territory with another six potentially becoming battlegrounds.

“For Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of Black residents (about 38 percent), this could mean that the lone majority-Black district—District 2, which covers much of western Mississippi, including the Delta, southwest Mississippi and Jackson—could be eliminated, resulting in all four of the state’s congressional seats being held by Republican representatives. Black and other minority voices are already limited in Mississippi by permanent felony disenfranchisement laws that have resulted in more than five percent of the state’s Black population being disenfranchised, which represents about 60 percent of the state’s disenfranchised population. The laws include permanently revoke the voting rights of people convicted of one of these 23 felonies ranging from bigamy to tree larceny to receiving stolen goods.”

According to One Voice, Black and other minority representation could be essentially silenced with limited avenues to effect meaningful political change though “aggressive voter roll purges that remove eligible citizens without notice, strict ID laws that create unnecessary confusion, the targeted closure of polling places in majority-Black communities, underfunded election infrastructure, coordinated misinformation campaigns that seek to discourage participation and limited access to alternative voting method.”

One Voice’s position, as described in its statement to The Mississippi Independent, is that, “Voting districts are much more than lines on a map; they are the blueprints for our daily lives.”

The impacts of such a ruling would likely be felt most on the local level, where representation gives communities the capability to elect leaders who not only understand their needs but have the power to provide solutions and resources. Through the manipulation of districts, the synergy between representatives and the communities they represent is broken, resulting in misaligned objectives and strategies that don’t serve to benefit the communities they are supposed to serve. As outlined by One Voice, the loss of political representation in these communities, especially Black, rural, low-income neighborhoods, “manifests as underfunded classrooms, the closing of local hospitals and crumbling roads.” One Voice argues that when democratic processes work the way they are designed, there is fair access to resources and fair representation on a larger political scale.

“If we look at the number of resources for the state of Mississippi, on the state level, that are not fairly distributed to these areas in the Delta, in that particular district, what this ruling would do will be devastating. Almost like some of these areas aren’t on the map because of a lack of representation,” We Must Vote’s Toni Johnson told The Mississippi Independent.

In a red state with a history of racial stratification like Mississippi, an adverse ruling in Louisiana v. Callais creates concern that other civil rights protections could be adversely affected, such as in housing, employment and education, by suggesting that race can never be considered, even when used to remedy current discriminatory practices.

While the case—and, apparently, the constitutionality of forcing fair representation—rest in the hands of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Roberts, Mississippi’s progressive organizations are not just waiting on a decision to be handed down. Groups such as One Voice and We Must Vote are conducting town halls across the state to inform people about the case, what their rights are and what’s at stake with a potential ruling.

The organizations are also undertaking massive voter education and registration campaigns. We Must Vote is engaging historically Black colleges and universities and other college and community-college campuses across the Delta and other rural areas to they help build and support local voting programs. They are also reaching out to older populations to ensure they are educated, registered to vote and have transportation to the polls.

Through Mississippi One Voice’s Election Protection work, the organization is working to ensure that “every Mississippian understands their rights before they ever enter a precinct.” That work includes supporting returning citizens in reinstating their voting rights, and over the course of the 2024 legislative session alone, they were able to assist 10 Mississippians in this restorative process.

With their focus on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, according to Politico, the GOP would strip political power from marginalized communities across the United States in an attempt to consolidate power in their hands, not just now, but for the foreseeable future.

Image: A voting rights worker assists a voter at an information table (via wemust.vote)

State voters largely stuck with the status quo in the 2026 midterm primary elections on Tuesday, affirming the strength of incumbency in a state where federal offices have not changed party hands since 2010.

Voters chose party nominees for one U.S. Senate seat and all four of the state’s congressional districts. The nominees will compete in the general election on Nov. 3.

U.S. Senate

Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith decisively won her party’s nomination, defeating primary challenger Sarah Adlakha, a physician and novelist who ran as a political outsider critical of career politicians in Washington.

The Associated Press called the race less than an hour after polls closed. Hyde-Smith, who has held the seat since former Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her in April 2018 to replace retiring Thad Cochran, won a special election later that year and a full six-year term in 2020. She is the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress and campaigned with the endorsement of President Donald Trump, emphasizing support for Mississippi farmers, tighter immigration policies and opposition to abortion rights.

On the Democratic side, Scott Colom, the district attorney for Clay, Lowndes, Noxubee and Oktibbeha counties, won the nomination over Marine Corps veteran Albert Littell and Priscilla Williams-Till, a distant cousin of lynching victim Emmett Till.

Hyde-Smith will face Colom and Independent candidate Ty Pinkins in the November general election. Republicans have held the seat for nearly 50 years, and Mississippi is widely considered a GOP stronghold at the federal level.

2nd Congressional District

The most closely watched House race on Tuesday’s ballot was in the 2nd Congressional District, where longtime Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson defeated two primary challengers, including Evan Turnage, a 34-year-old antitrust lawyer and former senior adviser to Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren. The third candidate was Pertis Herman Williams III, who called for a new era of leadership. Thompson, 78, has held the seat since 1993, when he succeeded Mike Espy, and serves as the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee. He previously chaired the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The contest reflected a broader generational struggle playing out within the Democratic Party, as younger candidates across the country have mounted challenges against long-serving incumbents. Turnage staked his candidacy on a message of economic populism and positioned himself as a leader capable of understanding and regulating Big Tech and artificial intelligence. But Thompson’s deep roots in the district and long record proved durable. Marvin King, an associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi, noted that Thompson’s 17 terms in Congress have made him an institution in a state where voters tend to reelect incumbents.

The 2nd District stretches from the central part of the state west to the Mississippi River, including the Delta and southwestern counties, and is a majority-Black Democratic stronghold in a state led mainly by Republicans.

On the Republican side, military veteran and physician assistant Ron Eller is running against Kevin Wilson, an oilman and county supervisor, for the GOP nomination. Thompson defeated Eller in the 2024 general election with 62 percent of the vote.

1st and 3rd Congressional Districts

Republican incumbents Trent Kelly in the 1st Congressional District and Michael Guest in the 3rd Congressional District both ran unopposed for the Republican nomination. Guest will face Democrat Michael Chiaradio, a former baseball player turned regenerative farmer, who also ran unopposed in his party’s primary. Kelly will face the winner of the Democratic primary between Cliff Johnson, a University of Mississippi law professor, and former Marshall County state Rep. Kelvin Buck. President Trump endorsed all three Republican House incumbents seeking reelection.

4th Congressional District

In the 4th Congressional District along the Gulf Coast, incumbent Republican Mike Ezell faced a primary challenge from Sawyer Walters. Three Democrats—including state Rep. Jeffrey Hulum III of Gulfport—competed for their party’s nomination.

Looking ahead

Mississippi does not have in-person early voting, and the state does not register voters by party, meaning any eligible voter may participate in any party’s primary. If no candidate in a contested race receives a majority, a primary runoff is scheduled for April 7.

The general election is Nov. 3, 2026, with a general runoff set for Dec. 1 if needed. Control of Congress is not expected to hinge on Mississippi’s federal races, but the primaries offered an early read on voter engagement and party dynamics heading into the midterms.

by Justin Glowacki, Jakira Hunt and McKenna Klamm

This article was originally published by the Roy Howard Community Journalism Center

OCEAN SPRINGS—Mississippi lawmakers are considering a bill that would exempt certain roadway safety records from the state’s Public Records Act, including inspection reports used to evaluate potentially hazardous bridges and road conditions.

House Bill 1660 would remove from public disclosure “reports, surveys, schedules, lists or data compiled or collected for the purpose of identifying, evaluating or planning the safety enhancement of potential accident sites, hazardous roadway conditions or railway-highway crossings.”

Under current law, those records are not admissible in state or federal court proceedings. However, they are not explicitly exempt from the Mississippi Public Records Act.

The proposed change follows a recent ruling by the Mississippi Ethics Commission ordering the Mississippi Department of Transportation’s Office of State Aid Road Construction to release bridge inspection reports requested by the Roy Howard Community Journalism Center.

For drivers who rely on public bridges for commuting, school transportation or emergency access, inspection records can document when deterioration was first identified, how severe it was, and what actions were taken in response.

Ethics Commission ruling

The Ethics Commission’s order stemmed from a public records request filed after the closure of the Davis Bayou Bridge on Hanshaw Road in Ocean Springs.

On March 5, 2025, the Office of State Aid Road Construction—a division within the Mississippi Department of Transportation that oversees construction and maintenance of nonstate-owned roads and bridges—ordered the bridge closed after an underwater inspection found severe deterioration in its supports.

RHCJC News submitted a public records request seeking inspection reports dating back to 2019. OSARC denied the request, citing federal law that prohibits certain safety data from being admitted as evidence in court.

The center appealed the denial, arguing that the records were requested under the Public Records Act, not for legal discovery.

In a written response dated April 23, 2025, Special Assistant Attorney General Payton W. Acy again denied the request on behalf of OSARC.

The center then filed a complaint with the Mississippi Ethics Commission, which enforces the state’s public records law.

On Jan. 22, the Ethics Commission ruled that OSARC violated Section 25-61-5 of the Mississippi Public Records Act by failing to provide the requested records.

“The Ethics Commission finds that the Mississippi Department of Transportation, Office of State Aid Road Construction violated Section 25-61-5 of the Mississippi Public Records Act by failing to provide the records requested as described in the complaint,” Executive Director Tom Hood wrote in the final order.

Vehicles cross the Davis Bayou Bridge after it reopened following temporary repairs. City officials are still seeking funding for long-term structural improvements. (RHCJC News)

The commission determined that federal law limiting the use of safety data in court does not address public access under state transparency laws and does not exempt the records from disclosure under the Public Records Act.

The commission ordered OSARC to provide a cost estimate for the requested records within seven days.

As of this publication—over a month following the order—the RHCJC News had not received a cost estimate or the requested documents.

RHCJC News also sought comment from the Mississippi Ethics Commission, requesting an in-person interview by email on Feb. 16 and Feb. 18 and calling the commission’s office on Feb. 16, 17 and 18. As of publication, the commission had not responded.

The legislation

State Rep. Steve Massengill (R-District 13) and chair of the House Transportation Committee, introduced House Bill 1660 in the days surrounding the Ethics Commission’s final order.

The Mississippi House of Representatives passed the bill 110-9.

If approved by the Senate and signed into law, the bill would exempt roadway safety evaluation records from public disclosure under the Public Records Act, including inspection reports used to assess accident risks or structural conditions.

RHCJC News requested comment from Massengill by email on Feb. 16 and Feb. 18 and called his office on Feb. 16, 17 and 18 seeking clarification on the bill’s intent. As of publication, he had not responded.

How Mississippi compares

Federal law requires states to publish basic bridge condition ratings using a 0-to-9 scoring system that measures structural condition.

State laws vary regarding whether full inspection reports—including engineer notes, photographs and maintenance recommendations—are publicly accessible.

Texas classifies bridge inspection reports as confidential under its homeland security framework.

In Pennsylvania, a 2010 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling held that although federal law references discovery in litigation, the intent of the statute prevents public disclosure of inspection reports.

South Carolina exempts bridge designs from disclosure unless the designs are under review in a negligence case.

In Virginia, some disclosure limitations apply specifically to critical infrastructure, generally defined as transportation assets whose failure could significantly affect public safety or economic stability.

The Roy Howard Community Journalism Center did not identify other states with exemptions identical to those proposed in House Bill 1660.

House Bill 1660 would apply broadly to roads funded through federal-aid highway programs.

The bill is now in the Mississippi Senate Accountability, Efficiency, Transparency Committee.

Image: Davis Bayou bridge (via Roy Howard Community Journalism Center)

Nearly 300 bills, including measures that legislative leaders in both parties had described as priorities at the start of the session, are dead after a key legislative deadline last week.

March 3 was the deadline for House and Senate committees to pass general bills originating in the opposite chamber, which effectively kills hundreds of bills every legislative session; many other bills survived in amended form.

Teacher pay: Both chambers passed a raise but neither advanced the other’s

The session opened with public commitments from both House and Senate leadership to raise teacher pay. Mississippi teachers are, on average, the lowest paid in the country at $53,704 annually, with starting salaries just above $42,000. The legislature last enacted a meaningful pay raise in 2022, and educators have said the gains were quickly offset by rising insurance premiums and inflation. A Mississippi Department of Education survey released earlier this year counted nearly 4,000 vacant teaching positions statewide.

The Senate moved first. Senate Bill 2001, passed on Jan. 7, 2026, proposed a $2,000 raise for teachers. The House passed House Bill 1126 on Feb. 4 with a $5,000 raise, an additional $3,000 supplement for licensed special education teachers, a cap on superintendent salaries tied to teacher pay, and provisions addressing the gap in paychecks teachers experience across the December holiday period.

Neither bill received a committee vote in the opposite chamber before the deadline. House Education Committee chair Rob Roberson (R-Starkville) said weeks before the deadline that he would not call another meeting, and he did not. Senate Education Committee chair Dennis DeBar (R-Leakesville) told reporters that the ball had been in the House’s court, noting that SB 2001 had been with the House since the second day of the session. Each chamber blamed the other.

The stalemate developed during a session already defined by a confrontation over school choice. House Bill 2, Speaker Jason White’s omnibus school choice package, passed the House 61-59 in January and was killed by the Senate Education Committee in under two minutes on Feb. 4. After that vote, most education bills in the House were double-referred, a procedural tactic that makes passage more difficult. White claimed the double-referrals were not retaliatory; Senate leaders were unconvinced.

Educators have not hidden their frustration. Jason Reid, a DeSoto County teacher who drives a school bus before and after school to supplement his income, told reporters the outcome was a disappointment after both chambers had appeared committed to addressing the teacher shortage and the pay gap with other states. Roberson said on March 5 that he had not given up on a raise before the session ends. One path forward would be for Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session. Another would be a one-time teacher bonus approved before the regular session adjourns April 5.

Campaign finance online filing: recurring failure

A bill that would have required all state, county and municipal candidates to file campaign finance reports online died in the House Elections Committee when chair Noah Sanford (R-Collins) chose not to call a meeting before the deadline. The bill, Senate Bill 2589, had passed the Senate and carried support from Secretary of State Michael Watson, who has made modernizing Mississippi’s campaign finance disclosure system one of his central priorities this session, in part because federal officials have accused several local Mississippi officials of campaign finance-related bribery during the past year.

Mississippi is the only state that does not require candidates to file campaign finance reports electronically. State candidates currently file with the secretary of state’s office, county candidates with circuit clerks, and municipal candidates with municipal clerks, producing a fragmented paper-based system that advocacy groups say makes it nearly impossible for the public to search or analyze contribution data. All surrounding states have online filing requirements.

The debate in the House Elections Committee exposed a division over technology access. Sanford raised concerns about requiring elderly candidates in rural areas to file online. Rep. Shanda Yates (I-Jackson) pushed back, arguing that anyone seeking elected office should be expected to know how to use the internet. Tom Hood, director of the Mississippi Ethics Commission, told Mississippi Today that his agency moved to online filing for statements of economic interest in 2010 and that only a handful of filers have ever opted for paper alternatives. The bill would not have taken effect until 2028, giving candidates time to adjust.

A broader campaign finance reform bill, Senate Bill 2558, which would have clarified enforcement authority between the secretary of state and the attorney general, capped cash donations at $1,000, and required candidates to maintain a campaign bank account, also failed earlier in the session. It advanced out of the Senate Elections Committee but did not have enough support to pass the full Senate. A comparable House bill was killed in committee before that.

Medical cannabis bill dies after two committee votes

House Bill 1034, known as the Compassionate Access to Medical Cannabis Act, or Ryan’s Law, would have required hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and hospice facilities to permit terminally ill patients with valid medical cannabis cards to use cannabis during inpatient stays. Smoking and vaping would have been prohibited. The patient or a designated caregiver would have been responsible for acquiring, storing and administering the cannabis, not facility staff.

The Senate Public Health Committee voted to kill the bill in late February. Sen. Brice Wiggins (R-Pascagoula) moved to reconsider, and the committee took it up again on March 3. Sen. Angela Hill (R-Picayune) had argued at the earlier hearing that the bill created an unworkable situation for hospital physicians and suggested that patients who want to use cannabis should seek out facilities already willing to accommodate it. The committee again declined to advance the bill.

Mississippi’s medical cannabis program, signed into law in February 2022 and operational since January 2023, does not authorize cannabis use in hospital settings. The program now has more than 52,000 enrolled patients.

Two narrower cannabis bills survived, though both were amended

House Bill 895, authored by Rep. Lee Yancey (R-Brandon), originally proposed several program changes: extending patient card validity from one year to two; eliminating the mandatory six-month follow-up appointment; removing the concentration cap on cannabis oils and tinctures; and extending caretaker card validity from one year to five years. In the Senate committee, Sen. Kevin Blackwell (R-Southaven) amended the bill to retain only two provisions: the concentration cap removal and a two-year caretaker card extension. The amended version passed committee, but most of Yancey’s original language did not survive.

House Bill 1152, also authored by Yancey and titled the Right to Try Medical Cannabis Act, passed the House 104-7 in early February. It would create a petition pathway for patients with serious conditions not currently listed among the program’s qualifying diagnoses to seek case-by-case approval from the state health officer. The patient’s treating provider must document that all conventional treatments have been exhausted. The state health officer’s decision is final and not subject to appeal. The bill was referred to the Senate Public Health Committee, where its fate remains pending.

Early voting blocked again; absentee overhaul still moving

A Senate bill that would have established no-excuse early voting for all registered Mississippi voters died in the House Elections Committee when House Elections Committee when chair Sanford declined to call a meeting before the deadline. Mississippi is one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.

Sen. Jeremy England (R-Vancleave), who chairs the Senate Elections Committee, has advanced early voting legislation for three consecutive sessions. In 2024, his bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support and died in Sanford’s committee without a vote. In 2025, an early voting bill passed both chambers overwhelmingly, but Senate leaders declined to send it to Gov. Reeves after England received word the governor would veto it. Reeves has been publicly opposed to no-excuse early voting. England has noted that the Republican National Committee encouraged GOP voters to cast early ballots in states that allow it during the 2024 presidential election.

What did survive the deadline was a more limited measure. Both chambers have passed bills to overhaul the mechanics of in-person absentee voting, replacing the ballot-envelope system with direct machine tabulation. The House bill, HB 447, retains the existing 45-day in-person absentee window. The Senate version compresses it to 22 days. A conference committee will negotiate the final version. Neither bill expands who qualifies to vote before Election Day.

What remains

Bills that cleared the March 3 deadline now face floor votes in the opposite chamber and a second round of committee deadlines in mid-March. The absentee voting bills, the Right to Try cannabis bill, and the SHIELD Act voter registration measure are among those still in play. The teacher pay raise bills, the hospital cannabis bill, the campaign finance online filing bill, and the early voting measure are not, absent a special session or a procedural revival.

The 2026 legislative session is scheduled to adjourn on April 5, 2026.

Image: Mississippi State Capitol building (Ryan Nave)