The public response to the 250^th birthday of the United States has been largely muted, in stark contrast to the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, which was defined by an outpouring of national pride.

Celebrating the bicentennial got underway even before the official year, with a decade of planning and events leading up to it beginning in 1975. When 1976 rolled around, there was an onslaught of red, white and blue, with endless parades, festivals and expositions, Revolutionary War reenactments and pioneer wagon trains, commemorative tchotchkes and the spectacle of tall ships visiting harbors on the East Coast. Even Queen Elizabeth showed up for the national party. An official bicentennial logo adorned everything from soft drink labels to the Kennedy Space Center and team jerseys at the Super Bowl.

The semiquincentennial is a different story. The date arrives at a time when the nation is deeply divided and threatened by authoritarianism, which has left many Americans wondering what, exactly, there is to celebrate. The biggest official attractions are a lightly attended, second-tier fair on the National Mall and an extravaganza that has had difficulty attracting performers.

Yet something worth celebrating can be found within the nation’s conflicted history, and it is less about the founders’ intentions than the record of what the country has actually done, including hard-won correctives prompted by a long series of bad national decisions.

America’s historical record is basically two stories braided together. Beyond the impressive list of achievements, which include crafting the Bill of Rights, winning World War II and landing on the moon, one thread is that long series of flawed decisions by those in power, most of which turned on conquest, exclusion and repression. The other thread is the dissent those decisions inspired—the people in every generation who refused to sit idly by, who forced the nation toward the ideals it proclaims yet has often failed to deliver. Together, the entwined threads make up a bewildering, inspiring, uniquely American narrative.

Progress has come almost entirely from the second thread: the refusal to tolerate wrongs. There is uncertainty about whether that will continue to be the case—or how effective any form of resistance will be, which is no doubt part of the reason for the lack of commemorative enthusiasm, yet uncertainty and unpredictability are also defining national characteristics.

No state illustrates the pattern more clearly than Mississippi, which has served as the nation’s proving ground for both its worst instincts and the movements that ultimately overcame them. The state’s tendency to test the nation was there from the outset: The colonists who occupied future Mississippi were on the wrong side of history at the founding, with the majority taking a staunchly conservative position against the nascent United States.

In 1776, the Natchez District was a loyalist refuge in British West Florida that was drawing other settlers loyal to the Crown, on lands that were forcibly taken from indigenous people, a dynamic that would accelerate in the next century when the majority of Native Americans would be expelled from the state under forced treaties. The Revolution reached the region only once, in 1778, when an American raiding party led by Capt. James Willing forced the colonists to swear an oath not to take up arms against the United States, a pledge they abandoned the moment the raiders left. The following year Spain, at war with Britain but no friend of the American revolt, seized the lower Mississippi and held the Natchez District until ceding it to the United States under the 1795 treaty that fixed the nation’s southern border, with American officials taking control in 1798.

The founding itself carried a fatal flaw that would shape Mississippi’s later history: human enslavement. For all the nation’s achievements and its advancement of many rights, the land of liberty was built on Indigenous dispossession and slavery, the latter of which remained legal in the U.S. long after it was abolished across most of the developed world. Among Western nations, only Brazil practiced legal slavery longer, until 1888. For most of America’s first century, millions of people were held in bondage, and among the states, Mississippi held the highest share of its population, more than half, enslaved.

Dissent over human bondage ran nationwide, from slave revolts led by Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner to the abolitionist movement and, finally, the Civil War that brought emancipation. There were a few Mississippi outliers: Revolutionary War veteran Isaac Ross, who immigrated to the Mississippi Territory in 1808 and directed in his will, decades before emancipation, that his enslaved workers be freed and allowed to emigrate to a colony in present-day Liberia known as Mississippi in Africa, and Newt Knight, who formed the Free State of Jones in what is today Jones County, which renounced the Confederacy during the war.

Overall, though, the tenor was set by those fateful bad decisions. Mississippi was the second Southern state to secede from the Union in 1861, once again choosing to oppose the American nation, this time declaring its position “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”

The founders’ declaration of independence had set the stage for dissent, which, in a bitter irony, would include both southern secession and the nation’s first great internal correction, Reconstruction, when the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments wrote emancipation, citizenship and the vote into the Constitution. For a few years after the war, a genuine multiracial democracy took shape in the South.

The reaction against that was swift and violent. Across the former Confederacy, white Democrats used terror and fraud to overthrow the multiracial government, including through the Mississippi Plan of 1874 and 1875, a campaign explicitly designed to restore white rule “peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.” The federal government, exhausted by the war and its aftermath, let the reaction stand.

What the reaction could not complete by force it finished by law. Across the South, states wrote disenfranchisement into their constitutions through poll taxes, literacy tests and understanding clauses that never mentioned race because they did not have to. Mississippi’s 1890 constitution, under which the state still operates, was the template the rest of the South copied, and the Jim Crow architecture it built held for three-quarters of a century. The decision to exclude people was codified, the dissent against it driven underground for a generation, and the gains of Reconstruction rolled back almost entirely. It would be decades before the pendulum swung back.

The pattern repeated into the new century, and not only over race. The 1910s opened with the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910, when union ironworkers detonated explosives that killed 21 people and the newspaper’s anti-union owner used the attack to brand all organized labor as anarchist, helping break the city’s labor movement for a generation. Industrialists of the era wielded enormous influence over the government, which often answered labor unrest with brutal force and supplied bombs to subversives so they could be arrested for setting them off. In 1914, in one of the period’s more notorious episodes, company guards and National Guard troops attacked a tent encampment of striking miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, massacring roughly two dozen people, many of them women and children. Nationwide, courts and police were routinely turned against strikers and radicals, and even advocates of birth control were prosecuted under obscenity laws.

When the U.S. entered World War I, the federal government criminalized opposition to the war through the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, jailing socialists, pacifists and immigrants for the content of their speech. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs went to prison for an antiwar address and the post office banned use of the mail for dissenting newspapers along with periodicals about contraception. The decade closed with the anarchist mail bombings of 1919, which targeted officials including the U.S. attorney general and triggered the Palmer Raids, a nationwide dragnet that arrested roughly 10,000 people without warrants and ended with the deportation of hundreds. The raids were justified by warnings of an imminent revolution that never came, and as the government’s excesses became clear, public opinion turned against them.

Out of that backlash came a wave of new organizations devoted to social justice, labor reform, racial equality, public health and voting rights, among them the National Urban League, the organization that became Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920 to fight the kind of abuses the Palmer Raids embodied.

Yet the same machinery that branded dissent as treason would return under Joseph McCarthy, alongside lynchings that terrorized Black communities and a series of assassinations that punctuated the midcentury. It was in this stretch that Mississippi assumed its preeminent role as a national proving ground.

The American story of dissent surfaced most powerfully during the civil rights movement. The murder of Emmett Till, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the killings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, the Freedom Summer registration drives and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge at the 1964 Democratic convention were the movement at its most exposed and most consequential. The people who forced the nation to honor the Fifteenth Amendment did it against the worst the states could do to them, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was in large part a result of their work. This correction is among the clearest advancements in the entire 250 years that the country can unequivocally celebrate, and it belongs entirely to the dissenting story.

The temptation at an anniversary like this one is to flatten the two stories into a single comfortable one, about a nation that simply argues with itself and always has. But to flatten the story is to diminish it, and carries real perils. Secession and the Freedom Rides were both, in a sense, Americans defying the federal order. They were not morally equivalent. One defended slavery, the other demanded the right to vote. American history means nothing if the distinction between the decision and the refusal is allowed to dissolve.

The present looks less unprecedented held against that record. The nation is again arguing over who counts as a citizen and who gets to vote, again watching a government turn its power against citizens and others whom it treats as enemies, again seeing protests met with reactionary force. The killing of George Floyd in 2020 put millions in the streets demanding the country honor the equality it advertises—the same demand the marchers of 1965 and antiwar protesters in the latter part of the decade made. The assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, sought to overturn an election by force—the same refusal of a lawful result that the Mississippi Plan perfected in 1875. Last year’s No Kings protests against executive overreach belong to the older tradition of dissent, not the reaction against it. The arguments of 2026 are the arguments of 1865 and 1919 and 1965 in new dress, and the threat to democracy that many describe as unprecedented has 250 years of precedent.

So, the question of what there is to celebrate has an answer, though it is not about sentimentality or forced national pride. Neither is it about decisions relative to slavery, secession, disenfranchisement or repression, nor the long national habit of choosing exclusion and calling it order. What is worth marking at 250 is the recurring fact that those decisions were never the last word, that someone in every generation refused them, and that what the country can take the greatest pride in was won by the people who did the refusing.

That is the part of the story that reads as true progress, and on the Fourth of July, it is the part worthy of fireworks.

Image: Montage of images of historical Mississippi figures and scenes, including, left to right, Spanish military leader Bernardo de Gálvez; Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner; civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer; mixed French and Choctaw chief Greenwood Leflore; steamboats racing on the Mississippi River; pioneering journalist, educator and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells; James Meredith, who integrated Ole Miss; Revolutionary War veteran Isaac Ross; blues musician Robert Johnson; Mississippi’s first Black congressman after Reconstruction, Robert Clark; Medgar Evers; Natchez Indians fighting French colonial forces; the Mississippi State Capitol; and Emmett Till (all via Creative Commons); woman with sparkler (Gerd Altmann via publicdomainpictures.net)

Several new Mississippi laws are scheduled to take effect July 1, bringing major changes to juvenile justice, voting procedures and child custody. One law is partially tied up in federal court, but all three are worth watching.

Mississippi policy guru Hannah Williams is back to tell you what you need to know.

First, Senate Bill 2710 expands penalties for crimes involving firearms.

The new law allows children as young as 10 years old who are charged with certain violent crimes while possessing a firearm to be transferred to adult court and prosecuted as adults. It also creates penalties for adults who knowingly provide firearms used in those crimes.

The measure establishes a new felony offense for shooting into a crowd of two or more people, regardless of whether anyone is actually struck.

Supporters, including Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, say the law is needed to address rising youth gun violence and repeat firearm offenses.

Critics argue that prosecuting more children as adults could deepen the school-to-prison pipeline, overlooks research on adolescent brain development and raises concerns about placing children in the adult criminal justice system.

Read more after the video.

Next, House Bill 2588, known as the Shield Act (Safeguard Honesty, Integrity, and Elections for Lasting Democracy Act), was also scheduled to take effect July 1. However, a federal judge has blocked part of the law involving the federal SAVE database while legal challenges continue.

If fully implemented, the law would require election officials to verify a voter’s citizenship through multiple government databases. If citizenship cannot be confirmed, applicants would have to provide documentation proving they are U.S. citizens before completing registration.

The law also requires annual reviews of Mississippi’s voter rolls using the SAVE database. If officials cannot verify a registered voter’s citizenship, that voter’s registration would be flagged while the matter is investigated.

Supporters say the law helps ensure only eligible citizens register to vote.

Opponents warn it could create barriers for eligible voters whose records contain discrepancies, including people who have changed their names after marriage or students who register to vote while attending college in Mississippi.

We’ll continue following the court proceedings and what they mean for implementation.

Finally, House Bill 1662 creates a legal presumption that equal (50/50) physical custody is in a child’s best interest.

The law does not require every custody case to end with equal parenting time. Instead, it shifts the starting point for judges, meaning a parent seeking primary physical custody will generally need to show why an equal custody arrangement would not be in the child’s best interest.

Supporters say the change encourages both parents to remain actively involved in their children’s lives.

Critics question whether a default 50/50 framework adequately accounts for complicated family situations and whether it could create unintended consequences in difficult custody disputes.

Either way, it marks one of the most significant changes to Mississippi child custody law in decades.

Other notable laws taking effect include:

• House Bill 525, which sets mandatory minimum sentences for sexual battery, five to 30 years for a first offense and 10 to 40 for a second, scaled by the age of the victim. The law also makes the death penalty available in the most severe cases, where a child 12 or younger is sexually abused and suffers injuries that damage internal organs. Only a few states allow capital punishment for child sexual battery.

• Known as Jill’s Law, House Bill 565 requires most health insurance plans in the state, including private plans, Medicaid and the State and School Employees Health Insurance Plan, to cover biomarker testing when clinical evidence supports it. Biomarkers are biological indicators, detected through imaging or fluid samples, that can reveal a disease or the risk of developing one.

• House Bill 1935, which gives Mississippi teachers a $2,000 raise. Special education teachers receive an additional $2,000, for $4,000 total, and assistant teachers, school psychologists and occupational therapists also receive $2,000. School resource officers get a $5,000 increase.

• Senate Bill 2369, which withholds casino and gaming winnings from people who are behind on child support. The law takes effect today, though the Gaming Commission and the Department of Human Services have until Jan. 1, 2027, to build the system. About 170,000 of Mississippi’s roughly 200,000 child support cases involve arrearages.

A complete list of laws taking effect July 1 is available on the legislature’s website.

As always, stay informed. Ask questions. And read the bill—because somebody has to.

Additional reporting by Derrion Arrington

Image: Hannah Williams (courtesy)

U.S. Census data shows that between April 2020 and July 2025, the population of the southern United States led the nation in growth, yet Mississippi lost population, with numerous counties showing dramatic declines.

Based on Census Bureau population trends, a Washington Post analysis published on Tuesday reported that across every age group, the Southeast grew faster than any other region between April 1, 2020, and July 1, 2025—by 6 percent, nearly double the national average.

Yet, Mississippi stands out in the Post’s data map for its departure from the trend. Overall, the state’s population continued to decline, most dramatically in the Delta and in rural counties along the Mississippi River in the southwestern part of the state. Isolated parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas also showed notable declines, though all those states aside from Louisiana also showed pockets of significant growth and greater overall population stability.

As the Post also recently reported, census numbers help determine how the federal government allocates billions in funding to states and municipalities, as well as how leaders draw up legislative districts and how much representation each state gets in Congress. Census data also influences where businesses choose to locate.

Mississippi lost a congressional seat following the 2000 Census due to population decline. As a result of shifting demographics and continuing population decline, the state could lose another seat when data is compiled from the 2030 Census, which would leave it with only three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a University of Mississippi population researcher has warned.

According to a previous analysis of census data by Mississippi Today, ReThink Mississippi and the University of Mississippi’s Center for Population Studies, the state’s 2024 population stood at 2,943,045—down nearly 45,000 from its peak in 2014. The state ranked 49th in population change during the preceding decade, with only West Virginia showing a greater loss.

Image: Population trend data map (via the Washington Post)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law that counts absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within five business days, rejecting a challenge brought by the Republican National Committee and turning back an effort that could have ended similar grace periods in more than a dozen states before the November midterms.

The 5-4 decision in Watson v. Republican National Committee split the court along unusual lines. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices, a coalition that crossed the usual ideological divide to side with the state. The four remaining conservatives dissented.

The case turned on whether the federal statutes that fix a single national Election Day override a state’s decision to count ballots that arrive afterward. Barrett wrote that they do not. The federal laws require the electorate’s choice to be made on Election Day, she reasoned, and that requirement is satisfied so long as Election Day is the deadline for voters to cast their ballots, as it is in Mississippi. Federal law sets when a ballot must be cast, in other words, not when it must be received.

The ruling is a defeat for the RNC, the Mississippi Republican Party and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, which brought the suit, and for the Trump administration, which backed the challenge. President Trump has repeatedly attacked mail voting and moved to curtail it. The law they sought to strike down was defended by a fellow Republican, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, who argued that the state’s grace period protects voters who rely on the mail, including military and overseas voters, older voters and rural voters.

Mississippi is one of 14 states and the District of Columbia that count mail ballots arriving after Election Day if they were postmarked in time; 29 states and D.C. allow it for at least some military and overseas ballots. A ruling for the RNC would have wiped out those windows for federal races. Instead, the law stands, and the decision affirms that states retain the authority to set their own ballot-receipt rules.

The case reached the court after a split in the lower courts. A federal district judge upheld the Mississippi law in July 2024; the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that October, holding that federal law requires ballots for federal office to be both cast and received by Election Day, and the Supreme Court heard argument March 23, 2026. At argument, several justices had appeared skeptical of the state’s position, making Monday’s outcome a surprise.

“Common sense prevailed today,” said Bradley Heard, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, in the organization’s news release. “When a voter mails a ballot postmarked by Election Day and it arrives within the allotted window of time, they have done what the law requires—laws which have been on the books since as early as the Civil War. Votes cast by mail are valid votes, and all valid votes should be counted.”

Image: U.S. Supreme Court justices (via supremecourt.gov)

On July 1, 2026, a Mississippi law will take effect that requires people to prove citizenship before their voter registration is accepted. Yet nine days before that deadline, a federal judge blocked access to the database the law depends on.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled on June 22, 2026, that the Trump administration’s revamped version of the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE—which states had begun using to check their voter rolls—was unlawful and could no longer be used.

The judge found that the overhaul aggregated Americans’ personal data in violation of federal privacy law and relied on citizenship records the government “knew to be unreliable” in a way that “threatens the sacred right to vote.” The ruling did not eliminate SAVE itself, the decades-old benefits-verification program, but it blocked the expanded version that made mass voter-roll checks possible.

The injunction deprives Mississippi’s SHIELD Act—the Safeguard Honest Integrity in Elections for Lasting Democracy Act, signed by Gov. Tate Reeves in April—of its primary tool. What that means for implementation of the state law is unclear. Neither Reeves nor Secretary of State Michael Watson (whose office regulates elections) responded to requests for comment from The Mississippi Independent.

The SHIELD Act directs local registrars to verify an applicant’s citizenship against the federal database, and tasks the secretary of state with running the entire voter roll against it every year. If the database is unavailable, the state could require voters to produce documentary proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate, a passport or naturalization papers.

Whatever the state decides, the basic dynamic—placing the burden of proof on the voter—has a long history in Mississippi, stretching back to the Reconstruction era, when Black citizens gained the right to vote for the first time. From that point until the Voting Rights Passed in 1965, Mississippi officials used various mechanisms to deter Black voting, from poll taxes to requirements to interpret clauses of the state constitution. State Democrats argue that the SHIELD Act falls within this dynamic as “a poll tax dressed up in modern language.”

In the words of its own architects, the state’s 1890 constitutional convention was called to disenfranchise Black Mississippians by legal means, given that violent intimidation tactics used during the previous 15 years had prompted intermittent federal intervention. The resulting provisions did not mention race, though that was clearly their focus. The constitution included rules that the voter, not the state, had to satisfy, which were designed to exclude Black Mississippians who would be least able to comply.

Section 243 of the 1890 constitution established a poll tax of two dollars, payable to the county school fund by the first day of February in the year a man (only males had the right at the time) wished to vote. Beyond the expense, which was no small thing for a poor voter, the catch was proving that it had been paid. An official receipt was the only acceptable proof, and neither the registrar nor the tax collector kept a permanent record of who had paid. A man who paid in February and lost his receipt by November could not vote.

In 1896, the Mississippi Supreme Court, in Ratliff v. Beale, described the poll tax, the proceeds of which were to go to public schools, as designed “primarily as a clog upon the franchise.” Though the burden of proving the right to vote rested on the voter, the court ruled specifically on the use in liens for nonpayment of the tax. Defenders of the constitutional clause asked: “Can it be that the poll tax was imposed to exclude negroes from voting? The constitution says it was to aid common schools. Is that a lie? We copied from Massachusetts’ constitution. Was that to exclude negroes?”

In its ruling, the court noted: “It is evident therefore that the [constitutional] convention had before it for consideration two antagonistic propositions—one to levy a poll tax as a revenue measure and to make its payment compulsory; the other to impose the tax as one of many devices for excluding from the franchise a large number of a class of persons, which class it was impracticable wholly to exclude and not desirable wholly to admit. In our opinion, the clause was primarily intended by the framers of the constitution as a clog upon the franchise, and, secondarily and incidentally only, as a means of revenue.”

The constitution’s Section 241 set residency requirements of two years in the state and one year in the election district—the longest in the United States, and the only one-year district requirement in the nation. The requirement operated against the labor force that the cotton economy had produced. A sharecropper who moved from a plantation in one county to another in a different county, in pursuit of a better contract, was, by the next election, ineligible to vote in either place. The state did not have to prove that he had moved. He had to prove that he had stayed.

Section 244, the so-called understanding clause, was the third lock on the door. It required a would-be voter to read a section of the constitution or understand it when it was read to him and give a reasonable interpretation to the satisfaction of the registrar, who in most cases was white and could choose to be unsatisfied. The man who was reportedly behind this clause was James Z. George, who played a leading role in crafting the constitution’s language. George, a former slaveowner who had signed the state’s secession ordinance, served as a general in the Confederate army and was a state supreme court justice and later a U.S. senator.

The Section 244 provision sparked opposition even in the white press of the day, with more than 30 state newspapers editorializing against it. It passed anyway and handed the registrar a test that no applicant could be sure of passing while leaving the onus on the voter.

Together, the three sections had the same effect as the terrorism and violence of the previous Reconstruction era: rapidly diminished Black voting. Mississippi thus wrote the template, and every other Southern state copied it. Within a decade, Black voter registration across the South collapsed from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. This codified disenfranchisement architecture held for 75 years.

What broke the system of disenfranchisement was the removal of the registrar’s discretion. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 sent federal examiners into the counties where local officials had used tests like the understanding clause to keep the rolls uniformly white, and it required jurisdictions with the worst records—Mississippi among them—to clear any change in voting procedure with the federal government before it could take effect. The law took the burden of proof off the voter and put it on the state. Mississippi now had to prove a change was not discriminatory before it could impose it. Black registration in the state climbed from single digits in some counties to majorities within a few years.

That arrangement lasted until 2013. In Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the formula that determined which jurisdictions had to clear their voting changes in advance, ending the preclearance requirement in practice. The discretion the Voting Rights Act had taken from the states was returned to them. Mississippi could again change the rules of registration without first proving to anyone that the change would not fall along racial lines.

The SHIELD Act makes use of that returned discretion. Like the 1890 poll tax and understanding clause, it does not name race, but it again puts the responsibility for proving the right to vote on citizens who are at the mercy of records over which they have no control. It requires proof of citizenship, checked against the federal database, a system built to confirm eligibility for public benefits, not to vet voter rolls. Even before the federal judge enjoined sharing the database, Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor called it “notoriously inaccurate”—a concern echoed in the June ruling. Where it cannot confirm a voter, the voter must produce other documents.

Roughly four in five Mississippians do not hold a passport. Hundreds of thousands of Mississippi women have married names that do not match the names on their birth certificates. The citizens least likely to be able to produce a birth certificate are older Black Mississippians, many of whom were born in segregated or under-resourced facilities where the births of Black infants were not consistently recorded. The Southern Poverty Law Center has estimated the law could affect more than a million Mississippians.

The voters that the SHIELD Act is most likely to turn away are the same cohort that the 1890 constitution turned away, and for the same structural reason: The state requires proof that in some cases the citizen might not be able to furnish. At stake is the linchpin of democracy, the right to vote.

In 1890, it was a poll-tax receipt, a copy of which the state did not keep. In 2026 it is a birth certificate checked against a database that is no longer accessible. Both provisions were written in race-neutral language, with the burden of proof on the voter and no state responsibility to ease the registration process.

Image: Harper’s Weekly drawing of newly enfranchised Black voters casting ballots for the first time (via Library of Congress)

As a patient at Georgia Regional Hospital, a mental health facility in Atlanta, Elaine Wilson felt trapped. “I felt like I was in a little box... You couldn’t do anything there but sleep or eat or smoke. That’s all you could do,” she told a local newspaper reporter in April 1999.

Lois Curtis had been in and out of the same hospital, starting when she was 11, in the facility’s adolescent unit. By the time she was a young adult, prescribed medications that kept her sedated, she was miserable and expressed that she wanted to live a normal life in her community.

Eventually, Curtis and Wilson formed a bond over their circumstances. “I prayed to God. I cried at night so I prayed to God every night in my bed. Elaine asked me to pray for her to get out too, so I did,” Curtis recalled later.

A legal aid attorney helped the women challenge their confinement and sue the state. In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, people have a right to live in communities and that governments have an obligation to provide disabled people with appropriate support to do so. That decision, known as L.C. v. Olmstead—or simply, Olmstead—was a game changer that provided legal protections against the long-held practice of casting people with disabilities aside and warehousing them in hospitals, including mental health institutions.

Since then, there have been dozens of statewide investigations, negotiated settlement agreements, amicus briefs in private and public lawsuits and consent decrees. As of 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice was involved in enforcing 10 Olmstead settlements and was involved in active litigation in Texas and Mississippi.

Last week, the Trump Administration threw into question the future of these legal protections through the release of a DOJ memo which argues that states are not obligated to provide community- or home-based services to people with disabilities, the crux of Olmstead. The question could become particularly urgent in Mississippi, which ranks second for the share of people with disabilities—behind only West Virginia—with 18.5 percent of all state residents having a disability.

The day the DOJ memo came out, Joy Hogge, the outgoing executive director of Families as Allies, a nonprofit that supports families with children who have mental health challenges, was at a conference in Oxford giving a presentation that stressed Olmstead’s role in advancing civil rights for people with disabilities, but offered a warning.

“We need to be careful—just because a right exists now, that doesn’t mean it’s going to continue to exist. We need to be aware of how it came to be and ways that it could be assaulted,” Hogge told The Mississippi Independent.

The 39-page memo, authored by Lanora Christine Petti, a deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ, came out days before the June 22, 2026, anniversary of the Olmstead ruling and argues that federal law does not require statutes to treat people with mental disabilities in the most integrated setting possible; that federal agencies lack the authority to impose integration mandates on states; and, contrary to longstanding practice, that Olmstead doesn’t set a firm requirement for states to move people out of institutions into community settings.

Backlash from advocates was swift. Allie Wheelz, an Oklahoma-based activist and social media influencer, wrote on Facebook that the memo, “puts in writing the horrible ableist attitudes of this [Trump] Administration and is incredibly alarming. The positioning in the document threatens decades of shared understanding about how we best include people with disabilities and keep people at home with our families.”

National advocacy organizations, some of which, ironically, had just made posts acknowledging the Olmstead anniversary, criticized the move but also stressed that the memo is not legally binding and does not change the law.

Jane Carroll, the communications director for Disability Rights Mississippi, told The Mississippi Independent, “We certainly don’t want people to ignore it but we don’t want anyone to panic because we do have nearly 30 years of legal precedent on our side.”

In Carroll’s view, “This has been a universally accepted thing to fight for. And because it is very distinctly American values—people being free to choose where they live, and have meaningful opportunity in their communities, and self determination. Focusing on those values and upholding those values is more important now than ever.”

The Trump administration’s DOJ memo represents a stark reversal from the agency’s position under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. A 2011 DOJ investigation prompted a 2016 lawsuit against the state of Mississippi for violating federal law by “failing to provide adults with mental illness with necessary integrated, community-based mental health services.”

“For far too long, Mississippi has failed people with mental illness, violating their civil rights by confining them in isolating institutions,” then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a news release at the time. “Our lawsuit seeks to end these injustices, and it sends a clear signal that we will continue to fight for the full rights and liberties of Americans with mental illness.”

In 2019, after a month-long trial, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves ruled in favor of the federal government. Mississippi appealed and, in 2023 the U.S. 5th Circuit reversed Reeves decision. Then, under the supervision of the Biden Administration, the Justice Department declined to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could have imperiled constitutional protections for all people with disabilities.

Observers note striking similarities between the June DOJ memo and Mississippi’s arguments in appealing the 2016 lawsuit at the Fifth Circuit. Both documents center on skepticism about the ADA’s community-integration mandate, a narrow interpretation of Olmstead and concerns about federal oversight of state mental-health policy. Given the state’s position in that case, it is unclear whether the DOJ memo will have an immediate impact on the state’s mental-health services. An email to the Mississippi Department of Mental Health’s communications director was not immediately returned this week.

Hogge and Carroll urged citizens to contact their members of Congress and other policymakers to express concerns about the DOJ’s Olmstead memo.

“There’s really very little evidence, if any, that putting someone in an institution helps them. There’s lots of evidence that it harms them,” Hogge said.

Community-based care is also less expensive than institution-based care with Medicaid spending $17,298 per person for home and community based care compared to $54,462 for individuals in institutional settings, according to 2023 Medicaid data.

Hogge observed: “It’s helpful for people to stop and think about the person you know you would consider the most mentally healthy, and to think: How would they feel if they got picked up, often by a sheriff, taken to some place where they don’t know anybody, where they have food that’s unfamiliar to them, where they have to sleep in this bed that they didn’t pick and all these people around them that they don’t know trying to get them to do stuff they don’t want to do.”

“Institutions are not magical places,” Hogge said. “The model itself creates a lot of stress and makes people’s mental health worse. And we know it is very hard to completely control for things like abuse that can happen in institutions — so they’re not a magic solution and they’re not cheaper than community care.”

Image: Lois Curtis with President Barack Obama (via White House archive)

In an early example of how the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling will influence voting rights cases on the ground, a federal judge in Oxford, Mississippi on Tuesday upheld DeSoto County’s challenged voting districts, ruling that Black residents failed to prove the county’s 2022 redistricting map dilutes their votes under the new standard.

Senior U.S. District Judge Glen H. Davidson found that the plaintiffs—two NAACP members, the DeSoto County NAACP’s Unit 5574 and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority—did not meet any of the three threshold requirements a vote-dilution claim must clear under the Supreme Court’s new interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The judgment, entered after a 12-day bench trial in Oxford, ends a case filed in September 2024 over districts that govern 25 elected offices across the fast-growing county.

“Plaintiffs did not present enough evidence to support a strong inference that the County intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Davidson wrote in the June 24, 2026, ruling.

DeSoto County’s Black population grew to 31.71 percent in the 2020 census, up from 22.56 percent a decade earlier. All five members of the county’s board of supervisors, which drew the map, are white, as are all five members of its election commission. The plaintiffs argued a county that is nearly a third Black should be able to elect a candidate of its choice in at least one of five districts.

The ruling turned on Louisiana v. Callais, which the Supreme Court decided on April 26, 2026, as the DeSoto trial was already underway. The decision rewrote the test courts use to weigh Section 2 claims, and Davidson took additional briefing from both sides before applying the new framework rather than the one in place when the trial began.

Under his reading of Callais, the judge barred any use of race in drawing the sample maps that plaintiffs must offer to show a fairer plan is possible. The plaintiffs’ mapping expert, William S. Cooper, testified that he placed “green dots” over areas at least 30 percent Black to guide his work, a method he said kept race only “in the background.” Davidson held that even background use now disqualifies the maps.

The judge further found that the proposed maps failed to honor the county’s own districting goals, including keeping incumbents in their districts and avoiding splits of established communities. Crediting defense expert Sean Trende, Davidson pointed to “core retention” figures showing how much an altered map would shift incumbents’ existing constituencies—a measure the Supreme Court had downplayed in a 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan but which the judge found newly useful.

On the second and third requirements—whether voting in DeSoto County breaks along racial lines—Davidson found that the plaintiffs again came up short. He wrote that the new standard demands proof of racial bloc voting that “cannot be explained by partisan affiliation,” and that the plaintiffs’ expert, Jacob Grumbach, acknowledged that he did not control for party and considered it inappropriate to do so.

The judge instead credited defense expert John Alford, who controlled for partisanship and found no difference in how voters behaved based on a candidate’s race within the pool of Democratic contenders. A second plaintiffs’ expert, Christopher Bonneau, offered what Davidson called a single example, and the judge said errors corrected during Bonneau’s testimony left it of “little value.”

Because the plaintiffs failed on all three threshold requirements, Davidson did not reach the broader “totality of the circumstances” inquiry that typically anchors a vote-dilution case.

The decision lands amid a wave of litigation testing what Callais means for minority voters across the South. The opinion itself acknowledges the tension at the center of that fight, noting that the Supreme Court did not formally overrule Milligan even as it imposed a markedly tougher test—the same friction voting-rights advocates have warned would make Section 2 claims far harder to win.

The plaintiffs had pressed for an expedited trial in hopes of forcing special elections under a fairer map. Whether they appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit remains to be seen. The county had argued at multiple points that no private individual or group may even bring a Section 2 suit, a position the Fifth Circuit has rejected; Davidson noted the county preserved the issue for appeal without arguing it before him.

Image: Federal courthouse, Oxford, Mississippi (via the court’s website)

The response to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that rejected key provisions of the Voting Rights Act has been starkly divided in Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of Black residents in the nation.

Mississippi Democratic Party chair Cheikh Taylor sees state redistricting efforts underway following the ruling as an attempt to override the wishes of voters to preserve Republican majorities.

Taylor described a resulting move by Secretary of State Michael Watson to prepare for district revisions as part of a partisan effort. “Let’s be clear about what Michael Watson is doing,” Taylor told The Mississippi Independent. “He is laying the administrative groundwork to hand Republicans a political windfall before a single public hearing has been held, before a single map has been drawn, and before Mississippi voters have had any say. The 2024 elections proved that when Black Mississippians have fair representation, Democrats win. That is exactly why Republicans are in such a hurry to turn back the clock.”

The court-ordered legislative districts that Taylor pointed to delivered for Democrats in the state’s 2025 special elections, with the party’s candidates winning all three of the newly drawn majority-Black seats.

Republicans have read the same results and assumed a different posture. State Sen. Jeremy England, a Vancleave Republican on the Senate Redistricting Committee, believes that the urgency around redistricting had eased and that the state could afford to wait on the courts.

“As I’ve said before, we’ve kind of seen some of the rhetoric die down, and I think that’s helped maybe cooler heads prevail,” England told The Mississippi Independent. “Now what we’re waiting on is if that court is just going to vacate that order. That may reinstall those maps without us having to take any action.”

It is not yet known whether the courts will order the state to revert to its previous maps or draw new ones, but Watson has instructed his staff to begin preparing the state’s election system to revert to the legislative maps that Mississippi used before a lower federal court ordered them redrawn, according to a June 9 letter he sent to Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and House Speaker Jason White.

“In light of the recent ruling by the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais et al. and its direct impact on the existing legislative district maps, coupled with my statutory duty as Mississippi’s Chief Elections Officer, I write to inform you I have instructed my team to begin preparing the Statewide Elections Management System (SEMS) for a reversion to the original 2022 legislative district maps adopted by the Mississippi Legislature,” Watson, a two-term secretary of state and former state senator who is now running for lieutenant governor, wrote in his letter.

In July 2024, a three-judge panel ruled that the legislative districts the legislature adopted in 2022 diluted Black voting strength and ordered the state to draw additional majority-Black districts in the DeSoto County area and the Pine Belt. The legislature redrew the lines in 2025. In the special elections held that November, Democrats flipped two state Senate seats and a House seat, ending a Republican supermajority that the party had held in the Senate for 13 years. In May 2026, weeks after deciding Callais, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the order behind those elections. Reverting to the 2022 maps would restore the districts that the lower court had found unlawful.

Watson framed the move as administrative preparation required by his official duties, not a decision that the maps will change. He laid out a timeline that narrows the window for redrawing districts before the next elections. No changes to the election system may be made while an election is underway, he wrote, which for 2026 bars changes from 60 days before Election Day (Nov. 3, 2026) until the election is certified in mid-December, and for 2027 from early June through mid-December. His staff estimates circuit clerks would need at least a month to reinstall the 2022 maps and meet their other legal duties.

Whether a reversion is legally clean is unsettled. Though the Supreme Court vacated the order that forced the 2025 redistricting, the laws the legislature passed in 2025 to draw the new districts remain on the books, which leaves open the question of whether reverting to the 2022 lines would conflict with statutes still in force. The committees that Hosemann and White formed to study redistricting have not drawn any maps, and two of the three Mississippi redistricting cases remain in court.

If the courts do not resolve the legislative maps on their own, lawmakers could be called into a special session later this year, before the period for 2027 candidate qualifying begins on Jan. 1, 2027.

Images: Side-by-sides of Jeremy England and Cheikh Taylor (via their official Facebook pages)

As the regional electric utility Entergy searches for new power sources for rapidly expanding data centers, the buzz in Port Gibson, Mississippi is that a new reactor will be built at the Grand Gulf nuclear plant to service a facility under construction in Louisiana.

Entergy supplies electricity and operates subsidiary companies in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, and operates Grand Gulf, Mississippi’s only nuclear power plant. Among the data centers it will provide power to is the $10 billion Louisiana data center known as Hyperion, under construction near Monroe, Louisiana, which will be the largest of social media giant Meta’s 20 facilities worldwide.

Though there is no reported link between Grand Gulf and Hyperion, local speculation is not far off the mark: Other data centers in Mississippi will need massive amounts of electricity, which could make another nuclear reactor more attractive.

At its core, the speculation is rooted in a lack of transparency surrounding the construction of data centers and related utility infrastructure across the South. Local residents have become acutely aware of the potential for significant, unexpected developments as a result of deals negotiated off-screen. When reliable information is not forthcoming, the rumor mill clicks into gear.

A case in point is Clinton, Mississippi, where officials withheld the details of a planned Amazon data center now under construction until the deal was done. Mayor Will Purdie said the reason for withholding an announcement was that the developer was still in negotiations about “some aspects of the project.” That left local media and freelance sleuths to find out what was happening at the site. The investment cost for the project varies according to the source, from $750 million to $1 billion.

Purdie later said the facility—the fourth major Amazon investment in the metro Jackson area—will connect to Entergy’s electricity grid and will not cause problems with air or noise pollution that sparked a backlash against xAI’s Grok facility in Southaven, Mississippi. Purdie also claimed the facility will be air cooled and will not require the large volumes of water that other data centers use.

Yet even the mayor’s explanation for not having apprised the public was vague, and many residents are growing skeptical of such official assurances. Last month, environmental activist Erin Brockovich pointed out that people in communities near new data centers often feel the projects are being “shoved down their throat in secrecy.”

“The single most common concern—more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills—is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency,” Brockovich wrote, referencing her efforts to gather public input about data centers and map the facilities across the U.S.

Brockovich said she was not arguing against data centers or A.I. but against “the pattern our map documents: projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.”

In response to negative public reactions, Clinton officials have promised to be more forthcoming about Amazon’s data center, but it is unclear how public input might factor into a project that has already been approved. Entergy Mississippi meanwhile announced that Amazon will pay all costs associated with powering the facility, including new energy infrastructure and upgrades to strengthen overall grid reliability.

Data centers are increasingly controversial for multiple reasons: the noise they generate, their intrusiveness compared with the relatively small number of permanent jobs they create, the potential for air and water pollution, and their outsized demands for coolant water and electricity. Public misgivings are often treated as a potential threat to multi-billion dollar investments. Given the air of secrecy, it is unclear precisely how many data centers are planned in Mississippi, with various websites listing from seven to 29 proposed, announced, under construction or in operation. Some data centers draw as much electricity as a small or medium sized city in a single day.

Across the river, Entergy has said that it will use a combination of “clean and renewable” energy sources to power Louisiana’s Hyperion data center and has broken ground on a new substation for that purpose. An agreement with the Louisiana Public Service Commission allows Entergy Louisiana to move forward with $6 billion in major infrastructure investments including a 10,000-acre solar farm, three natural gas turbines and 100 miles of new transmission lines. There is no mention of Grand Gulf. Massive solar farms and powerlines are also part of the mix in Mississippi.

Entergy has said in regulatory filings that Hyperion’s immense power needs will require a historic buildout of power plants—enough to fuel a more than 50 percent increase in its Louisiana power-generation capacity, according to reporting from the Times-Picayune. The construction of necessary infrastructure there has likewise been shrouded in secrecy.

There is no question that data centers will require significant new infrastructure and that utilities will reap financial benefits, and infrastructure expansions could include another reactor at Grand Gulf. Yet in response to concerns that utility companies will pass along the cost of building new infrastructure to residential and other commercial customers, Entergy has insisted its investments will not result in higher rates.

Elected officials have tended to treat developers of data centers and related power infrastructure as partners and the public as a potential impediment. State and local governments have meanwhile offered major tax incentives and other financial assistance to developers while treating the resulting need to create or expand power sources as an unquestioned public good. During the last session of the Mississippi Legislature, two appropriations bills were proposed to offset private costs associated with nuclear power development during the 2027 fiscal year. Senate Bill 2185, introduced by Sen. Joel Carter (R-Gulfport), proposed a $10 million appropriation specifically targeted to an expansion of Grand Gulf. House Bill 697, introduced by Rep. Jody Steverson (R-Ripley), sought to establish a dedicated fund for nuclear site development grants to be allocated to power companies, workforce training initiatives and site preparation projects. Given the considerable wealth of large utility companies and their investors, it is unclear why the lawmakers deemed such incentives necessary, but both bills died in committee.

It is not unusual for economic development officials and elected officials to be cagey about large projects in the works, which often involve nondisclosure agreements even when tax dollars and public safety are in play. Corporate CEOs likewise tend to be more candid with savvy investors than with the general public or the media.

As The Mississippi Independent previously reported, Entergy CEO Drew Marsh told investors during a first quarter 2025 earnings call that the company was considering adding a new reactor at Grand Gulf, and citing Marsh’s comments, the trade journal Power Engineering noted, “Nuclear power has regained popularity in recent years as end-use customers like data centers seek clean, reliable megawatts.” The journal noted: “Several of the tech giants, like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, have struck deals in the interest of procuring nuclear power for their AI data centers.”

In his comments, Marsh said Entergy has applied for an extension of what is known as an early site permit, or ESP, from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would be required for the construction of another reactor at Grand Gulf. He added that the company was “in discussions with customers, potential partners and other stakeholders regarding that opportunity.” The existing ESP for Grand Gulf expires in 2027.

Among the possibilities Entergy is exploring are small modular reactors that can be brought online more quickly than conventional reactors. Building a conventional nuclear reactor can take up to 10 years from the start of construction and total project timelines, including for planning and licensing, can stretch that period to 15 years or more, with costs as high as $30 billion.

Referencing Grand Gulf’s ESP application in a September 2025 Energy, Oil & Gas Magazine article, Entergy Mississippi CEO Haley Fisackerly said, “That’s very important to us because it would help us to accelerate and reduce costs on another plant if we were to look at building one; it’s something we’re studying very carefully. For example, we’re looking at new technologies such as small modular reactors, which are greater passive safety systems than what we currently use today. We’re making investments in upgrading our transmission systems with more resilient, robust structures, as well as into various other grid enhancement technologies, to ensure that the grid is stable and operating at its highest capability.”

Fisackerly was careful to use the phrase “if we were looking to build one.” In another instance, an Entergy spokesperson said no Grand Gulf reactor was in the works “right now” or “at this moment.”

The fact that elected officials and developers have hedged on their plans has fueled further speculation. The Port Gibson newspaper The Southern Reveille reported on June 12, 2026, that the recent successful testing of a modular nuclear reactor known as Antares Mark-O at the Idaho National Laboratory could put Grand Gulf “back in the national nuclear conversation.” Grand Gulf has, in fact, been part of the national nuclear conversation for a while, mostly for operational and ratepayer issues, but the newspaper was citing the possibility of the local power plant playing an expanded—and groundbreaking—role.

Asked about the status of the ESP application, Entergy spokesperson Tosha Hester directed The Mississippi Independent to this Nuclear Regulatory Commission site, which monitors the permit process and indicates that no federal action has been taken on the application since January 2026.

“Right now, we don’t plan on building any new nuclear plants, at this moment,” Hester previously told The Mississippi Independent. Once the ESP permit extension is in place, Entergy will evaluate the possibilities, she said, adding, “If Entergy proceeds, that [Grand Gulf] would probably be the first site.”

Entergy has previously looked into expanding Grand Gulf, but two proposed conventional reactors ended up being shelved. Adjacent to the current station is an unfinished concrete structure that was to be the containment building for a planned Unit 2, a twin to the existing Unit 1 nuclear reactor. But in 1979, Entergy precursor Middle South Utilities stopped work on Unit 2 due to high construction costs and lack of sufficient electricity demand. In 2005, Entergy announced that Grand Gulf had again been selected as the site for another reactor to be known as Unit 3, but that project stalled in 2009 and the related NRC permit application was cancelled at the company’s request in 2015.

Those proposals differed, however, in that they were pursued prior to the ongoing proliferation of data centers.

In its current ESP application, Entergy states that the location to be evaluated is adjacent to the existing Grand Gulf reactor, with the disclaimer that the company “has not yet selected a specific reactor design for any future plant that may be built at this proposed site.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission website notes that an extended ESP would allow a construction permit or combined license application for 20 years beyond the current permit’s expiration date of April 5, 2027. A notice of the agency’s consideration—which also opened the door for a request for a public hearing by March 30—was published in the Jan. 27, 2026, Federal Register.

The rapid proliferation of data centers and the secrecy that often shrouds their development taps into public misgivings about government, large corporations and artificial intelligence itself. It is easy to imagine people in the future marveling at America’s unquestioning embrace of data centers that require vast amounts of land, water and electricity yet few human workers, for an economic juggernaut that could end with machines taking over for humans who are subsequently rendered redundant. For now, Mississippi officials have wholeheartedly embraced the construction of data centers despite growing public resistance, and the Trump administration has squelched any effort to regulate A.I.

When it comes to the development of data centers, massive tax incentives are routinely used and the public is usually kept in the dark. Last year, NBC News reported that a survey of more than 30 data center proposals across 14 states found that in a majority of cases, local officials signed non-disclosure agreements and worked with what appeared to be shell companies that can conceal the identities of project developers.

All of which has led to public suspicion and speculation about both the data centers and the construction of related infrastructure. In places like Claiborne County, the primary focus is on the potential for economic development in a depressed region. Elsewhere, it is often on potential negative impacts, with local concerns exacerbated by misgivings about A.I., even as the public becomes increasingly dependent upon it in daily life.

In the short term, the biggest concerns being raised are that residential electricity bills will significantly increase as utilities shunt power to data center behemoths, and that multibillion-dollar deals are being made without public input or, often, even public awareness.

In the case of Louisiana’s Hyperion project, the Alliance for Affordable Energy urged the Louisiana PSC to postpone a vote on a gas-powered plant that would service the data center to give the public time to evaluate the proposal. Logan Burke, the alliance’s executive director, said she was concerned about a lack of transparency around the entire project. But the regulatory agency refused and forged ahead.

Residents in the vicinity of Grand Gulf—the largest single-unit nuclear power plant in the U.S.—also face the potential for the kind of risk that came to the fore with the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant in 1979.

In response to Three Mile Island, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission suspended all nuclear power plant construction projects while regulators analyzed what went wrong. Grand Gulf was still under construction at the time and resulting delays and modifications caused its construction cost to skyrocket. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the utility could pass along those cost overruns to ratepayers in the states served by the plant.

Image: Cooling tower at Grand Gulf nuclear plant (via Entergy)

The Neshoba County Fair opens today, and next week Mississippi’s political class will again gather beneath the oaks of Founder’s Square. Though fair attendees have grown more diverse in recent years, the multi-day camp gathering remains a key venue for conservative politicking—and for revisiting its racially charged history.

Political speeches are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, June 24 and 25. Gov. Tate Reeves closes the program on Thursday, the marquee slot, after Secretary of State Michael Watson and House Speaker Jason White.

Two of this year’s speakers are preparing statewide campaigns for 2027: Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson for governor and Watson for lieutenant governor. That makes the fair once again both a stage for reflection and a launching point for the next election cycle.

The setting is the same as it has been since 1889, with a network of wooden cabins arranged along footpaths, a central square and a horse-racing track. The location in Neshoba County is otherwise freighted: The fairgrounds are a few miles from the site where, in the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were murdered by Ku Klux Klan members while working to register Black voters. Their deaths became emblematic of the violent resistance to Black political participation during Freedom Summer and remain among the more notorious crimes of the civil rights era.

Sixteen years later, on Aug. 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan delivered his first major campaign speech at the fair after winning the Republican presidential nomination. Addressing a crowd of roughly 10,000, he tellingly declared, “I believe in states’ rights.” Republican strategists had chosen the Neshoba County Fair deliberately, as part of an effort to win rural Southern voters and break incumbent President Jimmy Carter’s hold on the region. A Mississippi Republican national committeeman had urged Reagan to speak at the fair because it would help win over “George Wallace-inclined voters.” The strategy was to court segregationists.

Everyone understood what Reagan’s terminology meant. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert later wrote that everyone watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair, and that when politicians invoked states’ rights to white audiences in a place like Neshoba County, the message understood on the ground was that in any conflict between white and Black voters, the speaker was on the white side. The newspaper’s contemporaneous coverage linked the location to the murders directly; reporter Douglas Kneeland noted that Reagan was appearing at a fair outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, near where the three civil rights workers had been slain in 1964.

The subtext became text the following year, when Reagan political operative Lee Atwater described the evolution of the Southern Strategy in a 1981 interview. The strategy, Atwater explained, had moved from open use of racial slurs in the 1950s to abstractions by the late 1960s—“forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff”—because the open slur had begun to backfire. The location was key to the message. The words were the delivery system. Civil rights leader Andrew Young wrote at the time that Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had been murdered in Neshoba County for trying to register Black voters, and asked what states’ rights a Reagan administration would revive.

The Neshoba County Fair has long been Mississippi’s premier conservative political stage. Dozens of speeches are scheduled over multiple days each year, and every Mississippi governor since 1896 has attended at least one session. Presidential candidates including Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Jack Kemp and John Glenn have spoken there, though national candidates have been less in evidence in recent years. Donald Trump Jr. appeared in 2016 on his father’s behalf and remarked about standing on the same stage from which Reagan had launched his 1980 campaign. The lineage—Reagan’s 1980 appearance as a defining moment—is explicit and celebrated.

The continuity of rhetoric and strategy was made plain in 2024. Reeves invoked Donald Trump in rallying the crowd, while Gipson framed Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt as evidence of resilience and urged fairgoers to oppose “liberal threats” and “global liberalism.” The speeches emphasized partisan loyalty over policy, demonstrating the fair’s enduring function as a site for reinforcing conservative political identity.

By 2025, the coded language had evolved while the essential message held. On July 31, 2025, Reeves emphasized “education freedom,” including proposals to consolidate school districts, while White framed the effort as aligned with federal incentives for “school choice”—policies that supporters say empower parents and that critics argue undermine public education and deepen inequality. Reeves repeatedly invoked “Mississippi values,” “conservative values” and the “Mississippi way of life,” portraying state policy as a model of ideological and cultural success, and he placed himself directly in Reagan’s lineage. “Before Tate Reeves got into politics, I started coming to the fair back in the eighties, when folks like Reagan and Dukakis were speaking, and I’ve loved it ever since,” Reeves told fairgoers, making an explicit claim on the historical and symbolic weight of speaking at Neshoba.

The fair’s symbolic power comes from its history. Speaking at Neshoba often signals a politician’s alignment with the racial and political sensibilities of the state’s conservative electorate. The fair is not a uniformly Republican space—Democrats have long spoken from the same stage, attend in numbers, and keep their own cabins in a section known as Happy Hollow—but the political program and the crowd it draws lean heavily Republican, and the speakers who command the marquee slots are almost entirely from the party that now controls every statewide office.

The rhetoric of 2025 closely mirrored that of 1980. Reagan’s coded appeals to racial and cultural anxiety were reframed as invocations of “conservative values” and “education freedom,” yet the underlying function—appealing to white voters while signaling resistance to federal intervention and progressive policy—remained. Policies such as school consolidation and school choice echoed the “freedom of choice” plans of the 1960s, which facilitated white flight from desegregated schools.

The coordination between federal incentives and state legislation reflects a strategic continuity that runs back decades.

The normalization is the point. Mississippi politicians continue to speak at a site that summons the region’s historic racial violence, employing the same coded language Reagan used, appealing to the same impulses with updated targets. Despite the characterization of the fair as “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” the tradition is not simply about hospitality. It involves impunity.

Standing a few miles from where the civil rights workers were murdered, and where Reagan launched a campaign appealing to segregationists, Reeves in 2025 called Mississippi “a blueprint and a model” for the nation. Next week he will have the last word at Founder’s Square, again.

Images: A man sends conflicting messages by carrying both a Confederate and a U.S. flag on the fairgrounds racetrack in 2016; a fair cabin draped with a partisan banner the same year (both by Alan Huffman)

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide by the end of June whether Mississippi can count absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day—a case that could end such grace periods in 14 states and the District of Columbia months before the November midterms.

The justices heard arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee on Mar. 23, 2026, and several conservative justices have signaled that they have concerns about the Mississippi law.

The “Watson” in the lawsuit’s title is Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, whose effort to preserve the law’s grace period has put him at odds with GOP attempts to restrict mail-in voting. The Republican National Committee and the Trump administration have argued that under federal statutes setting a uniform Election Day means the ballot box closes at the end of the day.

The case turns on a single Mississippi provision: State law counts an absentee ballot so long as it is postmarked on or before Election Day and reaches the local registrar within five business days. The question for the justices is whether the federal statutes fixing a single national Election Day override that window for races that include federal offices.

The legal fight over Mississippi’s mail-in ballot law began in January 2024 when the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, the Libertarian Party of Mississippi and a group of individual voters sued over the grace period. A federal district judge in the Southern District of Mississippi sided with the state in July 2024. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling the following October, holding that federal law requires ballots for federal office to be both cast and received by Election Day and therefore preempts the Mississippi statute. Watson appealed.

The case carries an unusual partisan dynamic: A Republican-led state, defended by a Republican secretary of state and a Republican solicitor general, is fighting the national Republican Party to preserve a voting provision. Notably, President Trump has pushed to curtail mail voting, and the Republican National Committee has made post-Election Day deadlines a national target.

Another issue in play is the notoriously slow delivery of the U.S. Postal Service, which means that a voter could mail a ballot well in advance of Election Day and it might still not arrive in time. Trump has likewise had a role in that. During his first administration, a White House report proposed cutting postal services and Trump’s appointee as postmaster general removed numerous mail sorting machines and drop-off boxes. In March 2026, Trump also signed an executive order cracking down on mail-in voting, a move that voting rights advocates said would disenfranchise millions of Americans. In May, a federal judge declined to halt the order, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of verified U.S. citizens in each state who are eligible to vote. Mississippi has agreed to voluntarily turn over its full voter registration list to the U.S. Department of Justice.

As for how this dynamic factors into the legal appeal, the Secretary of State’s office told The Mississippi Independent that it had forwarded a request for comment to Watson, who responded after this article published.

Rather than be interviewed, Watson sent the following comments by email a few hours after the original article published:

“The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) is the federal statute that guarantees military and overseas citizens the right to participate in elections, even if they are away from their home state or country. Military and overseas citizens apply for absentee ballots by completing a federal postcard application. This must be done annually to receive an absentee ballot pursuant to UOCAVA. For the general election held on November 5, 2024, there were nine hundred thirty-nine (939) UOCAVA citizens overseas; eighteen (18) emergency responders; eight hundred nineteen (819) UOCAVA military inside the United States; and two hundred ninety-seven (297) UOCAVA military outside of the United States, who were registered to vote and requested absentee ballots. Military or overseas voters are allowed by UOCAVA (federal law) to request absentee ballots and send in their ballots electronically, so long as those are received by 7:00 pm on election night. The only military or overseas voters potentially affected if the grace period were to be eliminated would be those who choose to receive their absentee ballots by mail. If our current law changes, we would encourage our military and overseas voters to request and send their absentee ballots electronically .

“At this time, absentee voting should begin 45 days prior to November 3. If the deadline for receipt of the mailed absentee ballots changes to the Monday prior to the election, then that deadline will need to be changed on the envelopes that are mailed to the recipients, either manually or by printing updated envelopes. Some counties may choose to send additional notifications to their voters reminding them of the updated deadline for returning the mailed absentee ballots.

“We do not have information as to how many mailed absentee ballots were accepted or considered within the five business day grace period for any of the elections.”

The plaintiffs in the case argue that when Congress set one day for the election, it fixed a deadline, and that a state law counting ballots after that day conflicts with it. The State of Mississippi, through Watson, counters that a ballot is cast when the voter completes and mails it, not when it physically reaches the courthouse, and that the Constitution’s Elections Clause leaves states broad authority over how elections are run.

Watson, a former state senator who is running for lieutenant governor, has framed Mississippi’s defense of the law as a question of federalism rather than political party. Specifically, he has warned that striking down the law would jeopardize the grace periods that protect military and overseas voters. Nearly 4 million service members and citizens abroad rely on mail voting, and in 2024 their ballots were rejected for being late at more than eight times the domestic rate. Mississippi’s five major military installations—Keesler Air Force Base, Columbus AFB, Naval Air Station Meridian, Naval Construction Battalion Center Gulfport, and Camp Shelby—support roughly 25,000 active-duty personnel and their families; Keesler alone has about 5,100 active-duty members, and Camp Shelby is the largest state-owned military training site in the United States. Mississippi also has more than 165,000 veterans.

Watson has previously taken conflicting positions on easing the voting process. During his 2019 campaign for secretary of state, he said he wanted to make it easier for college students to vote and would consider on-campus polling places and efforts to streamline the absentee voting process. But as a state senator, he had opposed legislation that would have accomplished some of the same things.

Watson’s break with Trump and the GOP on the state’s mail-in voting law is based not on an abstract principle but on preserving a window that disproportionately protects service members. Because Trump stresses political loyalty and typically dismisses reasons for not following his directives, Watson is taking a calculated risk.

Thirteen other states and the District of Columbia also allow some version of a post-Election Day receipt window, and several of the laws were written specifically to protect military and overseas voters who have few options other than slow mail delivery. Advocates warn that a stricter rule would fall hardest on absentee-reliant voters, including service members, older voters, rural voters and voters with disabilities.

A court ruling that changed the voting rules this summer would land in the middle of an election year. Mississippi election officials would have to communicate new deadlines to voters before Nov. 3, 2026, and county clerks would have to retrain staff and rework absentee guidance with a midterm election already underway. The court could also rule narrowly on Mississippi’s statute alone, uphold the state’s authority to set its own receipt window, or return the case to the lower courts.

A decision is expected before the court’s term ends. The Mississippi Independent will report on the ruling when it is issued.

Image: Secretary of State Michael Watson (via his official Facebook page)

When immigrants are released from one of the largest ICE detention centers in the United States, their freedom can begin with a warning: Pay a vastly inflated taxi fare, or risk being returned to incarceration.

“It’s a threat we’ve heard about many times,” said Frances Kelley, project coordinator for Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention (LA-AID), recalling the account of a person recently released from the Adams County Correctional Center outside Natchez, Mississippi. “If you do not pay me for a taxi ride, you’re gonna be put back in detention.”

The group said it raised concerns with federal agencies and members of Congress about the scheme about five years ago, but nothing has been done, and little has been publicly reported about who, if anyone, has profited from the practice.

Now, The Mississippi Independent has identified a connection between a Natchez-area driver accused of exploiting recently released immigrants and a longtime senior corrections officer at the privately run detention center, based on state and county records, social media posts and text messages.

For years, LA-AID has said that people released from ICE facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi have been victims of taxi-fare extortion, despite federal detention standards that require facilities far from public transportation to provide free rides.

Those standards have largely been ignored in recent years, paving the way for unscrupulous drivers who have charged fares ranging from $200 to $600 per passenger for rides that should be as short as 10 minutes.

A local taxi driver who witnessed the scheme over several years confirmed for The Mississippi Independent the names of the two people involved, one of whom works for CoreCivic, the company that operates the detention center.

“The only people I know who were involved with it were the lieutenant at the facility, Tameka Moore Anderson, and her husband, Otis Anderson,” said James Wynn, 31, the owner of Wynn Transportation, a Natchez-based taxi company that publishes its rates online and charges all passengers the same fares regardless of who they are or where they are from. “Nothing seems to have happened after I reported them to the federal government and CoreCivic. I just kind of gave up on it.”

Otis Anderson was first linked to the alleged scheme through text messages shared with The Mississippi Independent by El Molino Informativo, a Spanish-language news outlet based in New York City that today published a related article by Emma Llano. The messages, sent after 8 p.m. on April 2, 2026, show a person identifying himself as “Anderson taxi” discussing payment and destination with a cousin of a juvenile passenger recently released from Adams County Correctional Center. He asked for screenshots confirming that a $300 payment had gone through, reportedly on the Chime app.

The man wrote in the message that his cousin wanted to go to the bus station. Anderson responded by saying he was taking the juvenile to the Baton Rouge airport, about two hours from the detention center. The Natchez bus station is about 13 minutes away.

The juvenile told El Molino Informativo that he was in Anderson’s vehicle with two other men who were also told to pay $300. It is unclear why Anderson said he was taking the passengers to the Baton Rouge airport. Flights from the airport usually stop departing between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., according to the airport’s website, and historical flight records reviewed by The Mississippi Independent did not show departures after 8 p.m. on April 2.

Otis Anderson’s cellphone number is connected online to Anderson and Son Transportation, a publicly advertised Natchez taxi business. State business filings list him as the owner of the company, which was dissolved in January 2022 but has received online reviews within the last year.

When contacted by The Mississippi Independent, Anderson declined to answer questions about the allegations.

“I respectfully decline to comment on the matters you referenced,” Anderson wrote, without denying involvement. “I do not wish to participate in an interview or provide statements regarding this issue.”

He asked not to be contacted again, then signed off as “Mr. Anderson.”

According to the El Molino Informativo article, Anderson said he first became involved in immigrant taxi services after he saw several released migrants waiting at a bus station and decided to offer his services to CoreCivic, and told the outlet he does not share his earnings with employees of CoreCivic, DHS or ICE.

Wynn said Otis Anderson has been known to arrive at the Adams County Correctional Facility with a large passenger van to transport greater numbers of released immigrants, each paying hundreds of dollars. Kelley said that’s something she’s seen at numerous immigrant detention facilities in Louisiana.

The Mississippi Independent cross-referenced Otis Anderson’s principal home address listed in the state business filings with Adams County property records and found that he shares a home address with Tameka Moore Anderson. County records show the couple married in June 2011.

Tameka Moore Anderson is pictured with or mentions her husband in numerous recent social media posts across their accounts, including birthday and anniversary posts. In a June 10, 2026, post, she wrote that she had worked at Adams County Correctional Center for 17 years.

Although she does not identify her rank or job assignment in that post, multiple social media posts by her CoreCivic manager refer to her as “Lieutenant Moore,” tag her personal account and identify her as working in the facility’s R&D property unit. R&D refers to receiving and discharge.

For advocates who have believed that released detainees were being steered toward favored drivers, the connection made by The Mississippi Independent was significant.

“We have long suspected that there was some connection between some of the taxi drivers and the detention center employees,” Kelley said.

Tameka Moore Anderson did not respond to questions about her role at CoreCivic or whether she had any involvement in her husband’s taxi service.

The Mississippi Independent also did not receive responses from Adams County Correctional Center warden Rafael Vargara or CoreCivic’s headquarters to questions about the alleged taxi scheme, the Andersons’ connection, or whether the arrangement would violate the company’s ethics and compliance policies.

The receiving-and-discharge unit is central to the moment detainees leave custody. Staff in that unit process releases, return belongings and valuables, close out commissary balances and discharge people from detention back into the outside world. Immigration advocates say that moment is also when released detainees are most vulnerable—often without working phones, identification, English fluency, cash or any clear understanding of where they are.

ICE guidelines say facility staff assigned to detainee discharges must allow each person to make one free phone call to arrange transportation. If transportation cannot be arranged and public transit is more than one mile from the facility, staff must provide free transport to a local bus, train or subway station while those services are still open. According to El Motivo Informativo, CoreCivic said in an email that although its officers provide transportation options to released immigrants, they have the option of finding transportation independently or with the help of their attorneys. The juvenile reportedly told the outlet he was not presented with any options other than Anderson’s taxi service

Adams County Correctional Center is roughly 12 miles from Natchez but much farther from major airports or full-service bus stations.

“A lot of times, the person would get released and they wouldn’t know their family had asked us to come,” Kelley said. “Then the facility would tell them to pay for a taxi, and they would sometimes use money out of their commissary.”

Advocates say the problems at release are not limited to transportation. Juan Torres, founder of the Alabama-based immigrant advocacy group Belong, said he has heard complaints that belongings were not always being returned by prison staff.

“Their personal belongings confiscated when they were detained are not being returned,” Torries said. “Somebody is pocketing their jewelry, watches, phones, if they are new enough, and cash.”

Wynn, the Natchez taxi operator, said he has encountered a similar problem after picking people up from detention.

“I’ve taken off with them before and gotten 30 or 40 minutes up the road, and the facility would call to say their belongings were left behind,” Wynn said. “The person would say, ‘Well, they wouldn’t give them to me.’”

When that happened, Wynn said he would turn around to retrieve the belongings.

But Kelley said that the released immigrant and their families are unlikely to risk going back or complaining.

“Many of these families are just glad the person is out,” Kelley said. “They are scared to raise anything. And if someone has been in detention, especially for a couple of years, they have a million things that are on their mind that are more pressing than the money that they just lost.”

Since 2019, LA-AID has tried to intercept people at the moment of release, picking them up from detention centers, driving them to airports or bus stations, buying meals, arranging hotel rooms and sometimes helping pay for tickets. Kelley said the group has helped approximately 20,000 immigrants during four years.

The group’s 2021 civil rights complaint cited several examples of detention centers flouting the Performance-Based National Detention Standards, which set procedures for detainee releases. The complaint said officials at eight of the nine facilities in the region, including Adams County, had told families that their detained relatives would not be released unless they paid for a taxi, without saying how much the rides would cost. In one case, the complaint said, a person was forced to pay $600 after a release was delayed by two hours.

The complaint was sent to the Department of Homeland Security and several members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

By September 2021, LA-AID had persuaded one detention center to bus released detainees to a temporary church shelter, where volunteers provided food, Wi-Fi, phones and help contacting family members. At one point, Kelley said, four or five detention centers were coordinating similar releases, including the Basile facility in Louisiana, which arranged transport to the Lafayette airport or bus station.

The system worked for several years, Kelley said, largely because ICE and private prison operators could not keep up with the volume of releases and found it easier to let advocates coordinate with families.

But that system has collapsed, she said, as ICE has stopped nearly all discretionary releases.

“We wanted to make sure families weren’t having to pay an exorbitant amount for taxis, and to provide some level of communication and stability around the release process so families would know what was going on,” Kelley said. “We developed materials in different languages to send families information, explain to people where they were, what their choices were, and that they were out and safe.”

There is little public documentation of the taxi extortion allegations. But similar conduct has led to federal prosecutions elsewhere.

In New York, a taxi-extortion scheme targeting newly arrived asylum seekers led to federal kidnapping and extortion convictions. Prosecutors said a group of men targeted immigrants at the Port Authority bus terminal, sometimes posing as officials or helpful strangers before forcing victims into long and unwanted taxi rides. Families were then pressured to pay exorbitant fares, often more than $1,000, to secure their relatives’ release. Four men, including a driver, received prison sentences ranging from eight to 14 years.

In Louisiana, a 2021 Louisiana Voice article reported taxi fares of up to $400 and described one driver who allegedly refused to release a passenger to LA-AID’s free service. The article also said one driver charged three immigrant men $200 each for a 10-minute ride to the Monroe bus station in northern Louisiana.

Wynn left a comment on that article in 2023, saying his staff handled released immigrants with “love” and “care” and that he was aware of incidents in which correctional staff sought a cut of proceeds in exchange for steering families toward certain transportation companies. He called it a “disgrace.”

In an interview, Wynn said he has transported between 2,000 and 3,000 people released from regional ICE facilities over the last several years. Some were hungry, confused or unsure where they were, he said. His drivers are told to stop for food, clothing or a phone call if needed, and not to leave anyone at a station or airport until they know how to continue.

“These immigrants have been through so much already and can’t afford to pay those fares,” Wynn said. “I hate that greedy side of the world.”

Wynn said many of his passengers call once they reach their destinations. Some, he said, had cried in the back of his taxi after leaving detention, saying they wanted to go back to their home countries, even when home meant war.

“I just want to show people there are people with hearts out there,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this article referenced an uncle of one of the immigrants communicating with “Mr. Anderson.” Emma Llano at El Molino Informativo, who provided the initial characterization, said it was the man’s cousin, not his uncle.

Illustrations: Mike Williams

When the Ridgeland, Mississippi running store Fleet Feet posted on Facebook about Richard Edmonson’s birthday, it wasn’t a typical customer shout-out.

Edmonson was turning 88 and still an active runner. At a stage of life when most of his peers are happy just to be alive and ambulatory, Edmonson has completed 32 half-marathons as well as one full marathon, and he continues to run local routes even during the heat of summer.

For avid runners of any age, avoiding strenuous exercise during periods of high heat and humidity isn’t really an option, unless you reduce yourself to running on a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym. For those who take to the streets or trails, the old adage does not apply that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

Doing it at age 88 is next level. Consider the prevailing image of someone pushing 90 years old. Then imagine that person running, for miles, even in the summer sun. That’s Richard Edmonson.

Edmonson, a retired lawyer, has unique insights into both the aging process and how to adapt a running regimen to feels-like temps that bump 100 degrees or more, which can be particularly challenging for older runners whose bodies are less efficient at expending heat and whose physical strength and stamina are on the wane. He said he makes a few strategic concessions to running during the summer months, but that for the most part it’s just a matter of staying attuned to your body.

“I try to run in the early morning,” Edmonson told The Mississippi Independent. “I cut back on my mileage some in summer—six to eight miles is my typical long run, while I might run eight to 10 miles in winter.”

As for the age issue, Edmonson concedes he doesn’t have quite the stamina in his eighties that he had at age 70, when he began running, and now more often runs 5K and 10K races (3.1 to 6.2 miles) rather than half-marathons. Among the endurance races he has run is Jackson, Mississippi’s Fondren Urban Ultra, a 12-hour timed race in which runners choose distances up to 100k. Edmonson ran 26 miles.

Most running sites categorize older runners as over age 50, but among those listed on the Ultra Signup website, which reports endurance races and results across the United States, many are in their seventies, eighties and even nineties. The website for Ultra Running Magazine lists Jackson’s Urban Ultra as the most recent race for Aaron Goldman of Los Alamos, New Mexico, who is reportedly 94 and has run 37 races since 1992. Yet Goldman’s name does not appear in this race report for runners over 70 who participated in the race that year (2024). According to the report, Edmonson was the oldest entrant.

In 1984, Stanford University launched a study of runners over age 50 that would span their running careers across 21 years. By 2005, when the study concluded, many of the runners had quit or died, but among those who were still running, there appeared to be a commonality that contributed to their ability to stay at it: Those with the best outcomes tended to lay off running at the first sign of injury or other notable physical duress, yet tended to recuperate for shorter periods. One takeaway: It’s important to push yourself, even in the face of physical stress, but also to recognize trouble, cut back if necessary, then get back at it as soon as possible. Runners who insisted on powering through injuries as well as those who laid off for long periods tended to have worse outcomes. Finding the sweet spot, even when it seems contraindicated, seems to be a solid approach.

Among 538 runners who participated in the Stanford study, 284 were still running in 2005, when all of them were over 70. The study concluded that running in middle and older ages markedly reduced disability in later life and provided what the authors described as “a notable survival advantage.”

Edmonson said his personal credo as an aging runner is straightforward: “If you don’t keep on running, you get to the point that you can’t keep running.” In other words, not running ends up meaning not being able to run.

The same logic could apply to any runner’s regimen, regardless of age, as well as to the process of acclimating to summer heat—a major consideration now, when parts of Mississippi are under a heat advisory. Laying off running for a month or more basically takes you back to square one—you get little credit for having previously run, even if you did it for decades. Staying with it crucial.

Edmonson said he took up running late in life, at 70, which, he noted, “is kind of backward,” given that people are more likely to give up running around that age (and, in fact, most quit much earlier).

In his first race, Edmonson plunged into the heat of summer in Jackson’s July 4, 2008, Watermelon Classic 5K. A former longtime swimmer, he had grown bored with that sport, and after his wife and eldest son (who introduced him to road racing) died in fairly close succession, he said running helped him cope with grief. “Running,” he told Runner’s World magazine in a 2020 profile, “helped me find comfort in my discomfort.”

Finding comfort in discomfort is a useful approach for any runner attempting to push their limits, whether that means covering a long distance, dealing with extreme heat, adapting to the process of aging—or all of the above. It’s also why many runners are attracted to races like the upcoming Big Butts, Mississippi’s most infamous annual summer endurance race, which this year will take place on July 18 along the trails of Jackson’s Buddy Butts Park and an adjacent cross-country course known as Choctaw Trails.

Big Butts give runners the option of a 25K, 50K or 100K (about 15.5 to 62 miles) or a group relay for longer segments. Though the race begins at 7 a.m., it is invariably hot from start to finish. It’s all about enduring hours in sweat-sodden, chafing shorts and shoes, obsessively hydrating, coping with discomforts like swollen fingers and leg cramps, and pondering existential questions such as: Why, exactly, am I doing this?

For most participants, the point is to push your limits and live to tell the tale. Individual race times vary wildly: Big Butts has a cutoff point of 14 hours for longer segments and seven hours for the 25K.

Those of us who are old enough to remember when running was the sole province of track and field athletes—as Edmonson pointed out, “People would have thought I was crazy if I’d run the roads when I was growing up”—tend to reduce their running pace over time and most are fine with that. As Edmonson observed, older runners mainly compete with themselves and time. In summer, they also compete with the weather.

Big Butts runners tend to range in age from their teens to their fifties, though last year’s race attracted two 50K runners in the 60-69 age category and seven for the 25K (one of whom did not finish). Other area endurance races skew even younger, including Kick Up the Dust (4K, 8K or 14K, Butts/Choctaw trails, in April); the Bone Yard Trail Race (5K, 10m, 20m, 50k, near Brookhaven, in May); and the one-shot First Last Annual Clark Creek Trail Run (6m, 12m, Wilkinson County, complete insanity, September 2017).

Edmonson said he doesn’t run trail races like Big Butts because he’s concerned about the potential for falls. Dirt trails, which are typically maintained for mountain bikes, are riddled with tree roots, ditch crossings and repetitive changes in elevation, though the Butts Park hills are comparatively minor by ultrarace standards. Anyone who trail-runs knows that it is only a matter of time before you inevitably will trip and fall. On the upside, this teaches you how to fall, a potentially useful skill later in life. Partly because he has already suffered a broken hip, Edmonson chooses to run only along paved routes.

As for his regular running routine, Edmonson said he typically runs every other day, to give his body a day of recovery, and runs with a group because he likes the social aspects of a shared physical endeavor. “Runners are good people,” he observed. “Young or old, male or female, black or white, gay or straight—on the trail, you’re one thing: a runner.”

Unsurprisingly, members of Edmonson’s running group are much younger than him, and, he said, “My time is slow. In my seventies I could run with anybody, but when I hit 80 it got harder.” He said he aims for a pace of 14- to 15-minute miles. “You have to pay attention to your body,” he said. “My goal is to finish.”

For 50 years, Edmonson has also done strength training and currently works out for two hours in a gym, twice a week, both lower and upper body. To underscore the importance of doing this, he pointed to a Harvard University 30-year longevity study released on June 2, 2026, which demonstrated that combining strength training with cardio workouts resulted in significant decreases in mortality among study subjects. The study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that people who did about 1.5 to 2 hours of muscle-strengthening weekly combined with regular cardio workouts were 45 percent less likely to die from any cause than people who did neither. That percentage was higher than for people who did only strength training or only aerobic workouts.

Edmonson said it’s important to keep everything in tune. “If you stop running, it would be so easy to sit in my easy chair and play on my computer and not do anything,” he said. “I do it for my health. It’s not only about your life span—it’s about your health span. I want to stay healthy and be with people.”

Runners take different approaches to dealing with vagaries like weather, types of routes, and age. I personally avoid running on pavement because it can stress aging joints. Edmonson said he has been able to avoid common running maladies such as knee and ankle issues, but he has had a hip replacement and surgery on his lower back. His hip replacement was a riff on a common theme for the elderly that was only tangentially related to his running. Following a run, he said, he was leaning against a post that suddenly broke, sending him tumbling to the ground and leaving him with a broken hip, which later had to be replaced. He has also experienced dangerous dehydration—a common problem during summer heat for which older runners are at increased risk.

Edmonson’s dehydration episode happened recently, he said, during a comparatively short four-mile run. “I got about a mile and a half into the run and felt really dizzy and nearly passed out,” he recalled. “It was because I wasn’t hydrated enough. Now, I take goo and electrolytes, and I carry water all the time, even for a three-mile run.”

This site runs through the list of how to avoid that risk, whatever your age: Hydrate before and during the run; watch for signs of potentially fatal heat illness, including dizziness, nausea, chills, confusion or decreased sweating; and check with your doctor beforehand if you have any notable medical condition or are on prescription drugs.

Beyond that, nutrition supplements and hydration gels are basic prerequisites for long summer runs. Though there are almost always aid stations with water and other refreshments along race routes, runners may be required to also carry their own refillable water containers.

For older runners, the body’s decreased blood circulation near the skin reduces its ability to release internal heat, which is why it’s important to be dutiful about hydration and make personal concessions to distance and time of day. It all goes back to paying close attention to your bodies’ cues, and making necessary adjustments.

Summer endurance races doubtless involve a healthy measure of misery. Though dealing with that and challenging yourself can also be exhilarating and oddly addictive, it’s not unusual for Big Butts runners to have to walk parts of the route, and some don’t finish. There are always standout runners in such races, even among the elders. In 2024, the winner of Big Butts in the oldest age group (60-69) was Greg Gearhart, of Clinton, Mississippi, aged 68, who again won among seven runners in that age group in 2025.

Although older runners are obvious outliers, in some ways that’s true of all runners in a state like Mississippi, which is not known as a bastion of fitness. The Centers for Disease Control reported the state ranks No. 1 for “physical inactivity prevalence,” which is a nice way of saying there are lots of people who rarely do anything more strenuous than walking to and from their car. More than 30 percent of Mississippi’s CDC survey respondents reported not having engaged in any physical activity outside of work during the previous month.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the World Population Review this year ranked Mississippi the second fattest state in the U.S., with about 40 percent of residents categorized as obese, based on body mass index. Meanwhile, there are fewer publicly sponsored incentives to exercise in Mississippi than in more progressive states. As evidence, Clinton’s community symbol is the bicycle, yet the city has no bike trails or bike lanes.

Still, there are many dedicated runners in Mississippi, including those like Edmonson who refuse to age out and who continue running even during the most challenging days of summer. There’s a tired bystander joke that sometimes gets lobbed at runners: “What are you running from?” The answer is pretty simple: death. Though mortality will eventually catch us all, the point is to give it a run for its money in the meantime.

At its core, as Edmonson and other older runners can attest, it’s about how a person ages and the decisions they make along the way. Some people start cutting back on athletic activity as early as their thirties, and not always by choice. Others, whether due to genetics, luck or determination, persevere. For Edmonson, the combination earned him that profile in Runner’s World, recently got him inducted into the Fleet Feet Jackson Hall of Fame, and now, had him fielding questions from an also-ran about late-life running in the Mississippi heat.

Athletes who manage to stay at it well past their prime are a source of public fascination, for good reason. The Washington Post recently reported on another study of older runners, including Italy’s Emma Maria Mazzenga, who holds a world record as a sprinter in the 90-94 age group and has run intermittently for 62 years (the researchers are also studying older champion distance runners to understand how they adapt to prolonged aerobic exercise). The article noted that at age 92, Mazzenga’s overall aerobic fitness was similar to that of an athletic woman almost half her age, and her body’s ability to transfer oxygen to her muscles was even better, comparable to what’s typically seen in an active 30-year-old. Her muscles also exhibited healthy connections to nerve cells in the spinal cord. Such connections often wither with age, reducing the ability of muscles to receive and respond to messages from the brain, yet few of Mazzenga’s nerve connections had died. “Her muscles’ mitochondria—the tiny organelles inside cells that absorb oxygen and transform it into energy—were exceptionally robust, functioning like those of a 20-year-old,” the newspaper reported.

Sprinting taxes the body in different ways than distance or endurance running, but all involve intense aerobic workouts that would be out of reach for most people, even those much younger than Mazzenga, Edmonson or Goldman.

Such endurance, including racing during the dog days of summer, requires a high level of commitment, as well as powering through difficulties and, inevitably, submitting to a period of recuperation. In some cases, it can also mean accepting the dreaded “did not finish” designation in posted race results.

The point is to try—to stay at it for as long as possible, and, in the words of poet Dylan Thomas, to “not go gentle into that good night.”

Image: Commemorative illustration of Richard Edmonson, from a photo originally published in Runner’s World, displayed at his 88th birthday celebration (via Fleet Feet running store Facebook page)

Every major election handicapper rates Mississippi’s 2026 U.S. Senate race solidly or safely Republican. Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Inside Elections and RealClearPolitics all place it out of reach for Democrats.

Mississippi has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982, and President Donald Trump carried the state by 23 points in 2024.

Yet Scott Colom, the Democratic district attorney challenging incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, argues that the picture the ratings describe is already out of date.

Colom points to a poll the Southern Policy Law Center Action Fund and Impact Research released in April, which The Mississippi Independent reported at the time. It found Hyde-Smith with an unfavorable rating of 55 percent and put Colom within three points of her in a head-to-head matchup, narrowing a gap that the same pollster had measured at 13 points in June 2025.

The Colom campaign notes that Democratic turnout in the March 10, 2026, Senate primary reached roughly 150,000 votes, up from about 82,000 in the 2024 Democratic Senate primary, an increase of more than 80 percent. The campaign argues that the race now belongs in the same conversation as Republican-held seats in North Carolina and Texas that national Democrats are working to flip.

“Standing on that stage in Jackson with Congressman Thompson and Derrick Johnson, looking out at more than five thousand Mississippians who showed up in the middle of the day to stand up for voting rights, I didn’t see a state that has given up,” Colom said in a statement to The Mississippi Independent, referring to the May 20 voting-rights rally that drew thousands to the Jackson Convention Center. “On the contrary, I saw a state that knows exactly what’s at stake.”

The question put to Colom was whether Republican map-drawing and voting restrictions have made it impossible for Democrats to win in Mississippi regardless of how voters feel about the party in power. He answered by reframing the premise. “As a prosecutor, the rule of law matters to me deeply,” he said. “The Voting Rights Act was won here in Mississippi, and right now it’s being unwound here in Mississippi, and that is not by accident. When politicians redraw the maps to carve up parts of our state like the Delta or the Jackson metro, they’re making plain that they no longer want the voters to pick them, they want to pick their voters.”

Colom tied the redistricting fight to material conditions in the state. The politicians redrawing the maps, he said, “don’t want to have to answer to a farmer in the Delta who can’t sell his soybeans, or a mother who can’t afford her medication, or a rural hospital preparing to go dark.”

In background comments, Colom campaign officials said the redistricting contest exists because politicians in both parties have stopped trusting voters to decide elections, and argued that the Supreme Court’s narrowing of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the push to redraw the majority-Black Delta and Jackson metro, and the absence of early voting in Mississippi are aimed at the communities the Voting Rights Act was written to protect. The campaign officials said the backlash to those moves is already measurable in Hyde-Smith’s favorability decline and the primary turnout surge, and that in a low-turnout state, motivated voters carry more weight, not less.

Hyde-Smith holds advantages that the poll does not erase. She had raised about $4.7 million by the time of the primary, against $1.2 million for Colom, which was a record for a Mississippi Democrat but less than a third of the incumbent’s total. She has Trump’s endorsement and a seat on the Appropriations Committee. The Cook Political Report, in rating the race solidly Republican, has cited the state’s underlying partisanship as the reason a favorability problem has not translated into a tossup. The campaign says it outraised Hyde-Smith in the final quarter of last year and has kept pace since, which it argues is not the fundraising pattern of a safe incumbent.

Yet, in a nod to the potential for an upset, the super PAC American Bridge 21st Century announced on June 9 that it will spend $2 million on the Senate race, among 20 Senate and House races being targeted. Bradley Beychock, the organization’s cofounder, said in a news release: “Many Americans are angry that President Trump has betrayed them, and we want them to share their stories. Working class voters are fed up with the cost, chaos, and corruption. Our investment aims to seize this opportunity in traditionally Republican territory.”

Hyde-Smith’s campaign did not respond to the same list of questions submitted by The Mississippi Independent.

Colom closed his comments with the answer he said he would give a discouraged voter: “To the Mississippian who’s been told their vote can’t change anything, I say: that’s exactly what they want you to believe. Mississippians have beaten longer odds than a three-point race against an unpopular incumbent. We’ve been here before, and we know what to do.”

In addition to Colom and Hyde-Smith, independent candidate Ty Pinkins will appear on the ballot for the Senate seat in November.

Image: Scott Colom, Cindy Hyde-Smith (via Creative Commons)

When the Mississippi Republican Party recently held its annual Lincoln-Reagan-Trump Gala at the Sheraton Refuge Hotel in Flowood, the party officially rebranded the fundraiser with its new name on printed invitations, which linked it to the nation’s 250^th anniversary and described the June 4, 2026, event as a Semiquincentennial celebration. Gov. Tate Reeves and Republican National Committee co-chair K.C. Crosbie were keynote speakers.

Originally named the Lincoln Dinner (and sometimes the Lincoln Day Dinner) in the early 20^th century, the annual fundraiser of Republican Party organizations paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the first elected Republican president and the architect of the Emancipation Proclamation. Many state and county parties added Ronald Reagan’s name after his 1980 election, producing the Lincoln-Reagan Dinner, which has been the standard for the last four decades.

Adding Donald Trump’s name is more recent. The Boston Globe reported in August 2025 that local Republican parties across the United States had begun renaming the dinner to include Trump in 2022 and 2023, with some parties dropping Lincoln and Reagan entirely in favor of Trump’s name alone. Florida’s Lee County Republican Executive Committee held its “Inaugural Lincoln Reagan Trump Dinner” in May 2026. Michigan’s Alcona County Republican Party held one in October 2025. The Republican Party of California’s San Luis Obispo County held one in June 2025. The moves were not without detractors: The Globe quoted a Republican Party official saying that including Trump’s name alongside those of Lincoln and Reagan was “sort of an insult to Lincoln and Reagan.”

The Mississippi rebrand follows this national GOP pattern. The state party’s 2026 invitation describes this year’s event as the “2026 Lincoln-Reagan-Trump Gala,” with Trump appended to the two earlier names rather than substituted for them. Reeves’s post-event social media account of the evening referred to it by the new name. The party has not publicly explained when or why the change was made, and the MSGOP’s website does not show prior years’ gala names for comparison.

Adding Trump’s name to civic and commercial branding is a pattern with its own history. The Trump Organization placed his name on hotels, residential towers, casinos, golf courses, steaks, vodka, bottled water and a university, including properties his company licensed to outside developers and did not own. Naming rights is a big deal to Trump: Since returning to office in January, he has signed executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and restoring Fort Bragg as the name of the Army installation in North Carolina that had been renamed Fort Liberty (Braxton Bragg was a Confederate general). He has proposed renaming Alaska’s Denali back to Mount McKinley (for another president). The thread running through the commercial and political naming is claiming places, institutions, and now political traditions associated with individual figures, some of whom are still living.

It has not gone unnoticed that Trump is particularly fond of adding his name to public institutions, including the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, though a court recently struck down that renaming; to the U.S. Institute for Peace, a congressionally funded think tank; to a new fleet of Navy vessels; to a savings account and investment program; to a prescription website; and to immigration “gold cards” (a complete list is here).

In March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation transferring to the state the authority to name major commercial service airports, including Palm Beach International Airport, which was renamed the President Donald J. Trump International Airport.

In that context, adding Trump’s name to the annual GOP galas could be seen as a way to acknowledge the outsized impact of his presidency—or to curry favor with him.

The Lincoln Dinner originated in the late 19^th century as a Republican observance of Lincoln’s February 12 birthday more than two decades after his assassination. Reagan’s name was added to many events after 1980, with most renamings coming after he left office in 1989 and accelerating after his death in 2004. Trump’s name has been added while he is in office and at the center of his party. The Mississippi rebrand places it alongside those of the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation and the president most associated with the modern conservative movement, for an event that helps fund Republican candidates while Trump remains the party’s sitting national leader.

Trump has placed himself in Lincoln’s company before. In a 2020 presidential debate, he said that “nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump” with “the exception of Abraham Lincoln.” At a White House Rose Garden event in October 2025, while surveying portraits of past presidents, Trump said of Washington and Lincoln, “It’s going to be very tough to beat Washington and Lincoln, but we’re going to give it a try.” He also recounted having been angered by someone who had ranked him third, behind the two. The comparison has currency in his party. A 2019 Economist and YouGov poll found that 53 percent of Republicans rated Trump a better leader than Lincoln, while 78 percent of independents and 94 percent of Democrats chose Lincoln.

Reeves and Crosbie spoke under a banner that touted Trump’s name alongside Lincoln’s and Reagan’s. The Mississippi Republican Party has not said when it decided to add Trump’s name to the gala or who made the call. What the rebrand makes clear is that the party that holds every statewide office in Mississippi has decided, in 2026, that its annual fundraiser will be branded around a sitting president as well as the two it has been honoring for decades. The only higher form of praise would have been to name it the Trump-Lincoln-Reagan dinner.

Image: Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump (via Creative Commons)

This article contains two corrections. A previous version stated that Chip Herrington helped Candace Davis win full parental rights over Justin Davis’s daughter. Herrington said he actually helped Justin Davis win those rights. Herrington also corrected his previous statement about Charlie Green finding Justin Davis’s body. A different team member observed Davis’s death and Green, according to Herrington, was so outraged over how the company handled it, combined with past safety issues, that he quit Calgon.

An attorney representing the widow of an apprentice electrician who died earlier this month at a Calgon Carbon manufacturing plant in Bay St. Louis has accused Hancock County’s coroner—a former employee of the company—of spreading misinformation about the death and intimidating the man’s family.

Coroner Jeff Hair allegedly made “staggeringly inappropriate,” “inaccurate” and “heartless” comments to the family of Justin Davis, 28, while defending his former employer, according to attorney Chip Herrington, who spoke with The Mississippi Independent days after releasing a public statement in an attempt to correct early accounts of how Davis died.

“He scolded Mr. Davis and Justin’s widow, Candace [Davis], about any social media posting suggesting Justin had been electrocuted,” Herrington said in the May 23 statement posted to his professional Facebook page, referring to Davis’s father, Edwin Davis. “He did so in a disrespectful tone, raising his voice, such that it felt like harassment and an attempt to intimidate the family into silence.”

Herrington said he was prompted to speak publicly after Candace Davis read and heard reports that her husband had fallen 20 feet to his death—an account the family disputes. Herrington said the family had been told by a worker who found Davis’s body that he was discovered next to a “hot” circuit atop the scaffolding and had died by electrocution.

The confusion began when the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office told WLBT that Davis died after falling 20 feet from scaffolding on May 12. The station reported that deputies responded to “reports that a worker had fallen from scaffolding,” and that Sheriff Johnny Alison said “when officers arrived, they found that a man had fallen 20 feet, striking additional scaffolding on the way down but not reaching the ground.”

Herrington said that account was wrong.

“He did not fall,” Herrington said, citing witnesses at the scene saying Davis’ body was lowered to the ground using a pulley system. “There was no impact, no head trauma, nothing like that.”

After a team member saw Davis collapse and die on the scaffolding, Herrington said, another worker, journeyman electrician Charlie Green, quit his job at the Calgon plant due to the company’s handling of the death and a series of long-running disputes with the company over safety. “He blames them and their policies for killing Justin,” Herrington said of Green. “Everybody knew the scaffolding Davis was using was not properly insulated and requests for an insulated scissor have been regularly denied.” The Mississippi Independent is attempting to reach Green to confirm Herrington’s account.

Hancock County Sheriff Alison did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent about the source of his office’s account of Davis’s death.

“They didn’t hear that from me or Justin’s family,” Herrington claimed.

Herrington said he became involved in the matter after helping Justin Davis win full parental rights to his daughter the day before he died. He added: “I told coroner Hair during a very stern conversation that any attempt to shift the blame for Justin’s death away from Calgon Carbon is going to be a problem. He indicated that he understood.”

Herrington alleged that Hair yelled at Edwin Davis, denied that Davis’s son had been electrocuted and threatened to personally intervene if anyone in the family posted that Davis had died by electrocution. According to Herrington’s account, Hair also emphasized the company’s “impeccable” safety record while on the phone with the family.

In comments to The Seacoast Echo, a Bay St. Louis-based news outlet, Hair stressed that Davis was not an employee of Calgon. Hancock County Chancery Court records show that Hair was himself previously employed by Calgon, through which he had a 401(k) retirement account. The records do not say how long he worked for the company or in what capacity.

Hair did not respond to questions sent by The Mississippi Independent to his personal and private email addresses. He returned to full-time patrolman duties with the Waveland Police Department less than a week before Davis’s death, according to minutes from a May 5, 2026, meeting of the Waveland mayor and aldermen.

The Davis family is awaiting the results of an autopsy by the state medical examiner.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration office in Jackson is also investigating the death, according to online records. The agency has opened two safety investigations: one into Calgon and another into Doleac Electric Co. Inc., the electrical contractor that employed Davis as an apprentice.

In Herrington’s view, the early framing of Davis’s death as the result of a fall raises conflict-of-interest concerns and appears to shift the burden of liability away from Calgon and onto Davis.

“I anticipate that they’ll say he fell, or he died of natural causes, like a heart attack, which they will also claim is not their fault,” Herrington said of Calgon, adding that electrocution can cause cardiac arrest. “It is and always will be about the money.”

Calgon confirmed to The Mississippi Independent that a fatality occurred May 12 at its Pearl River facility, but the company did not directly answer questions about how Davis died or about the alleged intimidation of his widow and father by the county coroner.

“Local authorities are leading an investigation into the cause of death and we are cooperating fully,” Calgon Carbon director of global marketing and communications Jay Kissman said in an emailed statement. “Our deepest condolences go out to the individual’s family and loved ones during this difficult time.”

Calgon Carbon, which has 23 offices and 17 industrial facilities across North America, Europe and Asia, is wholly owned by the Japanese chemical manufacturer Kuraray.

A co-owner of Doleac Electric did not respond to questions about Davis’ death or alleged safety issues at the site. In Davis’s obituary, his family praised the company for its kindness and generosity.

A coroner’s office with broad powers and few barriers

The allegations against Jeff Hair land in a government office that, in Mississippi, carries extraordinary responsibility with comparatively few formal qualifications.

County coroners are called to scenes involving sudden, unexpected, violent or unexplained deaths, from car wrecks and suspected homicides to jail deaths and workplace fatalities. They help determine whether a death requires further investigation, coordinate with the state medical examiner’s office and play a central role in the official account of how a person died.

Yet in Mississippi, the minimum educational requirement to serve as county coroner is a high school diploma. Coroners are not required to be physicians. Across the state, they often come from funeral-home, law-enforcement or family backgrounds rather than medical ones. They are paid $900 a month, plus $185 for each case.

The state’s medicolegal system has improved from its most discredited era, but its history remains difficult to separate from the present. Mississippi went roughly 15 years without a state medical examiner. For nearly two decades, Dr. Steven Hayne dominated the state’s autopsy system, performing an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Mississippi’s autopsies despite not being board-certified in forensic pathology and despite mounting criticism that his testimony helped secure wrongful convictions.

Hayne’s work, often alongside discredited bite-mark analyst Dr. Michael West, became a national symbol of Mississippi’s broken forensic system: high-volume autopsies, questionable science and conclusions that critics said too often aligned with the needs of prosecutors.

When state Public Safety Commissioner Steve Simpson removed Hayne from the state’s approved list of medical examiners in 2008, it appeared to end his grip on the system. But many county coroners pushed back. Led in part by Yazoo County Coroner Ricky Shivers, they sought an attorney general’s opinion allowing adjoining counties to create independent autopsy districts and hire examiners outside the state-approved list. Hayne then circulated the ruling and legal paperwork to sympathetic coroners.

The effort was widely viewed by reform advocates as an attempt to restore the old system, in which coroners, law enforcement officials and prosecutors had easier access to a familiar pathologist, even after exonerations and scandals had exposed the dangers of that arrangement.

Shivers remains the Yazoo County coroner.

Hair’s own public career also reflects the overlapping roles that can define coroner offices in Mississippi. He was elected Hancock County coroner in a 2021 special election after longtime coroner Jim Faulk stepped down because of health complications. Faulk was later indicted in March 2023 by State Auditor Shad White on allegations that he submitted duplicate expenses and collected fees for coroner work he did not perform. He died the following month.

There is no allegation or public record suggesting impropriety by Hair as coroner, as a law-enforcement officer or as a former Calgon Carbon employee. But his position illustrates the conflict questions that can arise when a coroner has close ties to law enforcement or to entities connected to a death investigation. Hair’s position as a coroner who is also a police officer and an elected officials politician raise questions about how coroners are expected to independently help determine what happened in deaths that may involve police, prison officials, employers or other powerful local institutions—including those that they have relationships with.

National death-investigation experts have long warned that coroner systems can blur the line between medical inquiry and law enforcement. The National Academies has identified “potential or actual conflict of interest” where coroner or medical examiner offices overlap with law enforcement, while the National Association of Medical Examiners (known as NAME) has recommended that death investigators work for the medicolegal system, not as agents of law enforcement.

NAME states as its official position that medicolegal death investigators “must investigate cooperatively with, but independent from, law enforcement and prosecutors. The parallel investigation promotes neutral and objective medical assessment of the cause and manner of death”

Hair’s career in the coroner’s office predates the 2021 election. In campaign materials, he said he had served as a deputy coroner under Norma Stiglet, who held the Hancock County coroner’s office for 21 years between 1990 and 2011. She ended up with the job after the death of her husband, the previous coroner. Stiglet had worked at a bank before Hancock County officials asked her to take the position.

Chancery court records show Hair married Stiglet’s daughter in November 1998. It is unclear from available records how long Hair served as deputy coroner, whether that service overlapped with the marriage, or the precise terms of his appointment. Mississippi law has prohibited county officials from hiring close relatives, including relatives by marriage, into certain public positions since 1926, though its application depends on the official’s hiring authority, the position itself and whether public funds were used.

The same chancery records also identify Hair as having worked at Calgon Carbon. They do not say how long he worked there or in what capacity.

Herrington said those overlapping relationships and the ability to influence death investigations contributed to the family’s alarm over Hair’s comments after Davis’s death.

“There is concern that if Calgon Carbon has control over the County Coroner’s office, might they also have control over the medical examiner? Said Herrington in his press release. “This type of corruption erodes public confidence and we deserve better.”

Image: Candace and Justin Davis (courtesy Candace Davis)

Mississippi has one of the South’s few remaining majority-Black congressional districts, and state Republicans—from Gov. Tate Reeves and State Auditor Shad White to the state party itself—have spent months saying they want it redrawn.

As Republican-led legislatures in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina move to eliminate their majority-Back districts after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Mississippi has not acted.

Why not?

One clue could lie in the fact that making U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson’s 2nd Congressional District less Black requires making the three currently safe Republican districts around it more Black, and Mississippi’s three Republican incumbents do not have the margins to absorb the voters and stay safe.

Reeves has called Thompson’s tenure a “reign of terror” and said its end is not a question of if but when. After Callais was decided on April 29, narrowing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Reeves canceled the special session that had been scheduled to redraw the state’s districts. He has said the work will wait until before the 2027 elections. The state held its 2026 primaries in March. The candidates who won them are running in the districts as they exist.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a new congressional map on May 7 that carves the state’s only majority-Black district, in Memphis, into three districts. Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina have taken steps toward redrawing their own maps.

Mississippi has four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Three are held by Republicans—Rep. Trent Kelly in the 1st District, Rep. Michael Guest in the 3rd District and Rep. Mike Ezell in the 4th District—and have been drawn with Black populations low enough that Democrats cannot win them.

The 2nd District, Thompson’s, was drawn after the 2020 Census with a Black voting-age population of 61.05 percent. Lowering it below 50 percent to give a Republican a winning chance would require moving the registrations of roughly 75,000 to 80,000 Black voting-age residents out of the district. The only places to put them are in the districts now held by Kelly, Guest and Ezell, whose Republican margins were built by minimizing their Black populations. Adding voters from the 2nd District is the move that would lower those margins.

Mississippi Democrats drew the 2nd District’s majority-Black configuration in the early 1990s, after the 1990 Census and under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states to draw districts in which Black voters could elect the candidates they preferred. Mike Espy of Yazoo City won the Delta-anchored seat in 1986 under court-ordered boundaries. Bennie Thompson, then a Hinds County supervisor, won the 1993 special election after Espy was named U.S. agriculture secretary and has held the seat in every election since.

Byron D’Andra Orey, a political science professor at Jackson State University and current president of the Southern Political Science Association, said the framing that the 2nd District is the racial construction in the state’s congressional map leaves the other three districts unexamined.

“You can have three super majority white districts but not one majority black district in a state that’s 40 percent Black?” Orey told The Mississippi Independent. “For those white politicians seeking to dismantle District 2: If an all-white congressional delegation is the likely outcome, how is that not about race?”

When Mississippi Democrats controlled the legislature into the 2010s, lawmakers drew state House and Senate districts using the same approach: majority-Black districts packed with as many Black voters as possible, with surrounding districts kept safely white. Republican mapmakers, after gaining control of the redistricting process following the 2010 Census, kept the framework. The lines produced safe seats for incumbents in both parties for three decades, and federal courts permitted them.

The 2025 special elections, held to comply with a federal court order under Section 2, ended the Republican supermajority in the state Senate by flipping seats in districts the court had redrawn. The U.S. Supreme Court has since vacated the order behind those elections.

In Tennessee, eliminating the Memphis-area majority-Black district moves Black voters into adjacent districts that carry Republican margins large enough to absorb them. Louisiana’s redraw will scatter the voters of the second majority-Black district the court struck down across districts that were drawn with that absorption in mind. Alabama and Florida are working with maps that include incumbents whose districts have room to add Black voters without flipping. Mississippi’s three Republican-held districts were drawn for the opposite purpose. Their Black populations were minimized to make them safe. Adding the 2nd District’s voters to them is the move that puts them in play.

Reeves has said he is working with the Trump White House on a map that would oust Thompson. Neither he, White nor the Mississippi Republican Party has described how a redraw would resolve the arithmetic. The session Reeves canceled would have been the first attempt to find out.

The deadline he has set, before the 2027 elections, gives the legislature roughly 18 months to draw lines that move Black voters out of the 2nd District without moving them into seats his party would lose. No Southern state has yet demonstrated how that is done in a four-district delegation with three already-maxed Republican seats.

Image: Photo montage of Mississippi’s current U.S. House delegation (L-R, clockwise): Bennie Thompson; Trent Kelly; Michael Guest; and Mike Ezell.

As Republican-led states move to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, conservatives in Mississippi have made an argument about what those districts are. The districts sort voters by race, they say, and dismantling them ends the sorting.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and the civil rights organizations defending his seat answer that the districts remedy racial discrimination and that removing them revives it. The two sides do not dispute that race shaped the maps. They disagree about which use of race the Constitution forbids.

State Auditor Shad White has put the conservative case in those terms.

“Congressman Thompson’s congressional district was specifically drawn along the lines of race, and to me that is a form of racial bias,” White told Action News 5 (Memphis), calling for the Second District to be redrawn.

Former state senator Chris McDaniel made the same argument in a post on the decision, describing the majority-Black districts as racial carveouts that divide towns and split counties to group people by race, and saying the maps should follow communities and geography instead.

Thompson, who has held the Second District since 1993, answered the charge directly. “Bennie Thompson will be there with a whole bunch of folks with bells on, saying that this is not who we are,” he told Action News 5. “‘Jim Crow 2.0’ shouldn’t exist.”

Earlier, on Al Sharpton’s program, Thompson described the district as a consolidation rather than a division, saying the Voting Rights Act let lawmakers “craft a district” that could elect a Black member of Congress and that Black “communities of interest were consolidated and not divided” under the prior reading of Section 2.

During a Jackson rally on May 21 against weakening the Voting Rights Act, Thompson said: “The reason I act the way I do is because I was mistreated along the way. The mistreatment isn’t something I wanted to happen. It’s because the system didn’t want people like Bennie Thompson and you to make it.”

The disagreement over the constitutionality of district lines drawn to enable the election of Black candidates is the one the Supreme Court decided. The issue of the constitutionality of district lines drawn to favor white candidates by diluting Black voter strength was not before the court.

Writing for the six-justice majority on Apr. 29, 2026, Justice Samuel Alito held that the Voting Rights Act “was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it,” and that lower courts requiring majority-Black districts had engaged in “the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.” The Constitution, Alito wrote, “almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” In that reading, the majority-Black district is the racial classification, and Section 2 had been forcing states to make it.

The three dissenting justices located the racial harm elsewhere. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that under the majority’s standard “a State can, without legal consequence, systemically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” and that the majority’s changes “eviscerate the law.” In the dissent’s account, the racial classification is the dilution the district was drawn to prevent, and Section 2 was the remedy.

The record behind Thompson’s seat tracks the dissent’s account. Majority-Black districts in the South were largely ordered by federal courts, or drawn by legislatures under court supervision, after judges found that existing maps diluted Black voting strength. The Second District took its Delta-anchored, majority-Black shape from Section 2 litigation in the early 1980s and first elected a Black congressman, Mike Espy, in 1986, the first Mississippi had sent to Washington since 1883. The district that the conservative argument characterizes as a racial carveout entered the record as a remedy a court imposed after finding racial discrimination.

The fight has moved beyond the courtroom. After Callais, Tennessee passed a new map eliminating a majority-Black district in the Memphis area, and Alabama and Florida moved to redraw their lines. The NAACP responded by calling on Black student-athletes to boycott colleges in Southern states redrawing their maps, a campaign amplified by the Congressional Black Caucus and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Most of the targeted schools are in the Southeastern Conference, which includes Mississippi’s two largest universities. Today, May 27, 2026, hundreds gathered in Jackson at a march organized by the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Mississippi Democratic Party. Thompson told the crowd the Voting Rights Act had allowed “people that looks like me” to become mayors and sheriffs across Mississippi. “You have to understand that the system is not fair,” he said.

The Mississippi Legislature has not redrawn the Second District. Gov. Tate Reeves has said he wants the seat gone and has twice declined to call a session to draw it. Whether a new map ends racial sorting or revives vote dilution is the question Callais decided, in a vote of 6-3, and the one every southern legislature now redrawing its lines will test again.

Image: U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (via his offical Facebook page)

On Jan. 5, 1966, state Rep. Kenneth O. Williams of Clarksdale, chair of the Mississippi House Census and Apportionment Committee, introduced a bill to redraw the state’s congressional districts. The bill became House Bill 911 three days into the regular session of the legislature. The Voting Rights Act had been federal law for five months.

In 1964, three Black women—Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Annie Devine of Canton and Victoria Gray of Hattiesburg—had run for Congress under the banner of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed in response to the state’s regular Democratic Party having shut out Black voters. Registrars refused to certify the petitions of Hamer, Devine and Gray, so they never reached the official ballot. They ran instead in a parallel “Freedom Vote” open to anyone, which they won in a landslide.

Hamer drew roughly 33,000 Freedom Votes against Rep. Jamie Whitten’s 49. On the strength of those results, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party asked the U.S. House to refuse to seat Mississippi’s five white congressmen, arguing that their elections were invalid because half the state’s population had been barred from voting. The challenge ran through most of 1965, including depositions, sworn testimony and a September hearing in which the three women spoke. The U.S. House dismissed the challenge on a vote of 228-143 on Sept. 17, 1965. Whitten and the others kept their seats.

The bill that Williams put on lawmakers’ desks was not new. The legislature had drafted it during the 1964 general session and held it without passage before the Voting Rights Act existed—before Hamer had filed at the Indianola courthouse, at which time Sunflower County’s registrar in Indianola had been processing voter applications under the new federal procedures for 153 days, and before the voter registration drive—and attendant white violence—of Freedom Summer.

The plan Williams introduced was the plan the legislature had been holding for two years against the day the federal apparatus would inevitably force the question. Williams’s bill proposed five congressional districts—the same number the state had under the 1962 plan, but with the lines redrawn specifically to dilute Black voting strength.

The 1962 Second District had run east from the central Delta into the hill counties of north Mississippi. It contained Sunflower County, where Hamer had filed; Leflore County, where the Greenwood chapter of the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNNC, had been operating since 1962; Humphreys County, where George Lee had been shot in his car in 1955 and Gus Courts had been shot in his store the same fall; Washington County, the Greenville port county on the Mississippi River; and Holmes County, where Robert G. Clark Jr., would file for the state House the following year.

The Williams plan moved Sunflower, Leflore, Humphreys, Washington and Holmes out of the Second District and into the First. It packed the central Delta counties with the eastern Black Belt counties of Lowndes, Noxubee, Lee, Monroe, Oktibbeha and Clay to produce a First District that combined the heaviest concentration of Black Mississippians in the state into a district they could not carry. The redrawn Second District contained the hill counties of north Mississippi and the northern Delta counties of Bolivar, Coahoma, Quitman, Tallahatchie and Tunica.

The Mississippi Senate moved to resist. The Williams plan would be overturned in federal court before the next election, a number of senators said, and there was no point in the Senate’s passing a plan the court would have to redraw. The Senate Rules Committee considered the Williams plan in early February and rejected it. The committee approved instead a competing plan drafted by state Sen. W.B. Alexander of Cleveland, the Bolivar County senator whose district lay inside the 1962 Second District. The Alexander plan would extend the east-central Fourth District west across the state to absorb a number of Delta counties with high Black populations, leaving the Second District with a Black population majority and the Delta intact as a single congressional unit.

The Senate took up the Alexander plan on Feb. 15 and passed it after beating down amendments to make it conform with the House plan. When Sen. William Burgin of Columbus rose on the Senate floor the next day to oppose an amendment Walter Moore of Oakland had offered against the Alexander plan, Burgin named the purpose of the Moore amendment for the record. The amendment, Burgin said, was drafted “to distribute the Negro population of the Delta so that they will not be in a majority in the First or Second Congressional Districts.” If the plan was adopted, Burgin warned, “that same party will take the same contest back to the House of Representatives, and this time they will have a constitutional basis for the contest.”

State Sen. George Yarbrough of Red Banks, the floor manager who had brought the Alexander plan to the floor and was running the debate, closed the discussion before it could spread. “Let’s don’t start a lot of discussion,” Yarbrough said, “that might give somebody in Washington or the liberal press in the North a chance to take a dig at Mississippi.” The Moore amendment was defeated 21 to 26.

The legislative action was running against a federal clock. On Oct. 19, 1965, Peggy J. Connor of Hattiesburg and other plaintiffs including the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had filed Connor v. Johnson in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, challenging the existing districting on racial and population grounds. The three-judge federal panel hearing the case had warned the legislature that if the state did not act, the court would. The conference committee deadlocked through March.

On April 5, 1965, Lt. Gov. Carroll Gartin announced a reconstituted conference, with George Payne Cossar of Tallahatchie, Charles Allen of Monroe, and Jimmie Morrow of Rankin for the House and Gartin himself with Yarbrough, E.K. Collins of Laurel and A.J. Foster of Amory for the Senate. With April 8 standing as the deadline for candidate qualifications under Mississippi law, the conferees had three days to produce a compromise.

The compromise plan kept Sunflower, Leflore, Humphreys and Washington counties out of the new Second District but moved Tunica, Bolivar, Coahoma, Quitman and Tallahatchie counties into a redrawn Second District alongside the hill counties stretching from DeSoto to Alcorn. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party counted the result on April 19, 1965, at 440,023 in total population, with 301,660 Black residents and 138,365 white residents. The new Second District was 68 percent Black by population. Gov. Paul Johnson signed House Bill 911 into law before the qualifying deadline closed.

The structural argument the Williams plan made depended on the difference between population and the electorate. Six counties in the new Second District had Black voting-age majorities. Only one had achieved a Black majority of registered voters by April 1966. Coahoma County, the home of NAACP leader Aaron Henry and the only county in the new district where federal examiners had been sent under the Voting Rights Act, recorded 7,061 Black voters registered against 6,380 white voters. The remaining five counties had white-majority registration despite Black voting-age majorities. DeSoto County had registered 1,470 of its 6,246 Black voters of voting age. Tunica had registered 468 of its 5,822. Quitman had registered 2,060 of its 7,250. The Williams plan operated on those numbers.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party filed a motion with the federal three-judge panel hearing Connor v. Johnson charging that the new plan was racially geared and a successful effort to gerrymander the Black vote in Mississippi. The presiding judge of the panel was J.P. Coleman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—the former Mississippi governor who had served as Whitten’s counsel in the Hamer-Devine-Gray contest, elevated to the Fifth Circuit by President Lyndon Johnson on July 27, 1965, between the contest’s arguments before the House and the House’s Sept. 17 floor vote.

The Mississippi Delta had constituted a single congressional district from 1882 forward, through the redistricting plans of 1932, 1952, and 1962. The Williams plan was the first to carve it up.

On June 14, 1966, the Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear followed Highway 51 into Grenada, the hinge county the Williams plan had kept in the redrawn Second District. Grenada County contained 18,400 people, about half of them Black. Of the 4,300 Black residents of voting age, 135 were registered.

That afternoon, Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed a mass meeting at Bellflower Baptist Church, and more than two hundred people marched from the church to the town square to register. One hundred sixty Black Mississippians registered to vote in Grenada that day. The Williams plan had moved the lines. The work of registering the voters within those lines—specifically designed to dilute their numbers—went on.

Image: Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, 1964 (via SNCCDigital.org)

Lawyers for a transgender woman held since January 2026 in the men’s dormitory of a Mississippi immigration detention facility are fighting a federal judge’s recommendation to dismiss her unlawful-detention claim, arguing that the government locked her up without due process.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Sabrina Carmona Sanchez, 41, filed objections on May 15 in the Southern District of Mississippi, asking the federal judge to reject the recommendation and release her from confinement, according to legal documents Sanchez’s legal team shared with The Mississippi Independent.

The lawyers filed what’s known as a habeas corpus petition, a challenge to the government’s authority to keep someone in custody and, more recently, one of the few ways detainees denied a bond hearing can seek federal court review of the legality of their detention.

“Ms. Carmona Sanchez’s detention is attributable to the government’s policy to categorically deny her (and thousands of others like her) the opportunity for release on bond or recognizance,” her lawyers wrote in the filing.

Sanchez’s court filings in the Southern District of Mississippi reveal the messy nationwide legal drama that has caused a constitutional crisis among the nation’s 13 federal appeals courts, which disagree on the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s July 2025 immigrant detention guidance, which states that any undocumented immigrant arrested could be held in custody without offering them the opportunity to contest their detention or seek bond.

Like anyone else in the United States, Sanchez is entitled to know why she is being detained and, not withstanding a narrow set of circumstances, an opportunity to be released on bond.

“The undisputed record before this Court demonstrates that Ms. Carmona Sanchez received no pre-deprivation process whatsoever to challenge her current detention, which began on January 3, 2026,” the filings noted.

Her case is not about whether she will ultimately be allowed to remain in the U.S. That is already in motion within the immigration courts. This case asks whether the government can detain her without the opportunity to post bond while those proceedings continue.

No-bond policy

For decades, immigrants arrested inside the U.S. were treated as eligible to seek bond from an immigration judge while their cases proceeded. The Trump administration adopted a broader interpretation. While most district judges rejected the guidance, federal appeals courts are split over the issue.

“District court judges across the country said, ‘You can’t just start interpreting immigration detention laws differently,’” said Brandon Riches, an Ocean Springs immigration attorney who represents many immigrant detainees with habeas cases in the Southern District of Mississippi. “But the big Fifth Circuit decision in February kind of foreclosed a big chunk of the claims.”

Several district courts have rejected the administration’s position, but in February, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Trump’s legal interpretation in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, sharply limiting bond eligibility for immigrants who entered the country without inspection.

“So, attorneys started filing habeas cases,” Riches said. “It was initially widely successful across the country.”

The ruling has created a bizarre situation where Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas have become a haven for the Trump administration’s harshest immigration policies.

Because habeas petitions are generally filed where a person is detained--not where they lived or were arrested, geography can decide the practical outcome. An immigrant arrested in New York but transferred to Mississippi is litigating in the Fifth Circuit.

That distinction is central to Carmona Sanchez’s case. Her lawyers are not relying only upon the statutory argument that the government has misread immigration detention law. They also argue that the government created liberty interests when it briefly detained her at the border, released her, and granted her work authorization—before detaining her again.

“Since Ms. Carmona Sanchez gained independent liberty and property interests when the government granted her release on recognizance and work authorization, the Fifth Amendment entitles her to individualized due process before the deprivation of those interests,” the filings argue. “The Report and Recommendation fails to recognize this.”

In short, if the government changes its mind about your freedom, it has to explain why.

Released, then arrested again

Carmona Sanchez fled Ecuador for Chile in 2011 and lived there for more than a decade, according to the court filings. She entered the U.S. “without inspection” in November 2023. She was later apprehended by Border Patrol authorities in California, who issued her a notice to appear in immigration court and released her.

Sanchez next moved to Queens, built ties in the local community, entered a relationship, volunteered, and began receiving gender-affirming care and psychological counseling, her lawyers wrote in the filings. In August 2024, after appearing in immigration court in New York, she was allowed to remain free while her case proceeded. She later received work authorization and attended all scheduled hearings.

On Jan. 3, 2026, immigration agents arrested Sanchez at a hotel on Long Island. Her legal team says she was not charged with a crime but was transferred to ICE custody. Two days later, she arrived in Adams County.

Held in men’s dormitory

Since arriving at Adams County, Sanchez has been housed in a men’s dormitory, according to court filings shared by her legal team.

“Ms. Carmona Sanchez fears for her safety at Adams,” her lawyers wrote. “Detained men at Adams have verbally harassed and threatened her, calling her slurs and making lewd sexual comments and advances. She is currently assigned to a men’s dorm where about 100 other people sleep on bunks in a large room.”

Although Sanchez is permitted to shower privately in the healthcare unit, her lawyers said, she must use toilets in the dormitory that have no doors or privacy screens.

“Because she fears for her safety in the communal restroom, she waits until everyone has gone to sleep to use the restroom,” her lawyers added in the filings.

Her legal team also says she struggled for months to obtain gender-affirming medication, and eventually received it after repeated advocacy with ICE and the Department of Justice.

Sanchez has separate immigration claims pending in other courts. Because she was assaulted in December 2023 and later certified by the New York Police Department as a victim of a qualifying crime, she is entitled to a U visa. She is also seeking a T visa, available to victims of human trafficking.

In addition to the habeas petition challenging the legality of her detention, her attorneys sought a temporary restraining order against Rafael Vergara, the warden at Adams County, and Brian Acuna, acting director of ICE’s New Orleans field office.

If the district judge adopts the recommendation and dismisses the habeas case, that request for emergency relief would likely become moot.

Judicial bottleneck

The Southern District of Mississippi has become a bottleneck due to the Fifth Circuit decision and detention geography. Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas hold large immigration detention facilities, often in rural areas far from where detainees were originally arrested and usually in areas with few immigration attorneys, as The Mississippi Independent reported in November.

“I do think that’s by design,” said C.J. Sandley, a senior staff attorney with CCR, who declined comment on the specifics of Sanchez’s case for this story. “There’s just not enough attorneys with habeas or immigration experience, period.”

Riches said he used to take two or three habeas cases a year between 2018 and 2024. That number has risen substantially.

“There’s not many immigration attorneys in Mississippi to begin with,” Riches said, echoing Sandley’s comments, “and there’s definitely not many of us who practice immigration and are admitted to practice in federal court.”

The massive backlog of cases compounds that shortage.

“There are over 400 habeas petitions pending in front of a single district court judge in Mississippi,” Sandley, who is based in Birmingham, Alabama, said.

Since June 23, 2025, 494 habeas corpus cases have been filed in the Southern District of Mississippi, where Adams County is located, according to a Mississippi Independent review of the docket. Of those, 479 remain active. No such cases have been filed in the Northern District of Mississippi. Nearly all are before U.S. District Judge David C. Bramlette III, an 86-year-old senior judge presiding over 475 of the cases. Only 15 have reached any resolution, and none have been decided on the merits of the detainees’ claims. Typically, the district judge has magistrate judges beneath him who help with his workload.

If Bramlette adopts the magistrate judge’s recommendation, Carmona Sanchez’s habeas petition could be dismissed without a ruling in her favor on whether her detention violates due process. Sandley said she cannot be deported while she appeals her deportation order, and her T visa and U visa applications are proceeding separately.

Image: Unidentified ICE detainees (via ICE Flickr account)