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A top Democratic super PAC focused on U.S. Senate races announced Tuesday that it will spend $1.2 million on an ad campaign in Mississippi for Scott Colom.

The ad, paid for by the Senate Majority PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, marks the group’s first entry into Mississippi’s heated Senate race this cycle. Colom is challenging incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, whom the ad calls a “‘do nothing’ senator who voted to kick people off Medicaid while pocketing thousands from special interests.”

The ad buy from Schumer in the election’s homestretch is a notable development since Schumer had earlier been criticized by figures such as U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, Mississippi’s only Democrat in Washington, and some other congressional Democrats for failing to spend more on Colom’s campaign.

“Scott Colom is the senator Mississippi deserves – and he can win,” Schumer said on social media after the ad campaign announcement.

Thompson had said Democrats were “missing a golden opportunity” by overlooking Mississippi. Those comments came after the official campaign arm of Senate Democrats excluded Mississippi and Colom’s campaign from a $40-million investment in 10 battleground states.

But multiple Democratic senators have visited Mississippi to campaign with Colom, and Schumer attended a fundraiser for him this summer. Mississippi’s Senate race has since gained national attention and attracted a steady stream of Democratic power players.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign with Colom in Columbus on Thursday, and former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will visit cities along the Gulf Coast on Oct. 27.

The ad highlights Colom’s record as a district attorney and highlights his Christian faith. It also criticizes Hyde-Smith, saying she has failed to pass any meaningful legislation and that she voted for Medicaid cuts.

In a statement, Hyde-Smith’s campaign said the late investment from Schumer was evidence Colom was “too liberal” to win, pointing to issues such as immigration and transgender rights.

“It took Chuck Schumer and his Super PACs thirteen months to run a single ad for Scott Colom,” said Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith’s Campaign Manager. “Team Cindy is confident that voters will reject this radical agenda at the ballot box on November 3rd.”

News of the ad campaign broke on the same day the Cook Political Report, a reputable election handicapper, moved the Senate race in Mississippi from solid Republican to likely Republican. Other national pundits and prognosticators say races in deep-red states including Mississippi are becoming more in play as the Trump administration’s approval ratings tank and consumer prices continue to rise.

In a statement, Gerard Henderson, Colom’s campaign manager, said Mississippi is in play “because thousands of Mississippians volunteered and chipped in.”

“We clearly have the momentum and resources to win on November 3rd and prove to the nation that Mississippi Matters,” Henderson said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S.-Ukraine alliance is careening toward a possible breaking point, with Moscow strengthened by President Donald Trump’s recent rejection of new Russia sanctions and Kyiv undermined by disruptions in satellite support for its drones during the war.

Trump’s relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has always been a moving target, while the Republican president has frequently boasted of his rapport with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. But relations between the U.S. and Ukraine appear to be at a new low, threatening to tip the balance of the war to Russia’s favor and imperil America’s security interests across the globe.

“At this moment in time, things look blacker than they ever had regarding this administration’s policy towards Russia and Ukraine,” said John Herbst, a former ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush and now a scholar with the Atlantic Council.

Trump has been lobbing insults at Zelenskyy for over a week and turning to policies that benefit Putin, while Ukraine’s president has said he feels betrayed and worries for his country’s future. But the American president can still shift on Zelenskyy — especially as he faces bipartisan outrage from lawmakers — which Trump has done before.

Trump famously thrashed Ukraine’s leader in the Oval Office last year, warning him to “make a deal or we are out.” Washington briefly suspended intelligence sharing. But Trump was praising Zelenskyy by that July and said they “actually developed a good relationship.”

“Trump is a mercurial guy,” Herbst said. “He can wake up tomorrow morning, decide he’s done enough on this, and he might start to lean back in the other direction.”

No one has taken responsibility for satellite restrictions on Ukraine

Trump’s recent decisions have baffled experts and infuriated Democrats and some Republicans ahead of pivotal midterm elections in two weeks.

After The Wall Street Journal reported that Putin raised the prospect of a meeting with Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, Trump told reporters Monday that he was open to it but expected it to focus on denuclearization efforts. Asked whether he would be willing to negotiate the end of the war without Zelenskyy, Trump appeared to indicate yes.

“I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” Trump said.

Trump decided Friday to waive sanctions on Russia in a bill that Congress overwhelmingly passed to support Ukraine. Named after late South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the legislation targeted the flow of financial resources fueling Russia’s war.

That rebuke followed Trump’s announcement of a deal to import Russian diesel fuel in a long-shot effort to curb high gas prices. The agreement was pilloried by Republicans and Democrats alike who say it will help Russia without making a difference in global fuel prices, which are elevated mostly due to Trump’s war against Iran.

Then there were changes in SpaceX’s satellite support to Ukraine’s military, for which no one has taken responsibility.

Starshield is a military-grade version of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service and the backbone of Ukraine’s drone operations and communication. Zelenskyy says his country is facing major speed restrictions, so Ukrainian drones have been unable to intercept Russia’s jet-powered drones.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk, a Trump ally, has said Starshield is controlled by the U.S. and any limits are decided by the military and ultimately Trump. But Trump told reporters Friday that he did not order restrictions and doubted that Musk did either.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that Ukraine wants access to Starshield but doesn’t have it. On Monday, he said the Pentagon controls Starshield, and “Ukraine has benefited from it” and wants to expand its use to conduct attacks beyond its territory.

The U.S. military has not responded to questions about its involvement.

And while Russia has launched new attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy said Monday that Kyiv once again received no early warning of the latest attacks from partners such as the U.S.

“Russia killed six people, including a mother and her child, who was just over a year old,” Zelenskyy said on X, adding that this “is how Russia responds to sanctions waivers and reduced pressure.”

Trump and Rubio say Washington hasn’t stopped providing intelligence to Kyiv that has helped Ukraine counter Russian attacks.

Experts say Trump is trying to appease Putin

Dan Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland and assistant secretary of state for European affairs under Bush, said he was mystified by the Trump administration’s shifting positions on Ukraine.

Fried said he first thought Trump’s diesel fuel announcement was aimed at trying to influence the midterms with cheaper fuel prices. But what followed has changed his opinion.

“It all seems designed to put pressure on Zelenskyy and curry favor with Putin,” said Fried, now a scholar with the Atlantic Council.

Fiona Hill, who was Trump’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council during his first term, said Trump could be trying to appease Putin over worries that Russia could do more to support Iran.

Since Trump launched the Iran war in February, Russia has sent drone technology to Tehran and information that could help it strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region.

“So maybe this is it — Putin’s just calling in a chit for not devastating Trump through Iran as he could do by helping the Iranians,” said Hill, now a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution.

Trump revealed his worries on social media Sunday, saying, “Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.”

Criticism grows in Congress

One factor that could nudge Trump toward a detente with Zelenskyy is the cascading criticism from Republicans. They are facing a surge of Democratic momentum in the final stretch of the midterms, which will determine control of Congress.

Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican in a competitive race, is calling for congressional hearings into the Starshield disruptions and “immediate harsh and punitive budget cuts to any responsible agency or agency head.”

Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said on X that he and retiring Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis organized a call with Zelenskyy and a bipartisan group of lawmakers Monday, including about disruptions to U.S. intelligence sharing.

Zelenskyy, in a video of the briefing posted online, also noted that Ukraine has “almost no Patriot interceptors left from the United States” and claimed “the Pentagon is delaying the delivery of missiles that our partners have already paid for.”

Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, urged Trump to take up Zelenskyy’s pledge to stop attacks on Russian energy infrastructure in exchange for U.S. targeting assistance to stop Russia’s missiles.

“President Trump can lower prices at the pump today by simply agreeing to this deal!” Wicker posted on X.

Regardless of which political party controls Congress next year, lawmakers will likely revolt if Trump enters into a deal with Russia and China over Ukraine, said Fried, the former ambassador to Poland.

“It is clear that we are sitting on considerable leverage over Putin,” he said, “but also clear that we are not using it. It’s a mess.”

Associated Press writers Lynn Berry and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful ideas to be shared about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.   

Before I moved to Jackson for the summer, a New Yorker living in Montgomery, Alabama, told me to pay close attention to people’s reactions when I shared my summer plans.

I had just recently received nearly unanimous encouragement for my decision to study abroad in Madrid, so I was curious what she meant; this potential for contrast became a little game for me. I was a double agent, watching closely for the reactions I predicted: coastal elitism and disparagement.

What I noticed instead was more damning. A pause, a curious tilt, an eye squint. The subtle signs of drawing a blank. My friends and family in New York City and Boston didn’t condemn Mississippi. To have such strong opinions, they would have needed to observe, judge and then reject Mississippi. Instead, Mississippi sits outside their scope of consideration altogether.

I grew up in New York City, where a heavy dose of civic pride taught me that I hail from the center of the universe. College in Boston marked a departure down a well-blazed path for New Yorkers looking to expand their world, but only just so. In this universe, Mississippi is an abstraction, rarely registered beyond a childhood memory of spelling practice: MI-SS-I-SS-I-PP-I! It is scarcely acknowledged as a place to go, let alone stay or build a life.

It wasn’t until I talked with my professor, Gene Corbin, about his years living and working in Mississippi in the 90s that its inclusion in this universe—as much more than a thing to spell—became obvious and necessary.

Professor Corbin sent me to Jackson to work for Jake McGraw at Working Together Mississippi. My task was to join in their effort to research why Mississippi struggles to attract and retain college-educated people, a phenomenon known as “brain drain.”

Mississippi Today, in conjunction with Rethink Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Center for Population Studies, created a first-of-its-kind study dedicated to the state’s brain drain crisis. I began my job this summer by reading through the thousands of survey responses they had collected, placing myself at the “stay vs. leave” crossroads that many Mississippians perennially consider. Immersed in these fraught considerations, I found that most respondents reckoned with a home state where they don’t feel they have sufficient opportunities to stay, but they would, and they want to.

Ironically, I was analyzing an instinct that I recognize in myself and my friends: glancing toward the coasts, assuming that real life, real opportunity, happens there. The difference is that Mississippians must weigh the cost of outsourcing opportunity with what it costs to stay. Having started on this note, I was primed to spend the rest of my time in Jackson open to experiencing the full weight of either conclusion. Paradoxically, the more I studied leaving the state, the more I felt the value of staying. I was swimming against the current.

As the summer progressed, my understanding of Jackson grew beyond what I read in my research and rested instead on the experience of building a routine and community in this city. I listened to Blues at Hal & Mals on Mondays, learned about community organizing for a weekend in Louisville and wandered through the “L.V. Hull: Love Is a Sensation” exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art on rainy weekdays. I felt deep affection for a culture that I also recognized—one I had seen fragments of in New York City and pop culture my whole life.

Multiculturalism is a core part of New York’s identity, and most New Yorkers would balk at being called insular. But my time in one of New York’s great cultural wellsprings revealed just this: a blind spot in New York’s identity and proof that some constituent cultures are celebrated while others are forgotten.

So, let’s celebrate. You all know this better than I do, so forgive me for stating the obvious: Elvis Presley is from Mississippi, and so is Oprah. Robert Johnson, raised primarily in the Mississippi Delta, is the blues giant who inspired the 2025 film “Sinners.” And civil rights legend Medgar Evers is the namesake of a City of New York public college in Brooklyn, a fact I would fairly confidently state many Brooklynites could not explain. What happens in Mississippi does not stay contained behind a state line; it ripples throughout the rest of the country. The case for staying in this cultural wellspring is easily made.

Yet Mississippi is a real place, one whose challenges are concentrated and in their rawest forms – the brain drain didn’t come out of nowhere. And still the state remains unconsidered, even by those who claim to care passionately about social and racial justice. The instinct to engage injustice when it is exotic and geographically or historically distant keeps places like Jackson invisible. We should refuse to tolerate this hypocrisy.

Mississippians, the problem isn’t that coastal “elites” are judging you; it is that we ignore you. The message I will bring back with me is that if you, like me, desire a full understanding of the country you live in, and not just its wealthiest cities, come to Mississippi. If you don’t come, read; and if you won’t, at the very least, consider with curiosity.

Ella Caplan is a senior at Tufts University, studying sociology and Spanish. She grew up in New York City.

A state lawmaker pleaded with members of the Jackson City Council on Monday night to sell city-owned swampland along the Pearl River, a move that could advance a long-sought riverfront casino resort in Mississippi’s capital city.

Rep. Chris Bell, a Democrat from Jackson, expressed his dismay that the council had not yet approved an order allowing LeFleur Development to buy and develop 93 acres within the river’s floodplain.

“We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of the city of Jackson,” Bell said after thanking the council for letting him speak even though the project was not on the council’s work session agenda. 

Further delays, he asserted, would mean the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in much-needed tax revenue for the cash-strapped city. Last year, the city’s tourism arm, Visit Jackson, estimated that the proposed resort could attract over 4 million visitors annually and create more than 6,722 new jobs. 

“I’m not saying we will, but we do not need to fumble a $600 million influx of funds to the city of Jackson,” Bell told the council.

The council had tabled the matter during an Oct. 6 meeting after Ward 1 Council Member Ashby Foote, who represents northeast Jackson and is the body’s lone Republican, had questioned if the proposed selling price of $110,000 was too low. The amount was based on two estimates LeFleur Development obtained from two Mississippi property appraisers.

LeFleur Development is supported by former Gov. Haley Barbour and attorney-developer Robert Gibbs, a key ally of Mayor John Horhn.

Jackson City Council President Vernon Hartley, who represents Ward 5 in west Jackson, told Bell the proposal was not dead but had been referred to a committee for further discussion.

While the council’s support is crucial for advancing the project, the development faces other hurdles.

Despite repeated attempts, Bell has yet to secure passage of the required legislation that would allow a casino to be built in Jackson. His bill faced opposition from lawmakers whose districts already have casinos. 

Under state law, casinos can only be built along the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast, or on land owned by Native Americans.

It also remains to be seen how the Pearl River’s swampy banks will be converted into land suitable for development. In March, the Rankin Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District announced that it had approved a plan to widen and develop the river, though federal officials later clarified that no final decision has been made.

Libby Reuter watched the creek flow slowly, like she had done dozens of times before.

Mallard ducks rested on stones and cattails sprang out of the creek. The water ran parallel to a street busy with traffic and joggers, pooling behind the art museum in Springfield, Mo. 

Fassnight Creek is hundreds of miles from the banks of the Mississippi River, but that’s exactly what drew Reuter, an artist, there with her creative partner, Joshua Rowan. They wanted to tell a story about the creek and its changing environment. More importantly, the pair wanted to highlight its place in the larger story of the Mississippi River watershed. 

Here in Springfield, Reuter saw “an opportunity to show both the urbanization and the way the natural environment can contribute to it.”

Rowan, meanwhile, studied the scene. As a photographer, he was looking for a composition that could serve as a “gateway” into the themes surrounding water resources — in Fassnight Creek’s case, erosion, flooding. 

“Even in the background, the tall grass is the diversity of vegetation,” Rowan said. “If we can include even this rigid piece of concrete, forming at the far end of the photograph — that goes far to tell the story.”

The pair have followed this process more than 400 times over the past 15 years in states across the Mississippi River Basin, from Iowa to Wisconsin and Tennessee to Louisiana. 

The artists build cairns, which are normally stacks of stones raised to mark trails or a place of significance. But theirs are delicate, fleeting sculptures made out of found glassware, often recycled vases or antique dishes. Each one is custom-made to its location — rivers, creeks and wetlands in the basin — and placed at 40-mile intervals from one another.

The goal is to spark conversation about the state of the watershed and how each location is impacted by both nature and human activity. “There’s the common things,” said Reuter. “About stormwater, about flooding, about the soil and what it supports, and the history of the place.”

Each cairn’s construction and placement is inspired by the story of water the artists uncover there. For example, one of their many cairns sat on top of a levee in Rohwer, Ark., while another stood in the shadow of a grain silo in Warsaw, Ill., rising from an overgrown flowerbed on a no-till farm. In Mississippi, the artists created temporary cairns in Greenville bridge, Coahoma County, Natchez and Vicksburg.

We’re “trying to get a new metaphor of how we’re connected to the water and land and each other,” Reuter said.

Before the cairns are built, the pair meet with local stakeholders to get a better sense of the location’s past, present and future. In Springfield, they talked to Caleb Sanders, a parks supervisor for the city. 

Sanders told them that, before colonization, the area surrounding Fassnight Creek was likely a prairie with a series of buffalo wallows — places where native wildlife could find watering holes and rest. While this creek might not ever return to what it once was, he said, the city is making improvements to help the creek better manage stormwater and protect its soil from washing away. 

“It’s a space that, like an art installation, challenges expectations and norms and really serves to give that same feel that you would have when you’re walking into an art space,” Sanders said.

That mindset of connecting art and nature is why Joshua Best, museum educator at the Springfield Art Museum, commissioned the artists to create three cairns in a special series for the city. They met last year at an environmental conference and decided to work together on the local project. 

“Naturalization projects have been at the forefront of our civic thinking in Springfield,” Best said. “So it was one way that I saw to connect art with what we’re doing.” 

After viewing the site, the artists headed back to their cargo van. Inside were milk crates and plastic tote bags full of fragile glassware, cushioned with packing paper and styrofoam. The containers were labeled with descriptions like “swirly.” 

With help from Rowan, Reuter unboxed a long cylindrical vase with a small illustration taped to it: blueprints for the cairn that the artists would build.

The final product was a deep blue-green glass tower made of stacked platters and vases, its mismatched pieces evoking an otherworldly tea party set. For a brief moment, it rose from the bubbling Fassnight Creek, marking the many paths that intersected here across time: that of the buffalo, rainwater and visitors to the art museum.

True to the artist’s goal of sustainability, the sculptures are not meant to stay. “The photograph and the sculpture are both capturing a moment, and that moment doesn’t exist beyond that,” Reuter said.

After they’re photographed, the artists take the cairns apart, storing the pieces for possible reuse elsewhere in the basin. The artists log each cairn’s location and add the photos to their interactive map.

Occasionally, the glass sculptures might find themselves reconstructed at an art exhibition alongside Rowan’s photographs. In Chicago, the Watershed Art and Ecology Center is hosting the pair’s artwork through Oct. 31.

For Reuter, the connection between each community and the Mississippi River is why they’ve kept this project going.

“That’s what we’re trying to mark with the cairns,” Reuter said. “Not only the biological, ecological, but the history and the dynamics of the place. And the culture — the human culture — and how we all interact. None of it is independent of it.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri.

Despite growing evidence that midwife-led birth centers improve outcomes for mothers and infants, Mississippi remains one of 10 states with no centers. Mississippi is also among the states with the fewest midwives per births in the nation, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit research organization focused on healthcare issues. 

Built in the communities they serve, freestanding birth centers employ midwives to care for people with low-risk pregnancies, according to the report released Tuesday. They focus on patient autonomy and cultural responsiveness, which can help reduce pregnancy and delivery disparities for Black and Indigenous communities. Birth centers also may lower unnecessary interventions and increase maternal satisfaction, the report authors said. 

“Birth centers offer the kind of continuous, midwife-led care, shaped around each family’s needs, that can be part of the response to our maternal health crisis,” said Laurie Zephyrin, senior vice president of the Achieving Equitable Outcomes program at the Commonwealth Fund, in a press release. 

Last year, Mississippi health officials declared a public health emergency over rising infant deaths, most of which were Black infants. Experts have said increased access to care is a vital part of the solution. But in February, state lawmakers failed to pass legislation that would have made it easier for midwives to practice without paying a collaborating physician a monthly fee. Advocates argue these arrangements provide little meaningful collaboration while creating financial barriers that discourage midwives from practicing or opening birth centers. 

Mississippi, along with Louisiana and Alabama, has fewer than 20 midwives per 10,000 births, according to the report. All three states have collaboration agreements for nurse midwives. 

In 2026, the American College of Nurse Midwives sued Mississippi for restricting access to midwives in a place with some of the worst outcomes for mothers and babies. That lawsuit is still pending. 

Beyond collaboration agreements, the Mississippi State Department of Health has regulated birth centers in a way that may put underserved, rural areas at a disadvantage, Zephyrin told Mississippi Today. 

For example, a Mississippi birth center can only open within 30 minutes of a hospital, according to state regulations. Nearly half the counties in Mississippi are maternity care deserts, where there are no obstetric clinicians or birthing facilities. 

“With hospital shortages and maternity deserts, there may not be a hospital nearby,” Zephyrin said, adding that state leaders need to be innovative to address gaps in care. 

The state Health Department did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. 

Across the country, access to birth centers remains limited. In addition to the 10 states without birth centers, eight states have only one. 

On the other hand, Texas leads the nation in this health model, with 90 birth centers. Between 2004 and 2024, the model grew significantly, according to the report. However, birth center deliveries still only account for less than one percent of all U.S. births.

Getty Israel, founder of a Jackson-based women’s health clinic called Sisters in Birth, has spent nearly six years trying to open a birth center in the state. She believes the state overregulates birth centers and midwives. She said lawmakers lack the will to integrate midwives and birth centers into the healthcare system. 

Israel said she feels lawmakers don’t pay attention to the growing research that supports midwifery as an integral part of the solution. 

“There’s a lot of evidence about the efficacy of birth centers,” Israel said. “But no one is helping me to build a birth center.”

Southern Poverty Law Center President Ryan Haygood told Mississippi Today on Monday that his organization is prepared to fight the Trump Justice Department’s indictments in a trial set for April.

Haygood was in Jackson for the start of the organization’s “Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour” across Mississippi, which will combine community listening sessions to spotlight socioeconomic problems faced by residents. While the Center continues a shift toward anti-poverty advocacy as a central pillar of its work, fighting the lawsuit is of existential importance for civil rights advocacy more broadly, as the lawsuit against SLPC could be a “test case” used against other organizations, Haygood said.

“It’s a vicious irony that the DOJ has been weaponized against the organization that toppled the Klu Klux Klan, even as hateful organizations remain free to operate across the country,” Haygood said. “So it’s a case we intend to win.”

Without detailing the organization’s legal strategy, Haygood said the trial will shed light on why the SPLC was created and all the ways it serves communities across the South.

The Justice Department’s probe against against the Alabama-based group has thus far ensnared one of its former political extremism experts, who left the center about six year ago. That former employee, Heidi Beirich, has been charged with wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

Her legal team has said she is innocent of the charges and described the case as politically motivated.

The SPLC is a frequent target of conservative critics who claim the nonprofit is politically biased. Critics argue the organization has used its “Hate Map” to lump ordinary conservative political groups in with militant extremist groups.

In the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, anger from Trump and his supporters toward groups such as SPLC intensified.

In the fall of 2025, Trump directed federal law enforcement agencies to investigate what he claimed were wealthy donors and organizations funding left-wing political violence. A week later, Mississippi Today spoke to former SPLC President Bryan Fair, who warned the memo could be used as a pretext to target civil rights organizations perceived to be enemies of the administration and Republican causes in states such as Mississippi.

In April of 2026, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced an 11-count federal indictment against the SPLC in the Middle District of Alabama on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to launder money.

Haygood took over as SPLC’s president in August, at a moment when “civil society organizations face mounting attacks” the Center said.

As the SPLC prepares for a trial this April, Haygood said his organization remains undeterred

“It stands to reason that the kind of work SPLC does, the kind of work to connect people to prosperity and to create a fair criminal legal system, to create a multiracial democracy, and also to identify hateful actors and to topple their organizations,” Haygood said. “It stands the reason that an organization like ours given the work we are doing would be challenged in this moment by this kind of government.”

Haygood, who met earlier on Monday with Democratic state lawmakers, said the center plans to play an active role in pushing for Mississippi to raise its minimum wage, which remains set at the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. Proposals to do so have repeatedly died in the Legislature.

At the Mississippi Museum of Art, the SPLC convened panels on gaps in the social safety net that impact Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the country. Federal cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, housing, education and childcare have rattled communities across the the state, the center has said.

Joseph Cranney is a reporter with the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The New York Times. Mukta Joshi is an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow examining immigration and criminal justice issues. 

The police officer who shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley while chasing two women accused of shoplifting was justified in shooting at their car as it pulled out of a Walmart parking space in June, the Mississippi Attorney General’s office ruled Monday.

The decision came four months after Hunter Foster, an officer with the Senatobia Police Department, was placed on leave while state authorities investigated his actions. Although he has not been directly named as the officer who fired, Foster is the only officer among those present that day who was placed on leave.

Many details of the incident remain unknown, and it wasn’t immediately clear if or when law enforcement would release body-worn camera footage or other surveillance video of the incident.

It is also unclear what other evidence state authorities considered. Several witnesses and Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, said as recently as this month that they had never been interviewed by investigators.

Video taken by bystanders around the time of the shooting shows officers on foot intercepting the slow-moving vehicle in the close quarters of the parking lot on a Sunday afternoon. Five officers had surrounded the car, but none of the video made public so far clearly shows the car or the officers’ actions when the shots were fired.

Vellesiya Wiley said she was holding her son in her arms in the front passenger seat when her friend, Latoya Ferrell, tried to back out of a space and then drove forward to get away from the officers. Both women are Black. Foster is white.

In the hours after the shooting, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation issued a statement saying police had fired at a vehicle when it drove toward an officer, “almost striking” one.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch “found the use of force was justified,” her short statement Monday said. The statement said “one officer” was involved, though it did not name the officer or share any more details about what had happened.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for the Wiley family, reiterated his calls Monday for law enforcement to release video of the incident.

“How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?” Crump said in a statement.

“If the footage supports the state’s decision, release it,” Crump added. “We will not stop fighting until this family gets the truth.”

Reached by phone Monday, Vellesiya Wiley wept over the decision. The Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency, founded by Senatobia resident Patrick Lumumba after the shooting, posted on its Facebook page that it was withholding comment too.

“Our founder has literally wiped the tears of Kohen’s grandmother,” the statement said. “It affected people, relationships, and a community in ways that cannot be fully captured in headlines or social media statements.”

Martin Zummach, a lawyer for Foster, said Fitch’s decision was “expected” and “overdue.”

Veronica Roberson, the toddler’s grandmother, said Monday she learned of the attorney general’s decision when she logged onto Facebook. No state or local law enforcement official had reached out to the family, she said.

Foster, 33, is a former member of the U.S. Army National Guard and the son of a longtime law enforcement officer. Prior to joining the Senatobia department in March 2025, Foster made a name for himself at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office, where he won a statewide award for issuing the most DUI citations of any law enforcement officer in Mississippi in back-to-back years in 2023-24.

Foster was promoted to sergeant six months into his term at Senatobia. In the last year, he was twice accused of directing racially offensive language toward coworkers on the job, including referring to a Black officer as a “Black motherfucker,” Mississippi Today reported.

Senatobia’s former chief, Harold “Hal” Vanderford, who took no action against Foster in either case, was fired in September less than two weeks after The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News revealed he had routinely used racist slurs in private texts with a colleague.

Angelica Maze, a Black woman who was serving as a lieutenant in the department, was named Vanderford’s interim replacement. She didn’t respond Monday to a request seeking comment on the attorney general’s decision. The city of Senatobia released a brief statement on Facebook on Monday, saying it “continues to extend its deepest sympathy to Kohen Wiley’s family and all those affected by this tragedy.”

Update, 10/19/2026: This article has been updated with additional details.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced it reached a settlement forcing reforms in a Mississippi city and its police department, which the DOJ found discriminated against Black people, used excessive force and retaliated against critics.

The settlement announced Friday comes after a scathing 2024 DOJ report said the Lexington Police Department routinely violated citizens’ civil rights in the rural, poor, majority-Black city located about 65 miles north of the state’s capital. Police targeted Black people for arrests, made arrests for low-level offenses to generate money for the police department and locked people up for extended periods of time if they could not afford to pay fines, according to the report.

The out-of-court settlement requires the City of Lexington and its police department to reform practices on a number of issues — from fines and bail to stops, searches and use of force — and bring them into compliance with state and federal law.

The Associated Press called and emailed city and police department officials but did not immediately receive responses.

The agreement bars the Lexington police from continuing to jail people for unpaid fines without first assessing whether they can afford to pay them, a practice that violates the Fourteenth Amendment. The 2024 report found the city court had issued arrest warrants for more than 650 people, roughly half of the city’s population, for unpaid fines.

The city and the Lexington Police Department must also dismiss all existing warrants for unpaid fines and fees that violate the law and move to expunge the records of all unlawful fine-based convictions.

Additionally, the city and the Lexington Police Department are barred from creating and implementing a quota or incentive system for stops, warnings, citations, arrests or related revenue. The DOJ previously found that between 2022 and 2024, the Lexington Police Department made one arrest for every four people in town, more than 10 times the per-capita arrest rate for the state of Mississippi.

The department will also require DOJ-approved trainings on stops, searches, arrests and use of force, in addition to implementing documentation and review systems to ensure such actions are lawful.

“Through these reforms, we seek not only to address the concerns identified in our investigation, but also to strengthen public trust and promote practices that respect the rights and dignity of every person,” U.S. Attorney J.E. Baxter Kruger for the Southern District of Mississippi said in a news release.

The DOJ said it would work with the city and police to “ensure that they remedy the alleged violations.” The agreement lasts for three years, but could be cut short or extended depending on whether the parties mutually determine the city and police department have reached compliance.

The DOJ launched a probe into the Lexington Police Department in 2023, after citizens accused officers of using roadblocks to target Black drivers, engaging in excessive force, committing sexual assault and arresting people without justification, among other claims.

SAN FRANCISCO – These eight women and their families fought in a war known as America’s Civil Rights Movement. Over the weekend, they gathered, perhaps for the last time, as former President Bill Clinton and others cheered their courage and their grace.

“Throughout the course of their lives, these women have proved that love and compassion are better than bitterness and hatred,” Clinton said in a videotaped message. “They have led with courage, strength, dignity and grace to help build an America that more closely lives up to our founding ideals of equality and justice for all. And through their actions and their example, they have inspired millions of people, including me.”

He wished four of the women happy birthdays: Minnijean Brown Trickey and Elizabeth Eckford, two of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School in 1957; Reena Evers-Everette, whose father, Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, was assassinated in Jackson in 1963; and Lisa McNair, whose sister, Denise, was among the four girls whose lives were stolen by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

“To the four of you celebrating your birthdays, I thank you for the life you have lived and continue to live,” Clinton told them. “We’re all better off because of you.”

The other women gathered at the event, sponsored by the Sojourn Project, included: Kim McNair, the other sister of Denise McNair; Bettie Dahmer, whose father, voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer Sr., died defending their family from a Klan attack in Hattiesburg in 1966; the Rev. Gwen Webb, who took part in the 1963 Children’s March; and Angela Lewis, whose father James Chaney was among the three civil rights workers killed by Klansmen in Neshoba County in 1964.

Salute from San Francisco officials

On Friday, the city of San Francisco, county supervisors and the sheriff’s office honored these women.

“Your courage changed history,” Mayor Daniel Lurie told them. “It changed the course of history, and your example continues to inspire generations and generations.  I know we still have a whole lot of work to do, but your example will help guide us forward.”

Sheriff Paul M. Miyamoto praised the women.

“We know their names, the events and some of the photographs, but we don’t know the people,” he said. “You’ve helped change our history by being part of our history.”

The history of the Civil Rights Movement includes some in law enforcement “who failed to protect people at that time, who failed to protect you in our community, and, in some cases, were responsible for the very injustices that people experienced during this time,” Miyamoto said. “That’s not an easy part of our history to confront, but it’s one that we have to accept and understand and move on from.”

More than 20 Klansmen, including some Mississippi law enforcement officers, killed three civil rights workers, Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, on the first day of summer in 1964 and buried their bodies 15 feet down in an earthen dam.

Three years later, seven Klansmen were convicted of federal conspiracy charges, including a deputy sheriff. In 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicted Edgar Ray Killen of orchestrating the killings of the trio. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he died.

Miyamoto has taken some of his deputies on the Sojourn trip, walking across some of the same ground that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once walked.

“He’s always been, from birth, an influence on my life,” Miyamoto said. “It meant something very special to me as a history major and also sharing Martin Luther King’s birthday.”

He said it’s important for young people and for those in law enforcement “to learn together, to remember the past and make sure that it’s our responsibility to make sure nothing comes close to repeating it again.”

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins praised Trickey and Eckford for “stepping up at that time to make that sacrifice. You were so strong and brave.”

She told Evers-Everette, who now heads the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute, ”Your father died doing the work to give us the chance to be here, to give people like me the chance to serve in these positions. Thank you.” 

In 1994, his killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was finally convicted of murder. Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.

Through photos of the children marching in Birmingham or the Black students entering school in Little Rock amid a screaming mob, “we see strength, and we see beauty,” Jenkins said, “but what nobody wants to talk about are their scars.”

She said she hopes “we can set aside all the many differences that so many of us have and make sure we continue to work together to maintain their legacy — people who lost parents, who lost siblings, who lost so much of themselves to give us the chance to just go to school together.”

‘Women Who Dared, Women Who Cared: Warriors of the Civil Rights Movement’

She noted the upcoming elections in November. “I’m not telling you how to vote,” she said, “but you have to vote because we have multiple people who lost their fathers trying to make sure we had the right to do so.”

In 2023, Jenkins took her first of four Sojourn’s trips to civil rights sites in the South, where she met these women and visited landmarks where history was made. Through these trips, “we gain a deeper understanding of the courage it took, and continues to take, to change our country for the better,” she said. “These lessons matter.”

On Saturday, Sojourn celebrated these “Warriors of the Civil Rights Movement” with songs, speeches and birthday cakes with photos of the women.

Jenkins pointed toward the historic photos of the women and their families. She told them that she keeps a photograph of the four Dahmer sons dressed in military uniforms, standing over the rubble of what had been their home.

“Vernon Dahmer Sr. spent his life and lost his life over voting rights, over making sure that we could vote,” she said. A part of Medgar Evers’ work “was making sure that Blacks got the right to vote,” she said. “James Chaney and the others lost their lives to give us the right to vote.”

There is no more critical time than now, she said. “Their spirits are calling upon us to act, or else we will see this time again.”

Jenkins said when she walked inside the 16th Street Baptist Church, where the bomb killed four girls and injured dozens of others, “I had no idea how I would feel.”

But after hearing the McNair family speak, “I was overcome with emotion, not just because of their story, but because I, too, had buried my child,” she said. “When you think about losing your baby because of hate, there’s nothing worse.”

What led her to the path of becoming a prosecutor was the loss of her son, she said. “We have to look at these experiences of loss and of grief and of trauma, and use it as our purpose to act. Find the purpose out of our pain.”

When she thinks of Eckford and Trickey, she thinks of her grandmother, who graduated from a segregated high school in Texas and what it meant for her younger siblings to attend an integrated high school, she said. “It was because of your sacrifice that they had that opportunity.”

She praised Webb, who as a teenager faced the dogs and firehoses of Birmingham police to march for justice, only to later become one of the first Black police officers.

“She said, ‘I won’t be turned away by my experience,’” Jenkins said. “I’m going to come into this institution and make it change.”

Sojourn’s founder, Jeff Steinberg, said his nonprofit organization aims to amplify stories that people should know beyond King and Malcolm X — people such as Dahmer, Medgar Evers and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was repeatedly beaten for his activism in Birmingham and whose home was blown up by Klansmen.

“They live up to America’s ideals,” Steinberg said. “They set the standard of what we all should aspire to be.”

Lewis said if people want the world to change, they need to become part of that change. “It has to start with us,” she said. “We all want to see things change in a major way, but the way things change is in small amounts over time.”

When it comes to voting, “a lot of people think that their vote doesn’t count, but it does count,” Lewis said. “It begins with us being responsible by voting, because we have to make sure that we have a say in how this country is being run.”

Eckford said she tells “young people today to use your voice, ’cause if you don’t use your voice, somebody else is speaking for you.”