Mississippi Today
Jackson leaders insist city water is safe to drink. Some mothers struggle to trust them.

As federal and city officials continue to work to assure residents the water flowing from the troubled Jackson system is safe to drink, distrust among many capital city residents — particularly mothers and caregivers of small children — runs deep.
Regular boil water notices, lack of consistent water pressure and concerns about the safety of drinking the water even when there is not an active boil water notice are commonplace in Mississippi’s largest city.
Multiple federal lawsuits about the city’s recent water quality are pending, and the U.S. Department of Justice last fall acknowledged several major water system problems, including an acknowledgment that the city had consistently not met federal safe water standards. And since 2016, the city has mailed residents quarterly warnings that pregnant women and small children, who are most susceptible to lead poisoning, should follow state and federal safety guidelines before drinking the water.
In recent days, Ted Henifin, the federal appointee to manage the city’s water system, argued that those city notices are no longer necessary after years of clean water tests. Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has for months publicly repeated the refrain that the water is safe to drink.
In mid-June, while reiterating the water is safe to drink, Lumumba joined officials at the Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center to publicly announce a $100,000 donation to provide water filters specifically for pregnant women and with children under the age of 5.
Meanwhile, many caregivers across the city struggle to trust that the water flowing from the pipes is safe to give their loved ones.
“It’s hard in every way,” said Mary Rooks, a mother of four children under 10, who runs “JXN Motherhood,” an Instagram account that connects mothers across the capital city. “There are so many costs when your children are young … We pay a water bill, so you wouldn’t think you’d have to add an additional cost with water … There are so many factors of mom guilt. You just want to be the best parent of your child — bathing is a pretty simple necessity, and you’re like, ‘Can I bathe them in this water?’”
Rooks says that other parents, including parents of newborns, reached out to her during and after the 2022 Jackson water crisis, which left residents without safe tap water for weeks, to ask about how to handle various water concerns — many of which would likely not even occur to non-parents.
Even after the city-wide crisis passed, a friend with a newborn texted Rooks to ask if it was safe to wash baby bottles in the city’s water. She told them that she thought it should be fine, but the question was indicative of larger struggles parents of young children and babies have faced and continue to face.
“It’s nuts, all the implications that it has,” she said. “Anyone without children wouldn’t have a category for (the difficulties), which is fine — they haven’t been there. But washing bottles is taxing in and of itself, and then add I’m washing bottles with bottled water? It’s ridiculous.
“There’s a lot of responsibilities and hardships of parenthood, and then such a simple thing of water added to that makes it so much more complicated,” Rooks continued. “We pay for water, so it’s like one of those things where we feel like it’s a right as a citizen to have access to clean water, not only for ourselves, but for our families … It’s a simple thing, but when it’s taken away it’s a huge stress added on top of all the million ways you question yourself as a parent.”
‘The baby is extraordinarily susceptible’
During the August 2022 water crisis, some parents used unique methods to ensure their children had safe water to bathe in.
Maisie Brown started the MS Student Water Crisis Advocacy Team with more than 20 other students at Jackson State University, where she is now a rising senior. The organization — organized almost immediately after Gov. Tate Reeves announced that the city would be without clean, running water “indefinitely” — delivered bottled water to people’s homes.
Though Brown says that the majority of the calls she received were from elderly and/or disabled people, she estimates that roughly 30% of the calls were from mothers of young children. These mothers were hesitant to use the water for bathing or making formula for their babies, even after boiling it.
“You don’t want to put your baby in some water that might have bacteria or microbes in it,” Brown said. “(Adults) barely want to wash our hands with it.”
To help parents with bathing small children, some donation-based organizations like the MS Student Water Crisis Advocacy Team, asked people to donate not only bottled water, but also baby wipes and products like shower bags, which would allow people to freshen up without fully immersing themselves in contaminated water.
One week, Brown says her organization got a call from a disabled mother of several young children. When a volunteer arrived, she saw that the home was surrounded with buckets that were full of rainwater. The mother had been collecting the rainwater and, after boiling it, used it to bathe her children and flush toilets. She was more comfortable using boiled rainwater than she was using boiled water out of the faucet.

This mother’s continued concerns are not unique, as some parents fear that contaminants in the tap water will be absorbed through their child’s skin.
Dr. Christina Glick is a neonatologist who runs Mississippi Lactation Services, a free-standing breast-feeding clinic in Jackson. She estimates that about 70% to 80% of her clients live in the capital city. Glick says that breastfeeding is “the greatest protection against a crisis like this.”
The people who would be most negatively affected by drinking contaminated water are immunocompromised people and newborn babies. Even if a mother were to get sick from drinking the water herself, Glick says that breastfeeding filters the majority of contaminants out of the milk that babies drink.
Her major concern is for mothers who use formula to feed their babies.
“If the water isn’t clean, the baby is extraordinarily susceptible to even very small amounts of contaminants. It could make them very sick,” she said.
Globally, diarrhea is the second leading cause of death for children under the age of 5. According to the CDC, “about 88% of diarrhea-associated deaths are due to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and insufficient hygiene.”
Despite breastfeeding being the safest option for those who are still concerned about the cleanliness of the water, it is not without issue, nor is it feasible for all parents and caregivers.
The water is ‘yucky’
Nakeitra Burse, owner of Six Dimensions, a public health research, development and practice agency, said that her major concerns with the water crises are how they impact breastfeeding mothers and people who are expecting.
Burse says that not having adequate access to clean, drinkable water could impact mothers’ milk supply. Dehydration can lead to reduced milk supply and to serious pregnancy complications. Water is essential for life at all stages, but it is especially vital when developing a new life, she said.
“For pregnant or postpartum mothers, (water) is really, really important to them being able to provide for their families, provide for their babies, provide for themselves and do whatever they need to produce the milk they need,” she said.
Because babies have such sensitive skin, Burse says she understands parents’ hesitation to use contaminated water for bathing. Not knowing what’s in the water could potentially have long term impacts for infants, she said.
Laurie Bertram Roberts is the executive director and co-founder of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. She is also a mother, grandmother and Jacksonian. Her granddaughter, who is a toddler, has never taken a bath in the capital city’s water. She and her family filter her granddaughter’s bathing water through a device that removes lead.
Bertram Roberts says that many of the expectant people with whom she works are already hesitant to use the water in any capacity because “the water looks gross, it smells gross and who the heck wants to put that in their body when they’re carrying a baby to term?”
But, she says, concerns go beyond those for expectant people and young children. Caregivers, in general — those who are helping care for elderly or disabled people — also have reasons to be wary of the water, especially if they are dealing with ailments like bed sores that make them more susceptible to infection.
Her own daughters have eczema, a skin condition that affects nearly 20% of African-American people. According to a 2019 study, Black and Hispanic children are more likely to miss school due to eczema. Bertram Roberts says that her daughters are hesitant to bathe using Jackson’s water in fear of exacerbating their eczema.
For Rooks, it was difficult to explain to her children that they should be drinking water, but that not all water was safe to drink. She and her husband explained to the children that the water was “yucky” and not safe for bathing because the children might potentially get the water in their mouths, or drinking, which led to cognitive dissonance when the family traveled out of town.
“My 7-year-old, he was 5 and 6 at the time, he was pretty receptive,” she said. “But he did think it was weird. We were traveling and getting water out of the sink, and he was like, ‘Why can we drink this water, but we can’t drink the water at home?’”
One of her younger children struggled with the water messaging even more.
“He was utterly confused,” she said. ‘Like, ‘You always tell me to drink more water and now you’re telling me not to drink water?’”
‘Compound issues’ pile up
Though the citywide water crisis has ended, concerns about the long term viability of the city’s water, specifically for young children and expectant mothers, continue. MSDH has issued recommendations for such households including running tap water for one to two minutes before drinking or cooking, not using hot tap water for drinking or cooking and using only filtered or bottled water for baby formula.
But Bertram Roberts thinks that many people, including young children and expectant people, are “probably drinking it anyway because the public health messaging in this city has been inadequate.”
“I think about all of these compound issues because people a lot of time look at it from one issue, like it’s just the lead or it’s just bacteria,” Bertram Roberts said. “But it’s all of those risks and then it’s … with the compound issues of medical racism and lack of health care and issues with access to assistance programs and unemployment issues. All of these compound issues that build on top of, like, just this water issue that make it so much more of a risk and a crisis.”
She notes that many people were unaware about the potential for lead in the water until the lawsuit two years ago — despite the fact that MSDH had acknowledged potential lead concerns about five years prior. She’s also concerned that, though all people should be wary of lead exposure, most of the warnings are only for pregnant people or young children.
The CDC notes that “exposure to high levels of lead may cause anemia, weakness, and kidney and brain damage. Very high lead exposure can cause death.”

At a court status conference in June, Henifin, the city’s water system administrator, repeatedly said that the water is safe for everyone, including pregnant mothers and young children. If anything, he said, filters recently provided to pregnant and expecting mothers could make the water less safe if residents don’t change the filters out every four months, which could cause bacteria to build up.
Still, some don’t want to take any chances with their loved ones. Bertram Roberts says that many of the people with whom she works have only been told not to use the water for making formula, but not that their young children should also avoid drinking the water. Even when parents do know to keep their children from drinking the water, she says people should be cognizant of the added costs parents must incur to be able to do so.
“A lot of parents don’t let their kids drink Jackson water, but think of the expense that is to keep up bottled water for a family on SNAP, a big family. It’s expensive to keep up bottled water for thirsty kids,” she said.
Rooks’ family ultimately ended up installing a reverse osmosis device on their kitchen sink. The device is not a solution to ensuring the safety of water from other sources, like bathroom sinks or bathtub spouts, but it does help in making sure the children have access to at least one clean, safe water source. Rooks also recognizes that not everyone can afford to modify their drinking situation.
“Not everybody can do that,” she said. But it is providing comfort to her to know that her children are a bit safer. “Now they can just drink out of this one little spout. We’ve definitely adjusted, but I hate it’s an adjustment that we have to make.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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