Mississippi Today
Welfare recipient won’t stop fighting for ‘decency and common sense’
Welfare recipient won’t stop fighting for ‘decency and common sense’
The state of Mississippi isn’t getting anything past Danielle Thomas.
Thomas is a bright, young single mother raising her six kids in south Jackson. Because she lives in poverty, Thomas is also an expert in the convoluted policies and bureaucratic red tape surrounding one of the biggest scandals in state history: the TANF program.
Despite recent attention on the graft and corruption within the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant, Mississippi is still pumping less than 5% of the money directly to mothers like Thomas.
“I really think it’s still them stealing from people, to be honest,” Thomas, 34, said. “I really feel like they feel like a lot of us aren’t smart enough, or they feel like we probably don’t know the system in and out well enough.”
Thomas works part time as a home health aide earning $9.50 an hour, the same wage she started at 10 years ago. When she’s not on the job, she’s feeding and changing her 5-month-old, ferrying her other kids to and from school, cooking meals, fetching medication, tending to boo-boos, monitoring screen time, and trying to keep the shrieking to a tolerable decibel.

On top of all that, Thomas basically moonlights as the unpaid lawyer, auditor and investigator on her own cases at the Mississippi Department of Human Services and other state service agencies. As most public assistance recipients know, it takes fierce self advocacy to ensure fair treatment within Mississippi’s social safety net.
Only about 1,600 very poor families in Mississippi are successfully jumping through the hoops required to receive the small TANF cash assistance payments each month.
Thomas knows a great deal more about how the TANF program works than the politicians who write the laws that govern the program.
But what happened to Thomas in recent weeks has stumped even the nation’s top policy experts.
In October, Thomas learned that she would be receiving a lump sum of more than $5,000 in back due child support from her ex-husband Larry Young, the father of her four youngest children. The state’s child support office, run by a private contractor, intercepted the money from Young’s child tax credit.
This tax offset process is part of the state’s child support enforcement program that Thomas is required to participate in to keep receiving public benefits. The rationale is, if the state is going to provide taxpayer support to single-parent families, then the noncustodial parents, usually fathers, should be forced to pay up as well.
This is where things get tricky: When the office collects support on behalf of a child receiving TANF, the state then seizes the funds to pay itself back for the welfare payments it issued. Most of that money goes straight back to the federal government.
Thomas said she sees the rationale in this, but at the same time, “I think that’s messed up a lot of co-parenting relationships … it doesn’t help how they think it helps. It kinda actually divides the family a little more.”
Thomas receives assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, for all of her children – several hundred dollars a month that comes on a debit card Thomas can only use on qualified items at qualified stores.
But Thomas only receives TANF cash assistance, $118 a month, for each of the two eldest children, not Young’s kids.
This is because of a harsh and little-known rule in Mississippi that if a parent is already on welfare when she gets pregnant and gives birth, that new child is not eligible for TANF benefits. These are sometimes called “capped” children. Just 12 states still have this policy in place, according to a 2020 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report.
For Thomas, this makes the child support payments for the younger kids all the more crucial.
The $5,000 cash infusion from the tax credit was coming just in time for Christmas. Thomas also planned to use some of the money to replace the radiator fan and valve cover gasket on her 2012 Dodge Durango – long overdue repairs on her only mode of transportation to work and the kids’ schools. Right now, she gets under the hood and manually sets spark to the fan before driving anywhere.
Thomas and her kids survive on the combination of her work income, no more than $13,000 a year, about $900 in monthly Supplemental Security Income, or disability benefits, that Thomas gets for her severe depression and anxiety attacks, and the public assistance. Because Thomas receives disability, she doesn’t receive a TANF payment for herself.
The prospect of a financial cushion provided Thomas some hope, but it was short lived.
In late October, Thomas received the child support payment on her debit card. It was $100.
She called a representative at the child support office, who told her that, according to the computer screen she was looking at, the TANF program had seized the rest.
That’s not how that works, Thomas thought.
“TANF took $5,000 from my kids, but the kids that they took the money from, they don’t receive TANF. They have never received TANF,” Thomas said.
Without the incoming funds, Thomas told her ex she still needed him to help pay for clothes and shoes for the kids. At first, the dad was skeptical that the state had taken the money. The situation caused tension between the parents.
“It makes me feel bad,” Young said. “It’s sad how Mississippi does things, man. Mississippi don’t care about no one, but what they do? Help Brett Favre. Help Phil (Bryant). They don’t help the ones that actually need help.”
Mississippi, which offers some of the lowest wages, strictest public assistance requirements, fewest labor protections and most meager health care of any state is also the most poverty stricken.
But Mississippi politicians have long blamed “fatherlessness” and nonmarital pregnancy for the state’s high poverty rate, ignoring the research that reflects the inverse: that those family outcomes are most often a symptom of poverty – and the feeling that upward mobility is unachievable – rather than the cause of it.
Instead of focusing on evidence-based practices for interrupting systemic poverty, the state has spent hundreds of millions of welfare funds attempting to address fatherhood and teen pregnancy. Along the way, MDHS admits it has gathered no evidence of how these “family stabilization” programs reduced poverty.
Millions through these programs ended up going to the pet projects of former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, other famous athletes and the cronies of state politicians.

Escaping poverty was always going to be a challenge for Thomas, whose parents split before she could remember. Child Protection Services took Thomas from her mother, who is legally blind and ran an unstable household, when she was 6. She moved with her father to South Carolina until her mom regained custody, and, at 16, Thomas returned to Jackson. She bounced around high schools before dropping out, meeting her first child’s father and becoming a mother.
Thomas secured her GED and has started several higher education programs in the hopes of securing a better paying job, but it seemed like something always got in the way of her finishing. “I start strong, I start motivated, and then I might take a blow from different things and I kind of back out,” she said.
She has prioritized the paying gig that she has versus striving for another because, she said, “I know from experience that if I don’t work, we don’t eat.”
Several years ago, Thomas entered a work program offered through SNAP, the federal food assistance program administered by Mississippi Department of Human Services. It was a 24-week course, she recalled, to learn medical billing and coding – a job in which she could potentially earn $50,000. The program promised to provide her with a certificate at the end.
“During the seventh week, we went in and they told us it was no funds left to be able to continue the program,” Thomas said. “I really felt like it might have been something where they just found a way to reroute the money.”
Like that, the program was over.
During the pandemic, Thomas had to leave her home health job to take care of her kids, who were conducting virtual school at home. She applied for unemployment, which would have provided her an additional $600-a-week, more than she’d ever made and finally a chance to get ahead. But unemployment insurance only covers people who make over a certain amount, and because of her low earnings, the Mississippi Department of Employment Security denied Thomas the benefits.
It appeared a technicality: Thomas didn’t qualify under traditional unemployment insurance rules, but she should have qualified under the special pandemic unemployment program, the purpose of which was to extend benefits to people not typically covered, including part-time workers like herself.
Thomas did her research, appealed the decision, and secured a hearing with the labor office. She even got her employer to corroborate the information on her claim. But after representing herself in the proceeding, she was still denied because she had filed under the traditional unemployment insurance.
Through setback after setback, Thomas doesn’t blame the government for her current situation.
“I’m not a victim because I know the decisions and the choices I have made when it comes to these children and certain things, I’ll take the accountability for. But when it comes to my children … I’d shovel horse manure to make sure my kids eat every night. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make sure me and my children have a roof over our head and we have food on the table.”
Then there’s the added stress of raising her children in a neighborhood where gun violence is prevalent. “We’re in an area that’s really crime-ridden. It’s real, real crime-ridden and poverty-ridden,” Thomas said.

Not too long ago, Thomas’ 9-year-old son found a bag of marijuana on the ground on his way to school. A curious mind, he picked it up and carried it with him to class. When the administration discovered it, Thomas said they almost opened a DHS case, but because she’d been such an attentive parent – attending all parent-teacher conferences and volunteering to bring food for parties – a school administrator vouched for her.
“I’ve been raised in this type of environment … but I don’t wanna repeat cycles. I wanna break generational curses. I don’t want us to be here, but for some reason I feel like I’m stuck, because nothing will come in to allow me to get away from here,” Thomas said.
“Yes, I had all these kids. I made this bed. I have to lay in it,” she said. “But I also know I’m the type of person to where I’m not looking for the government to take care of me and my kids. I can do without, but they also gotta realize the trauma that they have forced upon some of us to where we can’t even live properly. Like, I don’t even like going outside of my home unless I have to.”
In August, State Auditor Shad White, who initially launched the ongoing TANF fraud investigation, released a report demonstrating the cost of “absent fathers” to Mississippi taxpayers. The report focused on how children who grow up in single-parent households are less likely to finish high school, more likely to go to prison and more likely to become teen mothers.
“I’m hoping folks will be informed as taxpayers, but will also realize collectively as a society we need to be sending the message that if you’re man enough to father a child, you ought to be man enough to step up and help raise that child,” White said when the report was released, WXXV reported.

In Young’s case, Mississippi has done nothing to inspire his participation. The state took from him to indirectly support the kids of someone else, while his own kids got nothing.
National policy experts have long advocated against states confiscating the child support payments of poor children to pay back the TANF support they received. They say the practice, which barely makes a difference for states since the money is returned to the feds, keeps families in poverty and harms the relationship between children and their noncustodial parents.
“In this case, it’s even worse: the state is taking money paid by a father for children who the state didn’t even provide assistance to,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy director for policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). “While the state may have found a loophole that makes this legal, keeping these funds from Mrs. Thomas and her children is a violation of both decency and common sense.”
Little to no research on this scenario exists. Mississippi’s TANF policy manual doesn’t explicitly address it, according to the reviews of Mississippi Today and two national experts who reviewed the manual at Mississippi Today’s request for this story. It does not come up in exhaustive Q&As published by the federal agency that administers the programs, the Administration for Children & Families under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. When asked about what happened, the federal office told Mississippi Today that the agency was following Mississippi state law.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services similarly confirmed in an email to Mississippi Today that this is the agency’s policy.It said it could not comment on Thomas’ case specifically.
“While they (capped children) are not considered in the calculation of benefits, these children are still part of the head of household’s TANF case,” the statement reads. “When there are multiple children in the TANF-recipient household with different non-custodial parents, and one of those non-custodial parents makes a child support payment, that payment is applied to the overall household’s TANF recovery balance.”
It’s a miniscule policy distinction but with substantial implications – as is true with much of the state’s social safety net. The Legislature could change it.
But this area of government is often too complicated, too niche to capture the attention of the public or even policy makers. It’s part of the reason so much corruption was able to occur within the program in recent years.
Without a closer analysis, it’s easy to miss the catch-22.
When it behooves the state to exclude the children, in the case of determining who gets monthly benefits, it excludes the children. But when it benefits the state to count the children, such as to seize their child support payments, it counts them.
MDHS said it did not have any data on how many mixed-family households this policy affects.
Thomas questions it plainly: “I don’t see how one parent can be responsible for what another parent owes.”

Since the $100 child support payment, Thomas has had countless calls with MDHS, the child support office, and advocates, many of whom told Thomas they’ve never encountered this scenario and that they believed it was a mistake.
When Thomas visited MDHS in person, a supervisor in the office said her TANF case carried an unreimbursed balance of about $17,000 – a mathematical mystery since she’s only received a total of $146-a-month for both children, recently raised to $236-a-month, on and off over the last several years. TANF has a lifetime limit of 60 months. At one point, an MDHS caseworker told Thomas she had been receiving TANF for two children since 2008, before her second child was even born.
“I’ve calculated and added some things up myself and I’m like, you know, ain’t no way,” Thomas said. “… It’s a lot of things I’m not understanding, but I’m really thinking like it is really just (determined by) who reviews your case and files at the time. Like, if you have someone who is reviewing your case who might let some stuff slip through the system.”
Shortly after she began pressing the agency, Thomas found a letter in her mail. It was from the child support office, notifying her that her entire MDHS public assistance case had been closed. This wasn’t true, but it added to her list of issues to resolve. She wondered if her speaking out had triggered this notice.

Several days later, Thomas received another letter. This one targeted her 5-month-old, who had barely begun receiving assistance, and ordered Thomas to add the baby to her child support case. The notice said she had 21 days to visit the office and hand over paperwork proving the child’s father or her entire family would be cut off from assistance altogether.
Following Mississippi’s ban on abortion, which led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch and others have advocated for more strictly enforcing child support. The policy is advertised as a protection for mothers.
But for Thomas, the state’s meddling has only hurt her.
“They usually don’t contact you this early,” Thomas said after receiving the last letter. “I really feel like once again, this has something to do with me going and talking to people about them.”
With about $12,000 in supposed unreimbursed TANF still hanging over her head, it’s questionable if she’ll ever see a dime of child support from any of the three fathers of her children.
By this point, Thomas was dejected.
“I don’t understand how this system works,” she said in a slow, flat voice. “I’m no longer trying to figure out how it works.”
In fact, Thomas understands better than anyone how the system works. It is working the way it was designed, by wearing down the people it purports to serve.
But then, after talking to a free legal aid office, Thomas learned she could request a formal hearing from the TANF office to challenge the paradoxical policy. It’s scheduled for later this month. She’s already downloaded and started reading the agency’s program manuals from its website.
“I’m actually not going to stop fighting,” Thomas said.
In one of her educational stints, Thomas was studying to become a paralegal. When she thinks about going back to school, that’s the career path she envisions.
If her TANF case is any indicator, she’s a natural.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Mississippi River flooding Vicksburg, expected to crest on Monday
Warren County Emergency Management Director John Elfer said Friday floodwaters from the Mississippi River, which have reached homes in and around Vicksburg, will likely persist until early May. Elfer estimated there areabout 15 to 20 roads underwater in the area.
“We’re about half a foot (on the river gauge) from a major flood,” he said. “But we don’t think it’s going to be like in 2011, so we can kind of manage this.”
The National Weather projects the river to crest at 49.5 feet on Monday, making it the highest peak at the Vicksburg gauge since 2020. Elfer said some residents in north Vicksburg — including at the Ford Subdivision as well as near Chickasaw Road and Hutson Street — are having to take boats to get home, adding that those who live on the unprotected side of the levee are generally prepared for flooding.



“There are a few (inundated homes), but we’ve mitigated a lot of them,” he said. “Some of the structures have been torn down or raised. There are a few people that still live on the wet side of the levee, but they kind of know what to expect. So we’re not too concerned with that.”
The river first reached flood stage in the city — 43 feet — on April 14. State officials closed Highway 465, which connects the Eagle Lake community just north of Vicksburg to Highway 61, last Friday.

Elfer said the areas impacted are mostly residential and he didn’t believe any businesses have been affected, emphasizing that downtown Vicksburg is still safe for visitors. He said Warren County has worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency to secure pumps and barriers.
“Everybody thus far has been very cooperative,” he said. “We continue to tell people stay out of the flood areas, don’t drive around barricades and don’t drive around road close signs. Not only is it illegal, it’s dangerous.”
NWS projects the river to stay at flood stage in Vicksburg until May 6. The river reached its record crest of 57.1 feet in 2011.




This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
With domestic violence law, victims ‘will be a number with a purpose,’ mother says
Joslin Napier. Carlos Collins. Bailey Mae Reed.
They are among Mississippi domestic violence homicide victims whose family members carried their photos as the governor signed a bill that will establish a board to study such deaths and how to prevent them.
Tara Gandy, who lost her daughter Napier in Waynesboro in 2022, said it’s a moment she plans to tell her 5-year-old grandson about when he is old enough. Napier’s presence, in spirit, at the bill signing can be another way for her grandson to feel proud of his mother.
“(The board) will allow for my daughter and those who have already lost their lives to domestic violence … to no longer be just a number,” Gandy said. “They will be a number with a purpose.”
Family members at the April 15 private bill signing included Ashla Hudson, whose son Collins, died last year in Jackson. Grandparents Mary and Charles Reed and brother Colby Kernell attended the event in honor of Bailey Mae Reed, who died in Oxford in 2023.
Joining them were staff and board members from the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the statewide group that supports shelters and advocated for the passage of Senate Bill 2886 to form a Domestic Violence Facility Review Board.
The law will go into effect July 1, and the coalition hopes to partner with elected officials who will make recommendations for members to serve on the board. The coalition wants to see appointees who have frontline experience with domestic violence survivors, said Luis Montgomery, public policy specialist for the coalition.
A spokesperson from Gov. Tate Reeves’ office did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
Establishment of the board would make Mississippi the 45th state to review domestic violence fatalities.
Montgomery has worked on passing a review board bill since December 2023. After an unsuccessful effort in 2024, the coalition worked to build support and educate people about the need for such a board.
In the recent legislative session, there were House and Senate versions of the bill that unanimously passed their respective chambers. Authors of the bills are from both political parties.
The review board is tasked with reviewing a variety of documents to learn about the lead up and circumstances in which people died in domestic violence-related fatalities, near fatalities and suicides – records that can include police records, court documents, medical records and more.
From each review, trends will emerge and that information can be used for the board to make recommendations to lawmakers about how to prevent domestic violence deaths.
“This is coming at a really great time because we can really get proactive,” Montgomery said.
Without a board and data collection, advocates say it is difficult to know how many people have died or been injured in domestic-violence related incidents.
A Mississippi Today analysis found at least 300 people, including victims, abusers and collateral victims, died from domestic violence between 2020 and 2024. That analysis came from reviewing local news stories, the Gun Violence Archive, the National Gun Violence Memorial, law enforcement reports and court documents.
Some recent cases the board could review are the deaths of Collins, Napier and Reed.
In court records, prosecutors wrote that Napier, 24, faced increased violence after ending a relationship with Chance Fabian Jones. She took action, including purchasing a firearm and filing for a protective order against Jones.
Jones’s trial is set for May 12 in Wayne County. His indictment for capital murder came on the first anniversary of her death, according to court records.
Collins, 25, worked as a nurse and was from Yazoo City. His ex-boyfriend Marcus Johnson has been indicted for capital murder and shooting into Collins’ apartment. Family members say Collins had filed several restraining orders against Johnson.
Johnson was denied bond and remains in jail. His trial is scheduled for July 28 in Hinds County.
He was a Jackson police officer for eight months in 2013. Johnson was separated from the department pending disciplinary action leading up to immediate termination, but he resigned before he was fired, Jackson police confirmed to local media.
Reed, 21, was born and raised in Michigan and moved to Water Valley to live with her grandparents and help care for her cousin, according to her obituary.
Kylan Jacques Phillips was charged with first degree murder for beating Reed, according to court records. In February, the court ordered him to undergo a mental evaluation to determine if he is competent to stand trial, according to court documents.
At the bill signing, Gandy said it was bittersweet and an honor to meet the families of other domestic violence homicide victims.
“We were there knowing we are not alone, we can travel this road together and hopefully find ways to prevent and bring more awareness about domestic violence,” she said.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Court to rule on DeSoto County Senate districts with special elections looming
A federal three-judge panel will rule in coming days on how political power in northwest Mississippi will be allocated in the state Senate and whether any incumbents in the DeSoto County area might have to campaign against each other in November special elections.
The panel, comprised of all George W. Bush-appointed judges, ordered state officials last week to, again, craft a new Senate map for the area in the suburbs of Memphis. The panel has held that none of the state’s prior maps gave Black voters a realistic chance to elect candidates of their choice.
The latest map proposed by the all-Republican State Board of Election Commissioners tweaked only four Senate districts in northwest Mississippi and does not pit any incumbent senators against each other.
The state’s proposal would keep the Senate districts currently held by Sen. Michael McLendon, a Republican from Hernando and Sen. Kevin Blackwell, a Republican from Southaven, in majority-white districts.
But it makes Sen. David Parker’s district a slightly majority-Black district. Parker, a white Republican from Olive Branch, would run in a district with a 50.1% black voting-age population, according to court documents.
The proposal also maintains the district held by Sen. Reginald Jackson, a Democrat from Marks, as a majority-Black district, although it reduces the Black voting age population from 61% to 53%.
Gov. Tate Reeves, Secretary of State Michael Watson, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch comprise the State Board of Election Commissioners. Reeves and Watson voted to approve the plan. But Watson, according to meeting documents, expressed a wish that the state had more time to consider different proposals.
Fitch did not attend the meeting, but Deputy Attorney General Whitney Lipscomb attended in her place. Lipscomb voted against the map, although it is unclear why. Fitch’s office declined to comment on why she voted against the map because it involves pending litigation.
The reason for redrawing the districts is that the state chapter of the NAACP and Black voters in the state sued Mississippi officials for drawing legislative districts in a way that dilutes Black voting power.
The plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU, are likely to object to the state’s newest proposal, and they have until April 29 to file an objection with the court
The plaintiffs have put forward two alternative proposals for the area in the event the judges rule against the state’s plans.
The first option would place McLendon and Blackwell in the same district, and the other would place McLendon and Jackson in the same district.
It is unclear when the panel of judges will issue a ruling on the state’s plan, but they will not issue a ruling until the plaintiffs file their remaining court documents next week.
While the November election is roughly six months away, changing legislative districts across counties and precincts is technical work, and local election officials need time to prepare for the races.
The judges have not yet ruled on the full elections calendar, but U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Leslie Southwick said at a hearing earlier this month that the panel was committed have the elections in November.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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