Mississippi
‘Sounding alarm for 10 years’: Mississippi residents warn of Project 2025 ramifications
Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump presidency, has been used as a warning by Democrats to highlight what would be in store for the country if he were to win the upcoming election. But for some Americans, much of Project 2025 isn’t a distant possible future – it is a current-day reality.
In several states across the country, there are already extreme abortion bans that have led to the deaths of multiple pregnant women and at least one teen; restrictive voting policies that make it difficult for citizens to cast their ballots; defunding of education and censorship of books; and other such policies that have also been proposed by the authors of Project 2025. If the plan is successfully implemented, many policies that are already reshaping some states would become federal laws.
Project 2025 is “a fascist blueprint for governance”, said Lea Campbell, the founding president of the Mississippi Rising Coalition, a grassroots organization that supports lower-income communities. But Mississippi, she said, which has an entrenched conservative majority, is already dealing with many of the proposed policies, specifically the policing and surveilling of marginalized people.
Families across Mississippi are still rebuilding after the largest immigration raid in the country, which happened five years ago. In 2019, on the first day of school, scores of children returned home to find that their parents were part of 680 people who were taken into custody, some of whom were subsequently deported, after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided seven poultry plants. Under Project 2025, mass deportations would be expedited, further tearing families apart.
“We have been sounding the alarm for more than 10 years, just around the policies in this state, enacted by conservatives that target the most vulnerable among us,” Campbell said. “We’ve been saying about policies under this ultra-conservative legislature that we have here in Mississippi [that] the cruelty is the point, it seems, with a lot of this legislation that targets poor people and people of color, and women, and the queer and trans community.”
Even when voters have made it clear that they disagree with proposed conservative policies, lawmakers have found ways to maneuver around their wishes.
In 2011, 58% of Mississippians rejected a “personhood amendment”, which, had it passed, would have defined fertilized eggs as people. Opponents warned that because of the way the amendment defined life, it would ban all abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest, and it would have complicated in vitro fertilization.
Still, in 2013, the state, along with Kansas, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio and North Dakota attempted to pass so-called “fetal heartbeat” bills, in which abortion is banned after as early as six weeks once cardiac activity is detected. For several years, multiple states tried to pass similar bills and other restrictions. By 2019, 15 states introduced “fetal heartbeat” bills; six were successful in passing them.
Project 2025 aims to enforce the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old anti-obscenity law that prohibits the mailing of abortion-related materials. Doing so could lead to a de facto nationwide ban on abortion, as abortion clinics and advocates rely on the mail to send and receive abortion pills. The plan also indicates a goal of legally recognizing fetuses as people.
Currently in Mississippi, drug-sniffing dogs have been used to intercept abortion pills. And in nearby Louisiana, two common abortion pills that are also often used for miscarriage management, softening the cervix during labor and other procedures have been reclassified as “controlled substances”, despite doctors warning that doing so will harm women.
As it stands, organizers and activists in states that have proto-Project 2025 policies are able to push for change on a state and local level. If Project 2025 were implemented, however, many of those policies could become federally enshrined, drastically changing the way lawmakers and advocates can push to repeal such laws.
Nsombi Lambright-Haynes, the executive director of One Voice Mississippi, a civil rights organization, said that the non-profit has been encouraging people to vote by educating them about what Project 2025 would do to the public education system and to reproductive rights.
“We are pointing out what we already have and then pointing out the danger that can come if something like this is fully implemented,” she said. “It’s really like a wake-up call.”
A ‘beacon’ to get people ‘fervent in their racism’
Two years ago, Jackson, Mississippi’s capital and the Blackest city in the country, was without water for more than a month due to decades of the state refusing to invest in infrastructure. Danyelle Holmes, an organizer with the non-profit Poor People’s Campaign, said that implementing Project 2025 nationwide would worsen the rest of the country’s infrastructure woes.
“Project 2025 supports removing clean water protection,” she said. “That puts marginalized communities really at a very vulnerable place and position, as we’re feeling the impact of not having access to clean and safe drinking water.”
Project 2025 would downgrade per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from being classified as “hazardous” to “contaminants”, and it would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Toxic Substances Control Act, preventing the government from adequately monitoring the cumulative effect of toxins.
The plan could “erode the country’s system of checks and balances”, according to an analysis by Salon, increasing the president’s power over all of the federal government. But many states have already given such extreme powers to their state officials.
In Texas, for instance, the “Death Star” bill prevents cities and counties from passing measures that are stronger than those passed at the state level across a broad range of policy areas. While in Florida, Ron DeSantis, the governor, has augmented his own power by using the state’s republican supermajority to cement his ideas into law.
Project 2025 would eliminate Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), an interagency law enforcement training body, increase the use of the federal death penalty, eliminate the use of consent decrees and increase the use of mandatory minimum sentences, according to an analysis by the Thurgood Marshall Institute, the research arm of the Legal Defense Fund.
In Mississippi, police departments across the state have already been embroiled in controversy. Six law enforcement officers in Rankin county were convicted for torturing two Black men, while a federal investigation found that police in a majority-Black town elsewhere in the state have “created a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law”.
Project 2025 would make it so that the rest of the country experiences the restrictive, conservative lawmaking that many southerners have been organizing against for years, said Courtney Jones, a writer and researcher with ‘SippTalk Media, a digital media platform, said.
“There’s no part of this nation that is untouched by the harm that racism does. Project 2025 is more of a beacon to get people to be more fervent in their racism,” he said. “Instead of whispering about it or doing political loopholes, now they’re just directly saying, ‘We’re going to take these small things that we’ve been doing to these specific populations and now we’re just going to amplify them. And we’re going to make this happen across the entire country.’”
Jones noted that organizers in the state and region had long been trying to warn the rest of the country about what was happening and what might soon come for them. Their warnings were met with dismissal, he said, as people believed “that’s just Mississippi for you”.
“The people here that are doing the work have always been doing the work,” he said. “A lot of people in Mississippi recognize that because we’ve always been overlooked, that we have to kind of look within in order to save ourselves. There is no grand agency or political candidate that’s ever going to come here and suddenly fix things for us.”
Mississippi
MS man whose death sentence was overturned in 2023 is now facing death again. Here’s why
A man on Mississippi’s death row whose conviction was overturned last year will remain on death row after a federal appellate court said the lower court made the ruling in error.
Terry Pitchford was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2006 for the death of a man in a Grenada County grocery store during an armed robbery in 2004.
The victim, Reuben Britt, reportedly was shot with two different types of guns. One of the guns turned out to be Britt’s, according to court records.
Pitchford allegedly took part in an earlier attempted robbery of the grocery store. When investigators with the Grenada County Sheriff’s Office searched the vehicle that witnesses said they saw at the grocery store, they found the victim’s gun.
The vehicle was parked outside Pitchford’s house.
In 2023, Terry Pitchford’s conviction and death sentence were set aside and a new trial ordered by a federal district court judge.
Despite the ruling, the 39-year-old remained listed on the Mississippi Department of Corrections’ death row while Mississippi Attorney Lynn Fitch appealed the ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Friday, the conviction and sentence were reinstated by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals after it determined the judge in Pitchford’s case considered whether the elimination of four potential jurors who were Black was racially motivated.
U.S. District Judge Michael Mills of the Mississippi Northern District said the state Supreme Court erred when it ruled in Pitchford’s 2010 appeal that the trial court did not excuse four out of five potential Black jurors because of their skin color.
The trial judge said the prosecution was able to prove the non-white members of the jury pool were all dismissed for valid reasons that had nothing to do with race. He allowed the trial to begin with 11 white and one Black juror with two white alternates.
The racial makeup of Grenada County was about 40% Black at the time of Pitchford’s trial.
Pitchford admitted to his role in the crime, but said he did not shoot Britt. According to court documents, Pitchford and his friend Eric Bullin went to the Crossroads Grocery store intending to rob it.
The intended robbery turned deadly when Bullin shot Britt three times with a .22 caliber pistol, while Pitchford said he fired shots into the floor. Bullin is serving 60 years for five crimes, including 20 years for manslaughter, according to Mississippi Department of Corrections records.
Lici Beveridge is a reporter for the Hattiesburg American and Clarion Ledger. Contact her at lbeveridge@gannett.com. Follow her on X @licibev or Facebook at facebook.com/licibeveridge.
‘It’s just a reminder of how powerful these storms are and how far they can carry things and drop them off. It gives a whole new meaning to Air Mail, doesn’t it?’
Tornado in Mississippi
Eyewitness footage of cloud shaping into a wedge as it forms a tornado in near the Loyd Star Attendance Center in Brookhaven, Mississippi on Saturday, December 28, 2024.
Reuters
A Mississippi church was flattened on Dec. 28 as an outbreak of tornadoes passed through parts of the state and some of the contents of the church were found scattered in Rankin County up to about 80 miles away.
“There was a confirmed EF1 (tornado) that touched down within a mile of me,” said Ricky Flynt of Brandon. “We had some pretty intense winds for a minute or two.
“It didn’t get to us until about 10 minutes after seven o’clock. I think it came through Meadville about five.”
Flynt had been monitoring the weather as the deadly storms passed through Mississippi killing two people and injuring another 10. However, he didn’t know there was a connection between the weather that struck his area and the storm that struck the Meadville area and flattened a church until the next morning.
Tornado drops check from 1984 in Brandon, MS resident’s driveway
“I came out the next morning after it was light just to confirm any damage and to look around,” Flynt said. “Right there in my driveway was this folded-up, cancelled check.”
The check was from the now-flattened O’Zion Baptist Church located near Meadville and was written to the Franklin County Baptist Association in 1984. It had travelled just over 80 miles and wasn’t the only cancelled check found in the area.
“Since, I’ve heard about five or six checks landing in the Brandon area,” Flynt said. “It’s pretty crazy. Whatever was in that church got up into the atmosphere and was deposited in the Brandon area.”
MS man finds tornado-blown check while scouting for deer
John Beggerly of Florence found another check on Wednesday just east of Byram while scouting for a place to hunt on his family farm. It was written in 1982.
“That was one of the craziest experiences I’ve ever experienced,” Beggerly said. “I was on the edge of the woods in a pasture on our farm. I saw a piece of paper and it was sticking up.”
He said he picked it up and realized what it was because he’d seen a social media post about the check Flynt had found.
“It’s amazing how far stuff can travel,” Beggarly said. “I think it was 60 1/2 miles from the church to where I found it — pretty wild.”
Tornadoes can carry objects hundreds of miles
Pretty wild it is. According to Latrice Maxie, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Jackson, debris can go remain aloft high in the sky for very long distances.
“They’re probably getting pulled up hundreds of feet, for sure,” Maxie said. “The circulations are much higher, but the tornadoes themselves can loft debris a couple of hundred feet in the air.”
In long-track tornadoes, Maxie said she’s heard of letters being found hundreds of miles from where they originated.
“It’s not uncommon for (tornadoes) that stay on the ground for a while,” Maxie said.
That was the case in spring of 2023 when a tornado struck the home of Susan Perry in Rolling Fork and scattered photos and other items of hers over a 200-mile track.
“It’s unbelievable that people are finding this,” Perry told The Clarion Ledger at the time. “It just amazes me that these things can travel so far.”
Pastor of MS church destroyed by tornado wants to use checks to tell story of event
Lance Moak is the pastor of O’Zion Baptist Church and said the checks were stored in the church on shelf above filing cabinets. He said everything on the shelf is gone, but checks keep showing up.
“I had one gentleman call me from Florence at 10:50 on Monday night,” Moak said. “He’d found a check from 1990 made out to one of our former pastors.
“It’s just a reminder of how powerful these storms are and how far they can carry things and drop them off. It gives a whole new meaning to Air Mail, doesn’t it? “
Like Flynt and Beggerly, the caller said he’d return the check. Those checks and others will serve as somewhat of a memorial.
“He’s actually going to mail that check back so we can put it up in the new church to tell about the history of this happening,” Moak said.
A GoFundMe account has been set up for those wishing to provide financial aid to rebuild O’Zion Baptist Church.
Do you have a story idea? Contact Brian Broom at 601-961-7225 or bbroom@gannett.com.
JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – With the city of New Orleans experiencing a tragedy, the Mississippi community is stepping up to do its part.
Mississippi Blood Services is working diligently to collect blood supply products to send to The Blood Center of New Orleans.
Mississippi Blood Services needs O and B blood types as well as platelets.
If you are eligible and looking to donate, the center is in Flowood on Lakeland Drive.
Kasey Dickson with Mississippi Blood Services wants to stress that it is a true human action to be able to give to another person in need.
“Right now, as a result of the casualties that had taken place down in New Orleans over the holiday weekend, it’s important to supply those blood products.”
The center is hoping their loyal donors who have helped with past incidents will be able to help now.
Again, if you are eligible, visit the Mississippi Blood Services in Flowood.
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