Photo by Unsplash Contributor / Unsplash
Between 2016 and 2025, the Mississippi Legislature methodically stripped Jackson — a majority-Black state capital — of elected control over its airport, courts, policing, and water system, creating a cascading crisis in which residents live under institutions they did not vote for and cannot hold accountable.
Delores opens the envelope at the kitchen table the same way she has opened every bill for thirty years. She sets her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose, smooths the paper with the flat of her hand. She is in her late sixties. She has lived in the same house in west Jackson her entire adult life. She raised three children here. She knows this neighborhood the way you know a place when you have no plan to leave it — not romantically, but precisely. Which yards flood after heavy rain. Which neighbor has a generator. Which church on which corner opens its fellowship hall when the water goes out again.
The bill is for water. It says $94.00. It says JXN Water at the top, with a small logo she doesn't recognize, from a company that didn't exist four years ago. She doesn't know that the man running JXN Water earns $400,000 a year, appointed by a federal judge, accountable to no one she elected. She doesn't know that her payment is entering a system losing three million dollars a month. She knows only that she pays it, reliably, and that the water still sometimes runs brown, and that a neighbor two streets over stopped getting bills at all and hasn't paid in fourteen months and still has water.
She has heard about the court that opened in January 2025 — the CCID Court, the one with the judges the Chief Justice picked. Her nephew was cited for a noise complaint near the Capitol Complex last summer. He told her the officer wasn't city police. He told her he didn't know who to call if something went wrong. She nodded. She understood the feeling.
Delores doesn't use words like "institutional sovereignty" or "state preemption." She uses the words she has: They do what they want. She says it without bitterness, which is the most precise kind of description. Not a grievance. An observation. A read of the room that has been accurate for a long time.
She seals the return envelope. She walks to the mailbox. She comes back inside and puts the kettle on.
Jackson, Mississippi is a majority-Black city — roughly 82% of its residents are Black — in a state whose legislature is controlled by white Republicans. Its population has shrunk by more than 20,000 people since 2010. Nearly 27% of its residents live in poverty. Its median household income sits around $43,200. These are not background facts. They are the load-bearing structure of everything that follows.
The mechanism the Mississippi Legislature has deployed is not new in American political history, but the 2016–2025 execution is unusually systematic: identify a city service in crisis, frame that crisis as local incompetence rather than structural disinvestment, pass legislation transferring control to a state-appointed body, and defend each transfer individually so the cumulative pattern is harder to contest in court.
The airport: In 2016, House Bill 2162 — authored by Sen. Josh Harkins (R-Flowood) and signed by Gov. Phil Bryant — created a new state-appointed board to control Jackson's airport authority, replacing locally elected oversight. Jackson sued. Eight years of litigation followed. In May 2025, federal Judge Carlton Reeves allowed the case to proceed, writing that the airport seizure represented "a government taking of property — one that so far has lacked the remedy of 'just compensation' that the Fifth Amendment provides." Trial is set for summer 2026. The airport has been in legal limbo for nearly a decade.
In 2023, the encirclement accelerated. House Bill 1020 created the Capitol Complex Improvement District — a geographic zone carved out of Jackson — and established within it a separate court system whose judges are appointed not by Jackson voters, but by the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court. Senate Bill 2343, passed the same session, expanded the jurisdiction of the Capitol Police — a state agency — across a wider swath of the city, and required prior written approval for public demonstrations near state buildings. The U.S. Department of Justice, under Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland, intervened formally in August 2023, calling HB 1020's judicial appointment provisions "racially discriminatory." The NAACP filed a federal lawsuit to block the court.
Then, on December 2, 2024, the NAACP voluntarily dismissed that lawsuit — without prejudice — citing "appropriate safeguards." Seven weeks later, on January 27, 2025, Judge Stanley Alexander held the CCID Court's first session. Chief Justice Michael K. Randolph personally swore in all three judges. The DOJ intervention, under the incoming Trump administration, became politically inoperative. The court is now operational.
The water system: Following Jackson's catastrophic water system failure in 2022, Congress allocated $600 million for repairs in the omnibus spending bill — $150 million in flexible operating funds, $450 million for capital improvements. A federal court appointed Ted Henifin as third-party manager of JXN Water. Henifin earns $400,000 per year. By February 2025, JXN Water was losing $3 million per month, the $150 million in flexible operating funds was nearly exhausted, and Henifin was proposing a 12% rate increase — the second in two years — without city council approval, because his federal court appointment grants him that authority. JXN Water also spent $1.5 million on advertising: television commercials and pamphlets. Translation: the water manager spent $1.5M telling people the water is fine while the system bled $3M a month.
The city's response to the rate hike is instructive. On December 22, 2025, the City of Jackson filed formal opposition in federal court, identifying $74,434,949.13 in billed-but-uncollected revenue and noting that 6,000 locations are receiving water without an active account. JXN Water's own data shows 14,000 accounts receiving water without payment; the collection rate is approximately 70% against a national average that typically exceeds 90%. Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba has been unambiguous: "There is a barrage of attacks on the City of Jackson. … We have to call that what it is. It is paternalistic, and it is racist."
Who gains from this arrangement? The state gains jurisdiction over infrastructure, courts, and policing in a city whose electorate it cannot win. Federal appointees gain operating authority insulated from local democratic accountability. The entry friction question — who can participate — is answered structurally: no Jackson resident voted for the CCID judges, the JXN Water manager, or the Capitol Police command. They can attend public meetings. They can file amicus briefs. They can vote for a mayor who is increasingly without instruments of governance to exercise.
What is happening in Jackson fits a documented national pattern that political scientists call state preemption — the use of state legislative authority to override local governance, typically targeting jurisdictions whose policy preferences or demographic composition conflicts with the dominant state coalition. The Preemption Monitor maintained by the National League of Cities has tracked a surge in such legislation since 2011, concentrated in Southern and Midwestern states with Republican-controlled legislatures and majority-Black or minority-majority urban centers.
The pattern has antecedents and contemporaries. Detroit's Emergency Manager law — Michigan Public Act 4 of 2011 — removed elected officials from control of city finances, appointed a state manager, and culminated in the Flint water crisis when a state-appointed manager switched water sources to cut costs without adequate oversight. The structural parallel to Jackson is not incidental: a majority-Black city, a water system in crisis, a state-appointed manager with authority over rate decisions, and a local government that could file objections but not enforce them. The difference is timeline: Jackson's dispossession is slower, distributed across multiple institutional domains, and more explicitly tied to geographic boundary-drawing — the CCID carve-out being the clearest example.
Research from the Urban Institute and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition documents the compounding mechanism at work: cities that lose tax base through white flight and disinvestment face infrastructure deterioration; that deterioration is then used to justify state intervention framed as management reform; the intervention transfers authority away from the democratic mechanism — local elections — that gave majority-Black populations governance power after the Civil Rights era. The Journal of Urban Affairs (2021) describes this as "racialized fiscal federalism" — the use of fiscal stress, rather than explicit racial legislation, to achieve governance outcomes that explicit racial legislation could no longer legally produce.[1]
The FLOW division reads this as an information sovereignty crisis, not just a governance one. When the institutions that produce authoritative accounts of daily life — court records, police incident reports, water quality notices, utility billing systems — are controlled by entities the local population did not elect, the city loses its ability to narrate itself. The story of Jackson's decline and recovery is increasingly being told by Henifin's PR budget, by state-appointed judges' dockets, by Capitol Police press releases. The counter-narrative — Lumumba's press conferences, the city's court filings, the ward council members' public statements — has less institutional weight behind it, less enforcement authority, less reach. The machine that is doing the dispossessing is also, structurally, the machine that gets to describe what dispossession looks like.
When a city's elected government loses the instruments of governance faster than it loses the titles of governance, what remains is ceremonial accountability — the form of democracy without its substance.
The strongest counterargument is that Jackson's infrastructure genuinely collapsed — the 2022 water failure left residents without safe running water for weeks, a real emergency affecting real people — and that state and federal intervention was a necessary response to a city government that had failed to maintain critical systems. On this reading, the third-party water manager and the expanded court jurisdiction are corrective tools, not takeover instruments. This argument deserves weight: the water system's failure was real, the collection rate problem is real, and Henifin's team has produced measurable improvements in water reliability since 2022. However, the corrective-tool frame does not explain the airport seizure (2016, predating the water crisis), the court jurisdiction expansion (applying to a geographic zone rather than a failing institution), or the pattern of legislative timing — each intervention preceded by a "crisis" that was itself partly the product of state underfunding. The mechanism of disinvestment-as-pretext is well-documented; the corrective framing is not incompatible with it.
A second interpretation frames the state's actions as partisan rather than racial: Republicans targeting a Democratic stronghold, not white legislators targeting a Black city. Mississippi's Jackson is reliably Democratic; the legislature is reliably Republican. On this reading, the mechanism is political geography, and the racial dimension is incidental. This framing has some evidence: the CCID boundaries follow the Capitol Complex footprint, which includes a significant state government workforce that leans toward Republican-aligned concerns. However, the DOJ's formal determination that HB 1020's provisions were "racially discriminatory" under the Voting Rights Act goes beyond partisan characterization; Judge Carlton Reeves' language about the airport as an uncompensated taking frames the issue in constitutional property terms that implicate state power against a municipal entity. The partisan and racial frames are not mutually exclusive — and where the two overlap, the racial dispossession mechanism has the stronger evidentiary support.
What is not known: The long-term trajectory of the CCID Court's caseload and whether its operational practice will diverge meaningfully from the city court system. Whether the Trump DOJ's inaction on the HB 1020 challenge constitutes withdrawal or merely delay. The financial outcome of JXN Water post-April 2025 fund exhaustion — whether Congress will allocate additional operating funds or whether rate increases will be imposed over city objection.
What would change the signal: If the CCID Court's operational record shows consistently equitable outcomes for Jackson residents, the information-sovereignty dimension weakens. If the airport case produces a settlement that returns meaningful control to the city, the legislative encirclement pattern has a documented failure point. If federal DOJ enforcement resumes under any future administration, the legal exhaustion dynamic could reverse.
Research gaps: Granular data on CCID Court case demographics (who is appearing before these judges, for what charges, with what outcomes) is not yet available — the court opened in January 2025 and no systematic review was available at the time of this research. The Capitol Police indictment cases (2022 shooting) and their resolution would provide signal on accountability mechanisms within the new policing structure.
[1] Urban Institute / National Community Reinvestment Coalition research on racialized fiscal federalism; see also: Peck, J. & Whiteside, H. (2016). "Financializing Detroit." Economic Geography; Goodman, C.B. & Hatch, M.E. (2021). "State Preemption, Local Ordinances, and Downstream Policy Outcomes." Journal of Urban Affairs.
[2] U.S. Department of Justice, Press Release: "Justice Department Challenges Racially Discriminatory Provisions of New Mississippi Law," August 2023. justice.gov/opa/pr/
[3] JXN Water Financial Management Plan, Feb. 28, 2025. jxnwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/JXN-Water-Financial-Management-Plan-Feb-28-2025.pdf
[4] U.S. EPA, "Jackson, MS Drinking Water." epa.gov/ms/jackson-ms-drinking-water
[5] Mississippi HB 1459 (2025 session), authorizing Chief Justice appointments of CCID judges. billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2025/html/HB/1400-1499/HB1459SG.htm
[6] The Marshall Project: "Controversial New Court Opens in Jackson," Feb. 6, 2025. themarshallproject.org/2025/02/06/controversial-new-court-opens-in-jackson
[7] Mississippi Today: "JXN Water Running Out of Operating Money, Will Raise Rates Again," March 7, 2025. mississippitoday.org
[8] Mississippi Free Press: "Jackson's Fight for Control of Its Airport Continues After Judge's Ruling." mississippifreepress.org
[9] Mississippi Free Press: "As Funds for Jackson's Water System Dry Up, Henifin Proposes Rate Increase and Asks Congress for Help," April 2025. mississippifreepress.org
[10] Mississippi Today: "Legal Challenge of Separate State-Run Jackson Court Is Over," Dec. 10, 2024. mississippitoday.org
[11] Mississippi Free Press: "JXN Water Continues to Pursue Water Rate Increase Despite City's Objections," Dec. 2025. mississippifreepress.org
[12] WLBT: "Trial Date Set for Next Summer in Nearly Decade-Old Jackson Airport Takeover Case," July 22, 2025. wlbt.com
[13] Clarion Ledger: "Jackson Wins Key Ruling in Mississippi State Airport Takeover Fight," May 28, 2025. clarionledger.com
[14] Capital B News: "History of White Lawmakers Trying to Take Over Jackson." capitalbnews.org/jackson-mississippi-takeover-2
[15] U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, Jackson, MS city profile, 2020.