Jackson, MS Residents Not Legally Protected From…
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Residents in Jackson, Mississippi, a metropolis that is roughly 82% Black, have been grappling with an ongoing water disaster — a public health disaster brought on by infrastructure neglect, extreme climate, and a deteriorating water system — since the near-collapse of its water treatment plant in 2022. This month, the U.S. court system responded to the issue the same manner America has always responded to Black people in disaster: by telling them they don’t have the fitting to live.
Well, OK, what truly occurred is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in a 10-5 resolution that the alleged contamination of Jackson’s water system didn’t violate rights protected by the 14th Amendment.
“The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote in response to a lawsuit filed by residents over the town’s lead-contaminated water system in 2022. According to 8 News Now, plaintiffs Priscilla Sterling, Raine Becker, Shawn Miller and John Bennett argued that the town knowingly allowed residents to drink unsafe water, and the court mainly determined that, even if that’s true, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t instantly say metropolis leaders aren’t allowed to do that.
Actually, Jackson’s water woes started long before 2022. Journalist Madiba Okay. Dennie, the Deputy Editor and Senior Contributor at Balls & Strikes, supplied some of that historical past in a piece revealed Friday:
In 2014, Willie Bell, the interim director of Jackson’s Department of Public Works, alerted Mayor Tony Yarber that the river’s pH ranges had been inflicting a harmful increase in the quantity of lead in the water provide. Bell warned that the town urgently needed to improve its corrosion control program, and that the town’s residents had been at high risk of lead poisoning.
Yarber didn’t go on these warnings to the public. He instead fired Bell and expanded the town’s use of the low-pH river water. As a outcome, the people of Jackson—more than 80 % of whom are Black, and a quarter of whom live below the federal poverty line—stored ingesting and cooking with and bathing in water that they didn’t know was poisoning them.
In June 2015, the Mississippi State Department of Health discovered that 22 % of properties in Jackson had elevated ranges of lead in the water, that means the hazard was even more widespread in Jackson than in Flint, Michigan. Still, no one told Jackson residents until early 2016. And even then, metropolis officers downplayed the dangers and told the public that the water was secure. “The system is not the issue,” said Yarber at a February 2016 metropolis council assembly. “We are not even close to being Flint.”
That last half was fascinating, because, if you’re like me, many of you had been studying that excerpt and pondering, “Damn, Jackson is sounding just like Flint
The plaintiffs’ lawsuit particularly alleged that “the city had endangered their fundamental right to bodily integrity as well as their right to be protected from state-created dangers, as guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” as Dennie wrote. But in June 2024, the District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi dismissed the case, discovering that the residents hadn’t confirmed their Constitutional rights had been violated. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, on the other hand, ruled in November 2025 that while the town “plausibly violated the Constitution,” but was entitled to certified immunity.
Now, the court is basically saying there was no constitutional violation at all. So, at what level are we keen to admit this is necropolitics at work?
This is the same vitality the Trump administration had when its Justice Department ended a wastewater settlement for a principally Black Alabama city, falsely calling it “environmental justice as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” merely because environmental racism was addressed in the reaching of the settlement.
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