Jackson Residents Not Legally Protected From Poisonous Water Supply [Op-Ed]

Residents in Jackson, Mississippi, a city that is roughly 82% Black, have been grappling with an ongoing water crisis — a public health crisis caused by infrastructure neglect, severe weather, 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 way America has always responded to Black people in crisis: by telling them they don’t have the right to live.

Well, OK, what actually happened is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in a  10-5 decision that the alleged contamination of Jackson’s water system did not 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 city’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 city knowingly allowed residents to drink unsafe water, and the court basically decided that, even if that’s true, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t directly say city leaders aren’t allowed to do that.

Actually, Jackson’s water woes began long before 2022. Journalist Madiba K. Dennie, the Deputy Editor and Senior Contributor at Balls & Strikes, provided some of that history in a piece published Friday:

In 2014, Willie Bell, the interim director of Jackson’s Department of Public Works, alerted Mayor Tony Yarber that the river’s pH levels were causing a dangerous increase in the amount of lead in the water supply. Bell warned that the city urgently needed to upgrade its corrosion control program, and that the city’s residents were at high risk of lead poisoning. 

Yarber did not pass on these warnings to the public. He instead fired Bell and expanded the city’s use of the low-pH river water. As a result, the people of Jackson—more than 80 percent of whom are Black, and a quarter of whom live below the federal poverty line—kept drinking and cooking with and bathing in water that they didn’t know was poisoning them.

In June 2015, the Mississippi State Department of Health found that 22 percent of homes in Jackson had elevated levels of lead in the water, meaning the danger was even more widespread in Jackson than in Flint, Michigan. Still, no one told Jackson residents until early 2016. And even then, city officials downplayed the risks and told the public that the water was safe. “The system is not the issue,” said Yarber at a February 2016 city council meeting. “We are not even close to being Flint.”

That last part was interesting, because, if you’re like me, many of you were reading that excerpt and thinking, “Damn, Jackson is sounding just like Flint.”

The plaintiffs’ lawsuit specifically 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, finding that the residents hadn’t proven their Constitutional rights were violated. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, on the other hand, ruled in November 2025 that while the city “plausibly violated the Constitution,” but was entitled to qualified immunity.

Now, the court is essentially saying there was no constitutional violation at all. So, at what point are we willing to admit this is necropolitics at work?

This is the same energy the Trump administration had when its Justice Department ended a wastewater settlement for a mostly Black Alabama town, falsely calling it “environmental justice as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” simply because environmental racism was addressed in the reaching of the settlement.

At some point, it’s not hyperbolic to say that cash-poor Black people are being targeted for death via systematic neglect. We’re just calling it like it is.

SEE ALSO:

Black Alabama Residents Suffering Due To Trump Admin’s Racist Policies

Trump Admin Ends Wastewater Settlement For Black Alabama Town