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Defense attorneys for Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. asked a federal judge to let the jury hear a radio spot the former pro wrestler recorded with another celebrity enmeshed in Mississippi’s sprawling welfare scandal – Brett Favre. 

“One thing I’m excited about is now meeting all these Mississippians who have had success and now are using their platforms to help,” DiBiase said in the undated clip after introducing the NFL legend and Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback. “It’s being responsible and a good steward of what we’ve been given.” 

Around the time of the recording, DiBiase was receiving millions of Mississippi welfare dollars meant to alleviate or prevent poverty in the poorest state in the nation. The defense argued Tuesday that the spot is one piece of evidence of the work DiBiase conducted in a good-faith effort to fulfill his role as an independent contractor for nonprofit organizations working with the dysfunctional welfare agency. 

The prosecution, meanwhile, has described such efforts as falling outside the scope of services for “sham” contracts the wrestler received to provide temporary food assistance in north Mississippi and leadership training services. 

DiBiase is the only defendant to face a criminal trial in Mississippi’s welfare scandal, though seven people have pleaded guilty. He is being tried on federal charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, theft and money laundering.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves asked attorneys questions about how the recording could be authenticated. He ultimately ruled that the jury would not hear it, and DiBiase’s mother responded by thwacking a notebook on the courtroom bench where she was sitting. The defense continued to reference the recording as it completed its cross-examination of Nancy New. 

New was the founder of Mississippi Community Education Center, which was one of two nonprofits deputized by the head of MDHS from 2016 to 2019, John Davis, to take over some of the agency’s functions. They called their partnership Families First for Mississippi.

Davis and New both pleaded guilty to their roles in the welfare fraud scheme in 2022. Prosecutors alleged that Davis contracted with New’s organization with the understanding she would fund his desires.

One such wish, New testified, was the contracts with DiBiase. She also described various examples of work she saw DiBiase complete: A SuperTalk radio spot, a commercial filmed at Nissan and trucking company KLLM, an hour-long talk at a Families First conference in northeast Mississippi on “significance versus success.” 

New said she reviewed DiBiase’s unfinished Law of 16 curriculum, a self-help program he was designing with Davis. She talked about a teen rally in the Mississippi Delta where DiBiase spoke. 

“He always showed up and did all of that work for me,” she said. 

But when the prosecution asked New if that work fell within the “scope of services” of the contract DiBiase signed, she paused before finally concluding it did not.  

The defense repeatedly asked New to talk about how DiBiase contributed to the “sustainability” of New’s nonprofit by connecting her with donors and attending meetings across the country. This was part of DiBiase’s nebulous role as “director of sustainable change.” 

The organization New rapidly built at Davis’s direction was anything but sustainable, she testified. New, a former teacher, said Davis picked her nonprofit without a competitive application process and directed her to “immediately” begin expanding services into dozens of counties in the southern half of Mississippi. 

In a matter of years, the nonprofit’s revenue grew from about a couple million dollars to over $20 million due to its welfare agreements.

Despite Davis’s pushing, New said she received no template or plan from MDHS. As she tried to scale, she said she lost sight of her nonprofit’s original goal – to provide educational services. 

“If we could’ve slowed down, it could’ve been a better foundation,” New said. “It was a great program. It would’ve changed Mississippi in a positive way.” 

Davis – whom the prosecution and defense both asserted was the true “villain” of the DiBiase case – always wanted to get his way, New said. Early on in the formation of Families First, New said she dared to disagree with him, though she did not say about what. 

“I was labeled as a troublemaker and I was kind of alienated from the group of leaders at the time,” she said. 

Davis told her to leave meetings, New said. He would threaten to cut their funding. 

“One time he gave us money and then he took it back, but then he gave it back,” she said. 

New’s testimony was more succinct than that of her counterpart, Christi Webb, the former director of the now-defunct Family Resource Center of North Mississippi who described Davis as a bully who would cry or yell at people until they did what he wanted. 

“I would say he’s truly an enigma,” New said of Davis. “I don’t want to be wishy-washy. He came across as very demanding and as a tyrant. It was going to be his way or no way. There were good sides of him, as well.” 

The defense asked New if she trusted Davis’ leadership. 

“He had great, he had grandiose ideas,” she answered. “Trust? I don’t know if I’d use the word trust.” 

One of those ideas, New said, included directing Mississippi Community Education Center, or MCEC, to provide $10,000 to a movie theater to premier a film about DiBiase’s father, Ted DiBiase, the famed retired heel of the WWE known as the “Million Dollar Man.”

U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney Adrienne Rosen asked if there was anything about the movie that “meets MCEC’s goals”

“I think – I’m trying to be very honest and clear here,” New said. “I think for people who saw the movie who may have thought they could not accomplish certain things in life, it was an encouragement there. As far as our day-to-day goals, I don’t recall those, no.” 

But would she have funded the movie without Davis’ orders? 

“We would not have known to do that,” New said.

The trial is set to restart March 16. 

A team from Mississippi Today and The New York Times is a finalist for the Peter F. Collier Award for Ethics in Journalism for reporting about brutality in a Mississippi jail where guards used some inmates to carry out attacks on others.

The Ethics and Journalism Initiative at New York University announced nine finalists Wednesday for work published from 2024 to 2025. Three finalists were named in each of three reporting categories – student, local and national/international.

The work of Mississippi Today and The Times is a finalist in the local category.

The Collier Awards “honor journalism that meets the highest ethical standards in the face of pressure or incentives to do otherwise,” the initiative said in its announcement.

“Why practice ethical journalism when we are vilified for even our best work and when political leaders pressure news owners and their reporters to self-censor?” Stephen J. Adler, founder and director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative, said in the announcement. “Simply because ethical journalism is stronger, more reliable journalism, reflecting our aspirations to provide the public with fair and accurate information and to hold our leaders to account.”

First, second and third prizes will be announced April 15 at the Paley Center for Media in New York. The finalists, in alphabetical order by category, are: 

Student Category: 

• New York University students Krish Dev and Dharma Niles for their breaking news and data reporting for the Washington Square News on a March 2025 cyberattack that revealed the private information of more than 3 million NYU applicants, students and alumni.
• University of Texas Dallas students Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, Sherlyn Dominguez, and Tyler Crivella for their data-driven investigation for the independent student publication The Retrograde into UTD’s low rates of action on Title IX cases, amid restrictive gag order policies. 
• Stanford University student Anna Yang for her searing account of a Stanford assault survivor’s journey through a protracted two-year Title IX process while their perpetrator faced criminal charges, for The Stanford Daily.

Local Category: 

• The Miami Herald/The Tampa Bay Times for their reporting on the detention and harsh treatment of immigrants at the South Florida facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
• Mississippi Today/The New York Times for their investigation of the Rankin County jail in which guards enlist prisoners to carry out violent attacks on other inmates in the guise of “enforcement.”
• The Record (New Jersey) for its reporting on widespread abuse and neglect in New Jersey’s $1.5 billion group home system for adults with developmental disabilities.  

National/International Category: 

• NBC News and Telemundo for their year-long investigation of the secretive and unregulated trade in body parts, in which a Texas academic health center provided researchers and medical technology companies with the corpses of poor, unhoused, mentally ill, and other vulnerable people without the knowledge or consent of their families.
• The Associated Press for its unyielding defense of ethical standards and principles after AP journalists were blocked from the Oval Office, Air Force One and certain news events because the news organization would not change its style on the Gulf of Mexico.  
• The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg for his intrepid reporting on national security officials, including U.S. Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth, using the Signal app to discuss highly sensitive details of an impending strike on Houthi militants in Yemen. 

The Mississippi Today/Times reporting is also the recipient of the First Amendment Coalition’s 2025 Free Speech and Open Government Award, which recognizes journalism that advances free expression or the public’s right to know about its government.

HATTIESBURG — National recognition has come ever so slowly for Southern Miss baseball. Year after year, season after season, the Golden Eagles win 40 games and make an NCAA Regional, often hosting. 

Season after season, they play an arduous non-conference schedule, packed with SEC rivals, and more than hold their own. They dominated Conference USA. They are pretty much dominating the Sun Belt, by far the best so-called mid-major league in the land. 

The Golden Eagles have won 40 or more games nine consecutive seasons. Nobody else in the nation has done that. Nobody. Only the Arkansas Razorbacks have done it eight times. For the last nine full seasons, Southern Miss has averaged 44 games per. That’s remarkable. That’s consistency, too. That is, as the big sign behind the left field fence at Pete Taylor Park/Hill Denson Field tells visitors, “A Tradition of Excellence.”

And yet, every season, until this one, they have begun outside of the national college baseball polls looking in. Every season, until this one, they have had to win their way into the polls, which they have done consistently. This year, finally, USM began the season ranked – and has steadily climbed into the Top 10 of several of the most recognized polls.

Here Tuesday night, before a standing-room-only crowd of more than 5,700, the Golden Eagles sent another message to the rest of the college world, knocking off No. 4 Mississippi State, an exceptionally talented team, 7-6, in an exceptionally entertaining game. 

It was the Eagles’ 11th straight victory after losing their opener to perhaps the best pitcher in college baseball. They have achieved that record against the most difficult schedule any team in the nation has played. 

Finally, the national college baseball pundits are taking notice, perhaps grudgingly. I say that because if the Eagles were wearing an SEC patch on their jerseys, they’d surely be rated even higher than they are now. Put it this way: Mississippi State, 11-2 vs. the nation’s 108th most difficult schedule, came into Tuesday night’s game ranked No. 4. Southern Miss, 11-1 against the No. 1 most difficult schedule, ranked as high as No. 8 and as low as No. 12 in the most recognized national polls.

It’s not just State. Auburn, 10-2 vs. the 109th most difficult schedule, is ranked No. 7. Arkansas, 10-3 against the 110th most difficult schedule, also ranks ahead of USM in the polls.

What can Southern Miss do to change that? Only one thing: keep winning. Win all the way to Omaha and the College World Series. And then win there.

Back in February, Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco was asked by The Athletic, what team might surprise everyone in 2025. This is what he said: “They certainly have gotten a lot more publicity in the last maybe five years, but people probably nationally don’t talk enough about Southern Miss — just how consistently good they are. And it’s almost a backhanded compliment to say for a mid-major, but they don’t play like that. They host (Regionals and Super Regionals), they do everything that everybody else does from a Power 4 standpoint. But they are probably the best team over maybe the last four or five years that hasn’t been in Omaha.”

Interestingly, Ole Miss and Bianco kept USM from going to Omaha in 2022 when the Rebels swept a Super Regional at Hattiesburg en route to the national championship. Just as interestingly, the Rebels surely would have not gotten into the NCAA Tournament that season if not for a late-season victory in Hattiesburg, which boosted the Rebs’ RPI.

Other SEC coaches have experienced USM’s baseball excellence first-hand. Auburn’s Butch Thompson, saw it in 2023 when the Golden Eagles went to The Plains and won the Auburn Regional. LSU’s Jay Johnson saw it in 2022 when his first Tiger team played in an NCAA Regional in Hattiesburg. USM won three straight games over 27 hours, beating LSU twice, to win the title. Alabama’s Rob Vaughn saw it just last week when the Crimson Tide came to Hattiesburg and was run-ruled, 14-4, by the Eagles. State’s Brian O’Connor saw it Tuesday night, calling Southern Miss “a really great ball club” with “an excellent pitching staff.”

As any seasoned college baseball observer will tell you, it’s all about getting hot at the right time and that right time is late May and June. Being hot in February and March – as the Eagles surely are – will get you pats on the back but no trophies, no tickets to Omaha. 

That said, these Eagles surely have the potential to reach Omaha and win a championship. They have the pitching arms. They have a veteran lineup. They are deep, with several excellent players watching from the dugout most nights. Against State, Christian Ostrander kept trotting out true freshman pitchers, throwing mid-90’s fast balls with excellent breaking stuff. He used nine pitchers in all, five – count ‘em, five, freshmen. There are 26 pitchers on the USM roster. Few teams in college baseball have such pitching depth, which is what the post-season demands. 

Slick-fielding third baseman Drey Barrett, just a sophomore, struck the game’s biggest blow, a mammoth, 450-foot, three-run home run over the center field wall. There are no easy outs in this USM lineup. Thus far, they counter-punch every time they get punched in the mouth. After losing a 5-0 lead and falling behind, they responded once again against State.

Again, it’s a long road to Omaha and there will be sharp curves and potholes along the way. It’s baseball. That’s the nature of the game. The Eagles could lose to Nicholls on Wednesday night (as they did last season) and to North Alabama this weekend. But the guess here is that Ostrander’s third Southern Miss team is in the national picture for the long haul. The Eagles surely have that look about them.

The Senate Public Health and Welfare committee advanced a bill Tuesday that aims to improve upon House legislation to increase the regulation and transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. 

The committee narrowly passed an amendment with an 8-6 vote replacing all of the language in House Bill 1665. The bill moves to the full Senate for more debate.

The amendment’s author, Republican Sen. Rita Parks from Corinth, told committee members her changes would strengthen the legislation and add key provisions requested by independent pharmacists. 

Pharmacy benefit managers are the middlemen used by health insurance companies and self-insured employer plans. The managers have increasingly drawn scrutiny from policymakers because of opaque business practices and market consolidation. Independent pharmacists have warned year after year that their businesses could be forced to close because of low reimbursements from pharmacy benefit managers. 

Parks’ amendment drew criticism from several committee members, who argued the bill’s wording would drive up insurance costs, harm businesses and return efforts to pass pharmacy benefit manager reform to where they stalled last year.

“We’ve dealt with this for three years and we seemed on the precipice of getting something done here, and instead of getting something done, we’re right now debating a strike-all that puts us back where we were last year,” said Sen. Jeremy England, a Republican from Vancleave and the most vocal opponent of Parks’ amendment.

Parks said she believes the legislation’s benefits to independent pharmacies are critical, because they sustain access to health care in rural areas. 

“At least I will know I provided an avenue for care for all the citizens of Mississippi, with keeping our doors open with our independent pharmacists,” Parks said. 

Mississippi lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate pharmacy benefit managers unsuccessfully for several years. A pharmacy benefit reform bill last year made it further in the legislative process than in years past, but died in the House after a lawmaker raised a procedural challenge. 

Parks’ amendment maintains many of the provisions in the House’s version of the bill, which passed the chamber Feb. 4. These provisions would increase transparency and prohibit spread pricing, the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits. 

The updated bill would also: 

• Remove language that would prohibit insurers from requiring a patient to use a specific affiliate pharmacy, a practice known as “steering.” 
• Keep oversight of pharmacy benefit managers under the Board of Pharmacy, rather than transferring it to the insurance commissioner, like in the House’s bill. 
• Require pharmacists to be reimbursed at least as much as an affiliate pharmacy or the Mississippi Division of Medicaid, which covers the cost of the drug and a dispensing fee. 

Parks has championed pharmacy benefit manager reform efforts in the Senate for several years. She said Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney told her he believes pharmacy benefit managers should be regulated by the Board of Pharmacy, and that moving those responsibilities to the Mississippi Insurance Department would take at least two years. 

“That’s two more years we would lose before (House Bill) 1665 could even be in practice,” Parks said. 

England said several major employers and hospitals told him the cost of providing insurance to employees would increase if the state adopts provisions such as requiring independent pharmacists be paid a dispensing fee. 

“Our business community is literally screaming at us to not do it,” he argued as he implored other committee members to vote against Parks’ amendment. 

At England’s request, the committee made an additional amendment that could force the bill into final negotiations between the House and Senate.

Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, asked why the committee was advancing pharmacy benefit reform legislation after Congress passed its own reform bill in February. Parks said passing state-level legislation is necessary to strengthen oversight. 

Congress enacted several provisions pertaining to pharmacy benefit managers in its February appropriations bill. The legislation included measures that require pharmacy benefit managers to pass all rebates on to employer health plans, and increased oversight of pharmacy management services for Medicare Part D plans and employer health plans with transparency and data reporting requirements. 

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is now providing free and direct legal support to Mississippi journalists and newsrooms through its Local Legal Initiative.

Mississippi is among the seven states with a staff attorney from the Reporter’s Committee available to provide local news organizations free legal assistance, and the group is set to expand its service to two more states later this year.

Andrew Coffman, based in Tupelo, is the group’s new staff attorney for Mississippi.

“Mississippi journalists are working every day to bring information to our communities, and in a growing number of cases, they need legal backing to fulfill that mission,” Coffman said in a press release.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is the nation’s largest provider of pro bono legal services for journalists and newsrooms. It is also a leading advocate for press freedom in the U.S. and has a variety of resources, including a 24/7 Legal Hotline.

“We really see our mission here as parallel to the mission of any kind of journalism … and we view ourselves as providing support for that,” said Eric Feder, director of the Local Legal Initiative.

With the addition of Mississippi and Louisiana, along with Minnesota and Michigan later this year, the number of states in the Local Legal Initiative is growing from five to nine. The program previously provided services in Oregon.

Part of what made this expansion possible was a $1.25 million award from Press Forward’s Open Call on Infrastructure. Press Forward is a philanthropic group that supports local journalism in the U.S.

“I’m looking forward to being a resource for journalists and news organizations across the state to help them access public records and meetings, push back on legal challenges and produce even more deeply reported stories that shed light on important issues and hold government accountable,” Coffman said in the press release.

Coffman is a graduate of the University of Mississippi School of Law and was the inaugural National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law fellow.

He previously worked at law firm Phelps Dunbar LLP, where he litigated cases related to intellectual property infringement, defamation and more. He also worked as senior associate general counsel for the Tennessee Department of Health, senior associate attorney for King & Ballow and law clerk to U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills in the Northern District of Mississippi.

According to The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press website, the initiative’s attorneys have helped journalists win legal battles over public records, libel lawsuits and subpoenaing sources. The attorneys also have successfully helped advocate for greater transparency in state, local and municipal governments.

In 2025, the Reporters Committee and the Mississippi Press Association filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Mississippi Supreme Court to uphold a lower court’s dismissal of former Gov. Phil Bryant’s defamation lawsuit against Mississippi Today. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments Bryant’s effort to revive the case, but justices have not yet issued a ruling.

Mississippi State has lost only to the No. 1 team in college baseball. Southern Miss has lost only to the best pitcher in college baseball. Ole Miss still has a Top 10 RPI. The Clevelands discuss all that and bring in a special guest, Millsaps women’s hoops coach Jeff Wilbur who is taking his newly crowned conference champs to the NCAA D-3 Big Dance.

Stream all episodes here.

Raising teacher pay, which was originally described as a priority for both chambers of the Legislature, became a casualty of politics this week. 

Bills that would have increased teacher salaries died with a deadline at the Capitol on Tuesday, despite pleas from educators and advocates who have said for years that a teacher’s salary in Mississippi is unsustainable. 

Mississippi teachers are, on average, the lowest paid in the country at $53,704. Starting teachers make a little over $42,000.

The Legislature passed the last meaningful teacher pay raise in 2022, which educators told Mississippi Today was quickly eaten up by rising insurance premiums and inflation. In the years since, teachers say they’ve had to take second jobs and make tough financial decisions to live within their means. 

Both the Senate and House authored bills early in the session that would increase teacher pay. A Senate bill would’ve given educators a $2,000 increase, while the House proposed a $5,000 raise. 

But by the end of the day Tuesday, the deadline for committees to pass bills originating in the opposite chamber, lawmakers in both chambers ended up blaming the other for failing to advance each other’s raises.

“It’s incredibly disappointing,” said Jason Reid, a teacher in DeSoto County who drives a school bus before and after work to supplement his income. “Two months ago it seemed both chambers were very committed to addressing the regional and national teacher pay raise gaps and teacher shortage. Now, Mississippi teachers will fall even further behind their peers.”

Educators have consistently named low pay as one of the factors driving the teacher shortage in Mississippi. A survey released earlier this year by the Mississippi Department of Education showed nearly 4,000 vacant teaching jobs across the state. 

Senate and House leaders said in the weeks leading up the 2026 legislative session that raising teacher pay was one of the top items on their agendas. However, as the day winded down on Tuesday, it appeared that the chambers had reached a stalemate.

Both the Senate and House Education Committees had the opportunity to advance the others’ teacher pay raise bills. Still, they chose not to and pointed fingers at the other.

Kelly Riley, leader of Mississippi Professional Educators, said the blame doesn’t lie with one chamber. 

“Educators, just like other constituents, expect their legislators to come to Jackson and to take care of the state’s business,” she said. “Please put politics aside and do the job that your constituents elected you to do.”

Senate Education Chairman Dennis DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville, told Mississippi Today on Tuesday that he wasn’t planning on calling a meeting before the chamber adjourned, and that the proverbial ball was in the House’s court. 

“Senate Bill 2001 has been in the House since the second day of the session,” DeBar said. “I would have liked to have collaborated with them over the past seven weeks.”

However, the Senate has also had the House’s teacher pay raise bill since early February.

The leader of the House Education Committee, Republican Rep. Rob Roberson of Starkville, made it clear weeks ago that he would not call another meeting before the March 3 deadline. 

It’s not exactly clear why, but the move did come after Senate leaders made their stance clear on school choice, which was House Speaker Jason White’s pet issue this session. 

The Senate Education Committee killed House Bill 2, White’s omnibus school choice bill, last month. A majority of the committee’s education bills were then double-referred in the House, a tactic commonly employed in an effort to kill bills — though White told Mississippi Today that wasn’t out of retaliation. 

The House’s education panel has only passed two Senate education bills. DeBar’s committee met last week and passed just two House education bills. 

As a result, dozens of education measures have died over the past two months. 

“It’s frustrating because this seems to be an annual thing when we discuss pay raises,” DeBar said. “However, along with the pay raise, we’ve sent down a plethora of bills that refuse to get any action.”

DeBar, who’s also vice-chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he’s now planning to amend the Mississippi Department of Education’s appropriations bill to include money set aside for a teacher pay raise of at least $2,000. However, because legislators can’t address general law in appropriations bills, this would be a one-time bonus — not a permanent change to the teacher pay scale. 

In short, it would be a stop gap, and a temporary solution until the chambers could reach a resolution on a raise — perhaps next year. 

But legislative leaders heavily involved in education policy, such as Roberson and Republican Rep. Jansen Owen of Poplarville, and Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson, a Republican from Vicksburg, all said they’d like to find a long-term solution before the chambers adjourn this year.

“That’s just not how you do teacher pay raises,” Owen said. “It’s strange. I don’t understand why they’re trying to work around taking up the clean pay raise bill. We sent the Senate a very clean, a good, clean, large pay raise. And if it’s dead, that’s sad … I hate to see that the Senate is killing it just to play some political games.”

Riley said the status of the teacher pay raise bills was especially disappointing, given the state’s academic achievement over the past decade.

While state leaders have taken turns accepting credit for students’ dramatic progress in reading and math that have landed Mississippi in national headlines, education advocates say the gains wouldn’t have been possible without the work of teachers. 

“It’s just disheartening that they don’t turn around and reward that hard work with the pay raise,” Riley said. “But I hate to say that they deserve it, or it’s a reward, because the bottom line is that they should pay and respect our educators as the professionals that they are.”

A teacher pay raise could be taken up during a special session, if Gov. Tate Reeves, the only person who can call a special session and sets the agenda, were to call one. 

Roberson suggested that the chambers could also potentially agree to suspend the rules of the session and revive one of the teacher pay raise bills before they gavel out for the year as scheduled in early April. 

“I’m not saying that we are gonna do one, but we could,” he said. “Dennis and I are gonna get together. There may be other tools that can be used to fund this for a year, but I don’t want to do it that way.”

Roberson said he doesn’t want to give up on the House’s more generous $5,000 proposal. 

“I think it’s just a matter of us figuring out what we’re gonna do,” he said. “We may can agree on something and that may work, so conversations are ongoing. Nothing is set in stone until we leave.”

Mukta Joshi is part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

Melvin Funez, 22, and Hannah Cline, 21, met two years ago on Instagram.

They both lived with their parents in Lakeland, Florida, at the time. They would play video games and chat endlessly online, often until they fell asleep together on FaceTime. They bonded over date nights at Chili’s and shared a love for movies and seafood boils. 

A year later, they moved out of their parents’ homes and began living in a new apartment with Funez’s dog and a kitten they adopted together. In the fall of 2025, they decided they were ready to get married. They made plans for a simple courtroom ceremony in January.

Cline was excited. “He was going to buy a ring and randomly propose,” she said.

But as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown intensified across the nation, the couple became nervous. Cline is a U.S. citizen. Funez is not. His mother had brought him to the U.S. from Honduras when he was 5 months old.

“I would have nightmares of him getting picked up by ICE,” Cline said.

On the morning of Nov. 29, just as they had feared, Funez was stopped by police. A headlight on his car had been out and the local sheriff’s department held him for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, when he was unable to produce proper documentation. 

Funez was held for weeks in Florida and Louisiana and was transferred in December to the Adams County Correctional Center, a private, for-profit detention facility in Natchez, Mississippi. 

The couple didn’t give up on their marriage plans. Starting in January, Funez began submitting requests to hold a ceremony at the CoreCivic-owned Mississippi detention center, something that has long been allowed under federal rules.

Using a tablet given to him by the facility, and the detention center’s electronic portal, he repeatedly inquired about the marriage process. 

His first request was addressed to CoreCivic and directed at the chaplain. The chaplain told Funez his first conversation needed to be with his ICE representative. 

Funez’s subsequent requests to ICE, reviewed by Mississippi Today, always received anonymous responses. Each request was closed, with one response saying, “We do not allow detainees to get married at this facility.”

Federal policy since 2019 has stated that marriage requests by ICE detainees will be considered on a case-by-case basis. It states that a request is ordinarily granted unless a facility administrator or field office director determines there are “compelling government interests” to deny it or that the marriage meets other criteria for denial, such as posing a security threat.

Prior to 2019, the policy explicitly stated that “compelling interests” did not include the possibility of a marriage allowing a detainee to avoid deportation, language that is no longer included in the policy. 

A representative for ICE acknowledged receipt of Mississippi Today’s request for comment, but did not respond. 

“Our Adams County Correctional Center follows all ICE policies,” said Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic. The warden and assistant warden of the Adams County facility did not respond to a request for comment. 

An ICE facility disallowing detainees to get married altogether is highly unusual and would constitute a violation of rights, said immigration attorney Brandon Riches. Riches, who has represented clients held at various facilities in the South, said he had not heard of any detention centers with blanket bans on weddings. One of Riches’ clients got married while at the Jena, Louisiana, facility in June, he said.  

“While there are levels of various approvals to have this done, the right to marry should not be infringed upon because of current immigration policies,” Riches said. “These are not criminal detentions.” 

ICE detention is legally classified as administrative detention. Unlawful presence in the United States or not possessing proper documentation is considered a civil violation – like a parking ticket or a health code violation – not a crime. 

But even prison inmates who are convicted of crimes have a constitutionally protected right to get married while serving time. News reports show that detainees have gotten married in facilities across the country (such as in Texas and Washington). Susan Torres, a Florida-based immigration attorney who represents Funez, said at least five of her clients have gotten married while detained at different facilities in the past. 

“There’s usually a person that’s even designated for marriages that you can reach out to, and they will usually approve your request as long as it’s reasonable,” Torres said. 

But Cline said she has been unable to even contact staff at the Adams detention center despite multiple attempts to reach them. “When they answer, it’s a robot, and it gives you 10 options of people to speak to. I picked every single option so I could get a hold of somebody. No one answered the phone,” she said. 

Meanwhile, Funez has been spending his days waiting for his bond hearing, hoping to be released. To honor his engagement, he has been wearing a white and blue ring with a letter “H,” for “Hannah,” that a fellow detainee from Mexico spent a week weaving for him.

“They give us food in plastic bags every so often. He would cut the plastic bag into strips, tie one end to a bed post and tie the other end onto a shampoo bottle and spin it until it becomes a fine thread,” Funez said. 

His bond hearing is scheduled for Wednesday morning. If he is released, Funez says he wants to use the same plastic bag ring to propose to Cline. “It reminds me that I fought for our relationship, and to stay in a country that to me is our home,” he said. 

Correction 3/3/26: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the last name of Melvin Funez’s fiancée.

A legislative push to improve health care in Mississippi prisons — which has attracted legal scrutiny and mounting allegations that prisoners are denied necessary treatment — is still alive in the Legislature even after some lawmakers appeared ready to scuttle the effort.

Rep. Becky Currie, the House Corrections chairwoman spearheading a package of reforms aimed at ensuring prisoners aren’t denied care, used a legislative maneuver to keep the measures alive after Senate leaders prepared to kill them on Tuesday. Hours before a deadline for committees to pass general bills from the other chamber, Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, changed the language in a Senate bill dealing with prisons and probation and inserted the language from her own proposals.

That move was prompted by Senate Corrections Committee Vice Chairwoman Lydia Chassaniol, a Republican from Winona, saying she planned to kill almost all of Currie’s bills without taking them up for a vote by Tuesday’s deadline. Chassaniol is running the committee while Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, is out with an illness, and said she was honoring Barnett’s wishes by only bringing two bills forward.

“I just decided, what do we have to lose? They’ve killed the bills, we’ll force them to have to do it again,” Currie said. “I’m just continuing the fight.”

The legislative proposals follow Mississippi Today’s ongoing “Behind Bars, Beyond Care” investigative series, which has documented alleged routine denial of health care in Mississippi prisons. The findings include potentially thousands of people living with hepatitis C going without treatment, an untreated broken arm that resulted in amputation and delayed cancer screenings one woman said led to a terminal diagnosis. One ex-corrections official said people are experiencing widespread medical neglect in Mississippi’s prisons. 

The proposals Currie kept alive on Tuesday include a bill to require the creation of a hepatitis C program and an HIV program aimed at improving the treatment of prisoners. A Mississippi Today report in October revealed that only a fraction of Mississippi prisoners diagnosed with hepatitis C receive treatment, which has allowed the treatable infection to develop into life-threatening illness. Additionally, the bill would require the state to develop a plan focused on improving the health of female prisoners.

Another bill Currie advanced would take the power to award health contracts away from the Department of Corrections and task the Department of Finance and Administration with soliciting proposals for a new medical contractor. The current medical contractor, Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, was awarded over $315 million in emergency, no-bid state contracts by the Department of Corrections from 2020 to 2024. It has since faced legal challenges and allegations that it routinely denies or provides inadequate care inside Mississippi’s prisons.

Currie said she wants to make it possible for other entities to compete for Mississippi’s health contract proposals after Gov. Tate Reeves leaves office in 2027. Reeves appointed current Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain, under whose watch VitalCore has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

“We don’t want them here anymore after this governor leaves,” Currie said. “I’m not saying who’s going to get (the contract), but what I am saying is we want everybody to be able to submit. The way the RFP was written before, it was only for VitalCore, so we just want to be fair.”

The proposals had passed the House with unanimous, bipartisan support before being thwarted in Senate committee.

Currie also revived a policy that would increase oversight of the Inmate Welfare Fund. Currie said she found seven bank accounts linked to the fund, but only obtained access to one. In that one account, she found about $32 million, but had trouble tracing much of it. Currie said the disparate info in the bank statements raises questions about whether the money has been spent on prisoners.

The House’s efforts this year come after Mississippi’s prisons have attracted federal scrutiny for poor conditions, at times leading to death and suffering. Mississippi has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world — 661 people per 100,000. About 19,500 people are currently incarcerated in state prisons. 

A public zoning hearing is scheduled for March 16 in Brandon to review an application for a development from a battery storage company. The meeting is open to the public and will be held at 6 p.m. at Brandon City Hall on Municipal Drive. 

Brandon Mayor Butch Lee confirmed that Black Mountain Energy Storage, a Texas-based company, was applying for the zoning permit. According to its website, the company focuses on bringing “reliable energy storage capacity to the electric grid that will enhance system reliability and enable greater reliance on renewable generation.”

“Observe, listen, study, before accepting everything from the social media influencers,” said Lee when asked for comment about the project. 

Some Brandon residents have been raising concerns about the new proposal on social media ahead of the zoning hearing.

The new proposed facility comes on the heels of last August’s announcement of a $6 billion data center project being built in Brandon that has received community pushback over concerns about energy rates and air and water pollution.

Correction 3/3/26: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a planned zoning hearing was for a data center development in Brandon. The hearing is for a new proposal from Black Mountain Energy Storage.