Michael Guest has represented Mississippi's 3rd District since 2019 — seven years in Congress. In that time he's climbed into a chairmanship on the Homeland Security Committee, which means his votes don't just count, they set the agenda. Here are three things Mississippians should know about how he's used that job.
1. He wants the government to control your body
Mississippi is the state that ended Roe. The Dobbs case came from here, and today Mississippi enforces a near-total abortion ban — the state's last abortion clinic has closed, so women have to leave Mississippi to get care.
Guest didn't just cheer that on. He wants to take it national. He's pushing a federal six-week abortion ban with no exception for rape — six weeks is before many women even know they're pregnant. He spoke at a rally on the Supreme Court steps the day the justices heard the case to overturn Roe, and he's spent his career attacking Planned Parenthood and voting to defund it.
Almost two-thirds of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew. Guest thinks he knows better than you what you should be allowed to do with your own body.
2. He's the guy who wrote ICE a $46 billion check
Guest chairs the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement. So when Trump's budget bill handed ICE and Customs and Border Protection the biggest enforcement budget in American history, Guest wasn't a bystander — he went to Newsweek to take credit for it: more than $46 billion for border wall construction, 3,000 new Border Patrol agents and 5,000 new CBP officers. He also went on camera to confirm $800 million set aside just for ICE agent bonuses.
Here's what that money bought. Masked agents operating in near-total anonymity, which ProPublica calls an "unfettered and unaccountable" federal police force. People grabbed outside their own immigration court hearings — the ones who showed up trying to do the right thing. And in January 2026, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed an American citizen, a mother of three, in the face as she tried to drive away.
It's not just happening somewhere else. Local and state agencies are helping ICE run its crackdown here in Mississippi. Guest's response to all of it? He posted that he "fully supports" what DHS is doing.
3. He voted to take health care away from Mississippi
Almost a quarter of this state — 714,600 people, 24.3% of the population — was on Medicaid in 2024. Guest voted for the same bill he brags about above, and it cut more than $1 trillion from health care and food assistance.
For Mississippi, that means:
- An estimated $2–$4 billion in lost federal Medicaid funds over the next decade — fewer doctors, more strain on rural hospitals.
- About 115,000 Mississippians projected to lose coverage entirely.
- ACA tax credits allowed to expire, which spikes premiums for everyone still buying insurance.
Faith leaders across the state begged the delegation to stop, warning about the harm to Mississippi's most vulnerable. Guest voted yes anyway, then went on to talk up the shutdown fight and the expiring ACA subsidies like it was a win.
So who does Michael Guest work for?
Not the woman in Jackson who now has to drive to another state for medical care. Not the family whose neighbor got picked up by masked agents. Not the 115,000 Mississippians about to lose their insurance in the poorest state in the country.
He works for the agenda that gets him a chairmanship and a Newsweek byline. Pick any one of these three and the answer comes out the same — the people of Mississippi's 3rd District are never the ones he's serving. In 2026, they get to say whether that arrangement continues.
