Michael Guest has represented Mississippi's 3rd District since 2019 — seven years in Congress. In that time he's climbed into a subcommittee 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 a cosponsor of the federal six-week abortion ban — six weeks is before many women even know they're pregnant. The version he first pushed in 2022 had no exception for rape. The 2025 version he signed onto allows one only if a woman got counseling or medical treatment for the rape at least 48 hours before the abortion. 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.
Six in ten 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 took credit for ICE's blank check
Guest chairs the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement. So when Trump's budget bill handed ICE and Customs and Border Protection what he called "historic investments," Guest wasn't a bystander — he went to Newsweek to take credit for it: more than $46 billion to finish the border wall, $45 billion to expand ICE's ability to detain people, and about $35 billion to hire thousands more CBP and ICE officers and agents.
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, firing into her car.
It's not just happening somewhere else. Local and state agencies are helping ICE with its crackdown here in Mississippi. Guest's response to all of it? He posted: "I fully support the men and women of DHS who are working to remove criminal aliens from our streets."
3. He voted to take health care away from Mississippi
Almost a quarter of this state — 714,600 people, 24.2% 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 more Mississippians projected to be uninsured by 2034 — a figure that counts both the bill and the expiring ACA tax credits below.
- And on top of the bill, the ACA tax credits Republicans allowed to expire, launching millions of Americans into 2026 with steep insurance hikes.
Ten days after Trump signed it, faith leaders rallied outside Cindy Hyde-Smith's and Roger Wicker's Jackson offices, warning about the harm to Mississippi's most vulnerable. By then Guest had voted yes and the bill was law. That fall he went on a podcast to dismiss the fight over the expiring ACA subsidies: "This is clearly a political shutdown. This is not over policy."
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 projected to lose their insurance in one of the four states with the lowest median household income 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.
