JACKSON, Miss.—Sarah Adlakha, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, promises to crack down on corruption in Washington, D.C., by rejecting any contribution to her political campaign that comes from “Washington lobbyists” if voters elect her to serve in Congress, she told the Mississippi Free Press at a press conference.
She said she would not accept any funding from lobbyists while serving in office, either. Adlakha, a Chicago native raised in Montgomery, Alabama, who moved to Mississippi 14 years ago, is challenging incumbent U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican representing Mississippi, in the March 10 statewide Republican primary.
Adlakha says her first priorities are to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks while in office and from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments. The candidate also said she has signed the U.S. Term Limits pledge and supports term limits for members of Congress, limiting House members to serving up to three two-year terms and senators to up to two six-year terms.
“Washington is broken, and it’s not broken because of one party or the other,” Adlakha told the Mississippi Free Press at a Jan. 29 press conference outside of the Thad Cochran U.S. Courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi. “It’s broken because too many politicians have learned how to profit from the system instead of fixing it.”.
Adlakha Criticizes Hyde-Smith’s Voting Record
U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith voted to block a 2022 bill that would’ve banned foreign entities from making campaign donations to U.S. candidates and that also would have strengthened disclosures on campaign expenditures and political advertisements.
During a 2025 Senate Rules and Administration Committee meeting, the senator also voted against a measure that proposed banning Congress members and their spouses from trading individual stocks.
Sarah Adlakha chastised Hyde-Smith for taking large sums in campaign dollars from Washington lobbyists and for using campaign donations on travel-related expenses, claiming these expenses included a dozen trips to Las Vegas, luxury resorts, 5-star hotels, expensive meals and entertainment.
Several of Hyde-Smith’s Las Vegas trips involve her and her staff attending the National Finals Rodeo, as documented by her state director, Umesh Sanjanwala, via Facebook posts from 2021, 2023 and 2025. He posted a recap of his sixth National Finals Rodeo trip to Las Vegas with the senator on Dec. 11, 2023, in a now-archived Facebook post.
An FEC disbursement from Dec. 22, 2023, shows that the senator spent $9,104.93 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The description of the disbursement says “travel.”
“Mississippi deserves a senator who works for voters, not lobbyists,” Adlakha said. “I’m running to change how Washington works, not to become part of it. I will never sell my vote to special interests.”
In a Feb. 4 emailed statement to the Mississippi Free Press, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager Jake Monssen said the senator does not fund her campaigns herself. Instead, she gains donations from hosting fundraising events across the state and country.
“One of those events is an annual fundraiser in Las Vegas that is held around the time of the rodeo and is a joint event with other Senators,” Monssen said. “I know that Ms. Adlakha has held events to benefit her own campaign, but it seems they have fallen flat since she has mostly had to self-fund her efforts. All of these false attacks reek of desperation.”
Adlakha Aims to Bring ‘Affordable’ Health Care to Rural Mississippi
A mom of three who homeschooled her children, Adlakha works as a physician and has managed and founded businesses while fighting to remove “government restrictions.” The candidate said the founding fathers intended for lawmakers to be “citizen legislators, not career politicians.”
The federal Medicaid program and the Children’s Health Insurance Plan could lose $1.02 trillion due to the federal spending budget approved under House Resolution 1, removing between 9.9 million and 14.9 million Americans from the programs by 2034, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated. The nonpartisan office calculated that H.R. 1, which President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s federal funding by $186 billion through 2034, which will affect Mississippi’s food assistance programs.
“There’s a lot of corruption,” Adlaka said. “A lot of the federal funding that goes into these big insurance companies and kind of turns them into monopolies is one of the reasons that we’re having such a difficult time with funding health insurance or health care.”
If elected, she said she will continue fighting to break down government regulations and restrictions in health care and health insurance while bringing “affordable” health care into rural Mississippi.
“I’m also doing real estate development to bring affordable, low-cost health care into rural areas of Mississippi,” Adlakha said. “I’ve worked in multiple, very convoluted systems, broken systems that are broken from federal overreach—because of that, because of having to fight that corruption, that’s a reason I stepped into politics.”