A federal court in El Paso will hear arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging Texas' mid-decade round of congressional redistricting. Civil rights groups are seeking to block the new map from taking effect before candidates have to file for the midterm elections.
Republican state lawmakers passed the map in August during a special session, under pressure from President Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott, with the explicit aim of flipping five Democrat-held congressional districts into the Republican column. The process began with the U.S. Department of Justice sending a letter to Abbott, identifying four congressional districts as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” All four districts have majority non-white voting populations and have historically elected non-white Democrats to represent them in Congress.
Gov. Abbott and Republican state lawmakers initially cited the Justice Department letter as the reason for the mid-decade redistricting during the first special session — which was brought to a premature end after House Democrats broke quorum to prevent a vote on Republican’s proposed congressional map. By the time the second special session convened, Abbott and Republican lawmakers were arguing instead that the map was a purely partisan gerrymander, designed to maximize Republican gains.
Attorneys for the state are relying on this latter argument. The distinction is significant. While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled partisan gerrymanders are allowed under federal law, it has also held that racial gerrymanders are unconstitutional.
But attorneys for the plaintiffs argue that the state cannot simply change its argument and expect the court to disregard its earlier claim that the redistricting was necessary because of the Justice Department’s letter.
“The governor said that’s what he was going to do, to remove these majority-minority districts, and the legislators echoed that in their statements during the debates,” said Robert Weiner, voting rights project director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents the Texas NAACP in the case. “They were told to do it. They said they would do it. And they did it.”
Weiner pointed to electoral statistical evidence that indicates the redistricting plan was designed to undermine the voting power of people of color to elect their candidates of choice.
“The racial composition of these new districts cannot be explained by partisanship, and they really focused on race, just as they were told to do, and all of that is illegal,” Weiner said.
"It's not a particularly close case," voting rights attorney Chad Dunn said. "It has been the law for decades, long before even the Voting Rights Act was passed, that a legislature cannot draw districts on the basis of race, and that’s exactly what the [Texas state] legislature did here."
Houston Public Media reached out to the Office of the Attorney General of Texas for comment, but did not receive a response.
The plaintiffs' ultimate aim is to have the court throw out the 2025 redistricting map entirely, but in the near term, they're hoping the court will issue an injunction that will force Texas to use the map the state adopted in 2021 for the 2026 midterm elections.
The filing period for 2026 Texas congressional candidates begins Nov. 8 and ends Dec. 8.
"The court’s well aware that, under the current election schedule, the filing period where candidates file their ballot applications to seek office begin to get filed in November, and that process concludes in December," Dunn said, "and so the court has taken careful attention to those deadlines and has given every indication that it intends to rule in time for the next election."
Nina Perales is vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and another attorney representing the plaintiffs. Perales said that, regardless of whether the court grants an injunction, the losing side is likely to appeal the court’s decision.
“I think this is the kind of case where you would see an appeal by the party that did not prevail,” Perales said, “and because it is a statewide redistricting case, it does involve a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, or a direct request for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue.”
Copyright 2025 Houston Public Media News 88.7