A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Texas – El Paso Division ruled 2-1 against Texas’s new Congressional map.
The judges told Texas to use the boundaries drawn in the 2021 map after finding that the state appeared to have gerrymandered based on race.
The court concluded that the plaintiffs have strong direct evidence that supports their claim that Texas took part in racial gerrymandering.
The Senate passed the new map in August 2025. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law.
The plaintiffs, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, filed a lawsuit.
The Trump administration asked Texas to redistrict to flip five Democratic districts to Republican, prompting legislators to hesitate.
But then race came into the equation:
But when the Trump Administration reframed its request as a demand to redistrict congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board. On July 7, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), sent a letter (“the DOJ Letter”) to the Governor and Attorney General of Texas making the legally incorrect assertion that four congressional districts in Texas were “unconstitutional” because they were “coalition districts”—majority-non-White districts in which no single racial group constituted a 50% majority. In the letter, DOJ threatened legal action if Texas didn’t immediately dismantle and redraw these districts—a threat based entirely on their racial makeup. Notably, the DOJ Letter targeted only majority-non-White districts. Any mention of majority White Democrat districts—which DOJ presumably would have also targeted if its aims were partisan rather than racial—was conspicuously absent.Two days later, citing the DOJ Letter, the Governor added redistricting to the special session’s legislative agenda. In doing so, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to draw a new U.S. House map to resolve DOJ’s concerns. In other words, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race. In press appearances, the Governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts.
“The Legislature adopted those racial objectives,” wrote Judge Jeffrey Brown. “The redistricting bill’s sponsors made numerous statements suggesting that they had intentionally manipulated the districts’ lines to create more majority-Hispanic and majority-Black districts.”
The DOJ letter came out on July 7, addressing four Texas districts and describing them as “unconstitutional ‘coalition districts.'” Dhillon said the DOJ wanted Texas “to rectify these race-based considerations from these districts.”
A coalition district is one “where the combined racial minorities make up a majority of the population and where the voters from these different racial groups vote together to elect the minority-preferred candidate.”
The Voting Rights Act does not make these districts legally required, even though Dhillon said otherwise in her letter: “It is well-established that so called ‘coalition districts’ run afoul the [sic] Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment.”
So, from what I’m reading, the Voting Rights Act does not require coalition districts, but there is nothing that stops a state from forming them.
Brown argued that the case Dhillon used, Petteway v. Galveston County, does not fit her case:
Nowhere in Petteway does the Fifth Circuit hold that merely having a coalition district in an electoral map is per se unconstitutional. The Petteway court had no occasion to opine about the constitutionality of coalition districts. Instead, the en banc court remanded the case to the district court to consider the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims in the first instance.
“Thus, even though federal courts in this Circuit can no longer force a legislative body to create a coalition district under VRA § 2, that doesn’t prohibit such a body from voluntarily creating a coalition district for political or other race-neutral reasons,” added Brown.
How will this affect other states? I think it depends on the appeals. More than likely, Texas will appeal this decision.
If Texas cannot use the new map, then it wouldn’t shock me if the new California map doesn’t hold up.
California Republicans and the DOJ already sued the state over Prop 50, which allows the Democrat-led legislature to draw a new Congressional map.
The new map flips five Republican districts to Democrats.
Both groups claim that California Democrats redrew the map based on race: “In the press, California’s legislators and governor sold a plan to promote the interests of Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. But amongst themselves and on the debate floor, the focus was not partisanship, but race.”
Crazy idea! How about we draw the districts based on population and nothing else?
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