Federal judges block Texas from using its new US House map in the 2026 midterms

Federal Court Blocks Texas Redistricting Plan in Major Setback for Republicans

A federal court dealt a significant blow to Republican redistricting efforts on Tuesday, blocking Texas from implementing a redrawn U.S. House map that has become a central component of President Donald Trump’s strategy to maintain a slim Republican majority in Congress ahead of the 2026 elections.

In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of federal judges in El Paso determined that Texas’ unusual summer redrawing of congressional districts would harm Black and Hispanic residents. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee from the president’s first term, authored the decision.

“To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” the ruling stated.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott swiftly filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday evening as Republicans publicly defended the map, which was designed to give the GOP five additional House seats.

The court’s decision marks a significant development in an escalating national redistricting battle. Following Texas’ lead, Republican-controlled legislatures in Missouri and North Carolina approved new maps adding Republican seats in each state. In response, California voters approved a ballot initiative projected to give Democrats an additional five seats.

The Trump administration has filed a federal lawsuit challenging California’s redistricting, with Attorney General Pam Bondi characterizing it as “a brazen power grab.” California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom celebrated the Texas ruling on social media platform X, writing: “Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won.”

Texas Republicans have maintained they drew the new map solely for partisan advantage, not racial discrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering falls under political questions outside federal court jurisdiction. “Texas’s map was drawn the right way for the right reasons,” Bondi asserted on X.

However, civil rights groups representing minority voters argued the map reduced the influence of Black and Hispanic voters, constituting a racial gerrymander that violates both the federal Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution. If the ruling stands, Texas will revert to using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 for next year’s elections.

“Today’s decision is a critical victory for voting rights and a powerful rebuke of Texas’s brazen attempt to dilute the political power of Latino and Black voters,” said Abha Khanna, partner at Elias Law Group, which represents minority voters opposing the new map.

The judges indicated that map critics have a substantial chance of winning their case at trial. An Obama appointee joined Brown in the majority, while a Reagan appointee dissented. The majority concluded that without their injunction, minorities would face congressional representation based on “likely unconstitutional racial classifications for at least two years.”

The court determined that a major catalyst for Texas’ redistricting was a July letter from Harmeet Dhillon, assistant U.S. attorney general overseeing the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Dhillon had directed Texas to redraw four districts, citing a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which declared that the Voting Rights Act does not allow different minority groups to “aggregate their populations” to challenge maps.

Dhillon’s letter focused on four “coalition” districts where no single group holds a majority but minority voters collectively outnumber non-Hispanic white voters. She argued these districts must be dismantled as “vestiges of an unconstitutional racially based gerrymandering past.”

The judges called Dhillon’s conclusion “legally incorrect” but noted that “The Legislature adopted those racial objectives” anyway. “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,” according to the ruling.

Currently, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’ 38 congressional seats. Under the rejected map, Trump would have carried 30 districts by 10 percentage points or more in the 2024 election, likely securing similar Republican representation.

The blocked map decreased the number of congressional districts where minorities comprise a majority of voting-age citizens from 16 to 14 and eliminated five of the state’s nine coalition districts. Five of the six Democratic lawmakers drawn into districts with other incumbents are Black or Hispanic.

“The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional,” said Derrick Johnson, national president of the NAACP, one of the parties suing Texas.

Republicans countered that their map actually benefits minority voters by creating a new eighth Hispanic-majority district and two new Black-majority districts. Critics call these new districts shams, arguing that slim majorities coupled with historically higher white voter turnout will effectively control election results.

Abbott rejected discrimination claims as “absurd,” insisting the Legislature “redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences – and for no other reason.”