Federal judges block Texas from using its new US House map in the 2026
midterms
[November 19, 2025]
By JOHN HANNA
A federal court on Tuesday blocked Texas from using a redrawn U.S. House
map that touched off a nationwide redistricting battle and is a major
piece of President Donald Trump’s efforts to preserve a slim Republican
majority ahead of the 2026 elections.
The ruling is a blow to Trump's rush to create a more favorable
political landscape for Republicans in next year's midterms, at least
for now. Texas filed an appeal Tuesday evening with the U.S. Supreme
Court after Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans publicly defended the
map, which was engineered to give Republicans five additional House
seats.
In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of federal judges in El Paso sided with
opponents who argued that Texas' unusual summer redrawing of
congressional districts would harm Black and Hispanic residents. The
decision was authored by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump
nominee from the president's first term.
“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 states.
The decision comes amid an widening national battle over redistricting.
Missouri and North Carolina followed Texas with new maps adding an
additional Republican seat each.
To counter them, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give
Democrats an additional five seats there. The Trump administration filed
a federal lawsuit challenging that map, with Attorney General Pam Bondi
calling it “a brazen power grab.”
In a post on X, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrated the
Texas ruling: “Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned
— and democracy won.”
Republicans insist they had only partisan motives
Texas Republicans insisted they drew the new map only for partisan
advantage. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan
gerrymandering is a political question and not one for the federal
courts to decide.
“Texas’s map was drawn the right way for the right reasons,” Bondi
posted on X.
Civil rights groups representing Black and Hispanic voters argued the
map reduced the influence of minority voters, making it a racial
gerrymander that violates the federal Voting Rights Act and the U.S.
Constitution. They sought an order blocking Texas from using the map
while their case proceeded, which the judges granted.
If the ruling stands, Texas will be forced to use 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, a partner in the Elias Law Group, a
Democratic firm representing minority voters opposing the new Texas map.
Judges say the Trump administration signaled race-based motives
The judges signaled that they think the map's critics have a substantial
chance of winning their case at trial. An appointee of Democratic
President Barack Obama joined Brown in the majority, while an appointee
of Republican President Ronald Reagan dissented.
The majority said that absent their injunction blocking the map's use
for now, minorities would be forced to have congressional representation
based on “likely unconstitutional racial classifications for at least
two years.”
The two appeals judges concluded that a major reason that Abbott and
Republican lawmakers moved was a letter from the head of the U.S.
Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division in July, directing Texas
to redraw four districts that it said violated the Voting Rights Act.
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The State Capitol is seen in Austin, Texas, on June 1, 2021. (AP
Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant U.S. attorney general overseeing the
division, cited a ruling last year by the conservative federal
appeals court for Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the landmark
Voting Rights Act of 1965 does not allow separate minority groups to
“aggregate their populations” to argue that a map illegally dilutes
minority voters’ ability to elect the candidate of their choice. The
court said each group’s situation must be analyzed separately.
Dhillon's letter to Texas officials dealt with four so-called
“coalition” districts, one in the Dallas area and three in the
Houston area, where no group has a majority but minority voters
together outnumber non-Hispanic white voters. Dhillon argued that
those districts must be dismantled as “vestiges of an
unconstitutional racially based gerrymandering past.”
The judges said Dhillon's conclusion was “legally incorrect,” but,
added, "The Legislature adopted those racial objectives.”
“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 ruling said.
GOP map eliminated minority coalition districts
Republicans hold 25 of Texas’ 38 congressional seats, with Democrats
holding two of their 13 seats in districts Trump carried in 2024.
Had the new map been in place last year, Trump would have carried 30
congressional districts by 10 percentage points or more, making it
likely that the GOP would have won that many seats as well.
The new map decreased from 16 to 14 the number of congressional
districts where minorities comprise a majority of voting-age
citizens.
Texas 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, which was among the parties suing Texas over redistricting.
Republicans argued that the map is better for minority voters. While
five “coalition” districts are eliminated, there’s a new, eighth
Hispanic-majority district, and two new Black-majority districts.
Critics consider each of those new districts a sham, arguing that
the majority is so slim that white voters, who tend to turn out in
larger numbers, will control election results.
But in a statement Tuesday, Abbott said it's “absurd” to claim that
the map is discriminatory.
"The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect
Texans’ conservative voting preferences – and for no other reason,”
he said.
___
Associated Press journalists Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas; Meg
Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Adriana Gomez in Pembroke Park,
Florida, and Mark Sherman in Washington, contributed to this story.
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