Washington — A federal court on Tuesday blocked Texas from using its newly redrawn congressional map in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, a setback for Republicans as they work to maintain their narrow majority in the House.
In a decision authored by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, the court ordered the state to instead use House district lines adopted by the Texas legislature in 2021 for next year’s congressional elections. The dispute was heard by a three-judge panel, which divided 2-1 in finding that voting rights and advocacy groups that challenged the redistricting plan were likely to prove that the 2025 map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The court found that plaintiffs will likely succeed in showing that race predominated over partisanship in the map-making process, and said the state legislature appears to have set and followed a racial target.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map,” Brown, appointed to the federal bench by President Trump in 2019, wrote. “But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said the decision will be appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
“Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences – and for no other reason. Any claim that these maps are discriminatory is absurd and unsupported by the testimony offered during ten days of hearings,” he said in a statement. “This ruling is clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.”
Still, the ruling marks an early blow for Republicans and Mr. Trump, who had urged Texas state lawmakers to engage in a mid-decade redrawing of their House map in order to bolster the GOP’s chances of holding onto its majority in the lower chamber.
“A federal court just stopped one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen,” Texas House of Representatives Minority Leader Gene Wu said in a statement. “Greg Abbott and his Republican cronies tried to silence Texans’ voices to placate Donald Trump, but now have delivered him absolutely nothing.”
The map approved by the Texas legislature, which was signed by Abbott in August, redraws the state’s congressional districts to create five GOP-friendly seats. The effort in Texas kicked off a redistricting battle that has expanded to other states. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, pushed to recraft his state’s voting boundaries, and voters there approved a ballot measure earlier this month to draw new congressional districts. The map unveiled by California Democrats shifts five of the state’s House seats to be more favorable to Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.Â
In both Missouri and North Carolina, state GOP lawmakers have approved new maps that target a single Democratic-held district in each state. But the battles over House district lines have also sparked court fights that seek to block the updated maps from taking effect.
Under the original lines adopted by Texas’ GOP-led legislature in the wake of the 2020 Census, Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional seats, while Democrats control 12. The death of Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, has left one seat open. Those voting lines enacted in 2021 were used in the 2022 and 2024 House elections.
But with the GOP holding a razor-thin majority in the House, and Republicans at risk of losing their hold on the lower chamber, Mr. Trump’s political team began pushing Texas GOP leaders earlier this year to explore redrawing the state’s congressional map. That effort picked up steam after the Justice Department sent Abbott a letter in July alleging that some of the districts in the 2021 map were racial gerrymanders that violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
The letter from Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, threatened legal action if Texas didn’t dismantle and re-configure four Democratic-held congressional districts, which she said were unconstitutional.
Abbott then added redistricting to the agenda for a special session of the state legislature and directed state lawmakers to draw a new congressional map to address the Justice Department’s concerns. The new redistricting plan, signed by Abbott in August, creates five new districts that are favorable to Republicans.
Soon after the map received the green-light from state Republicans, a coalition of advocacy groups moved to block the state from using it in the upcoming House elections. The plaintiffs argued that Texas lawmakers engaged in an unconstitutional racial gerrymander when redrawing the lines, while the state said it relied exclusively on politics, not race, during the latest redistricting process.
The federal court in El Paso held a nine-day trial last month to address the claims and found that the nonprofit organizations were likely to prevail on their racial-gerrymandering claims.
Brown wrote in his decision that the Justice Department, in its July letter, directed Texas to engage in racial gerrymandering when it ordered the state to rectify districts that it deemed problematic. The court said the Justice Department’s letter effectively imposed a 50% racial target for Texas to meet when drawing congressional district lines.
Brown also pointed to Abbott’s actions in response to the letter, including his decision to add redistricting to the legislative agenda for the special session and his public statements.
“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,” Brown wrote in his 160-page decision evaluating the redrawn map. “The legislature adopted those racial objectives.”
The court said that supporters of the new redistricting plan also made numerous statements that suggested they retooled the district lines to create more majority-Hispanic and majority-Black districts.
The judges also rejected any concerns that it is blocking the new map too close to the election. Courts typically avoid ordering late changes election rules to protect against voter confusion and disruption. But Brown wrote that if the new House districts can remain in place, voters will be forced to vote under a map that likely sorts them on the basis of race, depriving them of their right to participate in a “free and fair election.”Â
Additionally, because the candidate-filing deadline is Dec. 8, the court said that the 2026 congressional election is not yet underway.
“To allow legislatures to redistrict as close to elections as possible while limiting the courts’ ability to review the constitutionality of that action — even in extraordinary cases like this one— would unduly tip the balance of the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches and impair the effectiveness of the Constitution’s protections of voting rights,” Brown wrote for the court.
