Judge rejects ‘racially gerrymandered’ maps in Texas that gave Republicans extra districts

New maps that added five Republican districts in Texas hit a legal roadblock on Tuesday, with a federal judge saying the state cannot use the 2025 maps because they are probably “racially gerrymandered”.

The decision is likely to be appealed, given the push for more Republican-friendly congressional maps nationwide and Donald Trump’s full-court press on his party to make them. Some states have followed suit, and some Democratic states have retaliated, pushing to add more blue seats to counteract Republicans.

A panel of three federal judges in Texas said in a decision that the state must use previously approved 2021 maps for next year’s midterms rather than the ones that kickstarted a wave of mid-decade redistricting. The plaintiffs, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, are “likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map”, so the court approved a preliminary injunction to stop the map’s use for next year’s elections.

Texas Republicans, under pressure from the Trump administration, redrew the state’s congressional maps earlier this year to make them more favorable to Republicans. But, Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote, the district changes were not purely partisan.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” Brown wrote. “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.”

Typically, redistricting happens after a new decade’s census results. Maps are often fought over, inviting lawsuits that can take years to resolve. In some states, the process is done by lawmakers, while in others, by independent bodies. Courts now cannot stop maps drawn for partisan reasons, but they can intervene if maps are racially gerrymandered.

Brown pointed to Texas lawmakers’ responses to the justice department. Lawmakers initially resisted the idea of redrawing maps for purely partisan reasons, but moved forward after the Trump administration “reframed” the idea of redistricting around racial makeup.

A July letter from the head of the department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, made the “legally incorrect assertion” that four of Texas’s congressional districts were unconstitutional. She threatened legal action if the state did not redraw these “coalition districts”, where no single racial group made up a majority of voters – “a threat based entirely on their racial makeup”, Brown wrote.

“Notably, the [justice department] letter targeted only majority-non-white districts,” the decision says. “Any mention of majority-white Democrat districts – which [the justice department] presumably would have also targeted if its aims were partisan rather than racial – was conspicuously absent.”

The legislature and governor’s office then followed suit on these demands from the justice department, Brown said, noting statements made by local officials on their reasoning.

“The governor explicitly directed the legislature to redistrict based on race,” Brown wrote. “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.”