President Trump’s Texas redistricting plan sparks protests across the US
More than 300 people protested in Texas on Saturday against President Trump’s redistricting plan.
WASHINGTON – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily put on hold a lower court ruling that blocked Texas’ new voting map, allowing the state to proceed for now with its plan to add Republicans to the House of Representatives.
In a filing early Friday, Texas officials asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate maps designed to help President Donald Trump’s party maintain control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
The lower court’s ruling blocked the drawing of a map approved by the Texas Legislature in August with Mr. Trump’s support that would redraw the boundaries of several electoral districts.
Alito, a member of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, issued the order as a judge appointed to handle emergencies in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Alito’s lower court freezing order gives the justices more time to consider Texas’ emergency request.
allegation of racism
Lower courts had concluded that the map was likely racially discriminatory, violating U.S. Constitutional protections.
Texas defended the Legislature’s action, saying in a filing that the lower court made multiple legal errors and causing confusion during the candidate filing period for next year’s congressional elections. “This summer, the Texas Legislature did what Congress is supposed to do: play politics,” lawyers for state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office told the judge.
The Supreme Court has ordered challengers to the state’s new electoral maps to comply with Texas’ emergency request by Monday.
Republicans currently hold slim majorities in both houses of Congress. Giving control of either the House or the Senate to Democrats in the November 2026 elections would jeopardize President Trump’s legislative agenda and open the door to Democratic-led congressional investigations targeting the president.
The federal court ruling by three Texas judges was a blow to President Trump’s efforts to require Republican-led state legislatures across the country to redraw electoral maps to change the demographics of congressional districts in order to increase the number of House candidates elected, a process known as redistricting.
Five seats could shift by law in 2026
The lawsuit involves electoral maps passed by the Republican-led Texas Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott that are likely to shift up to five seats currently held by Democrats to Republicans in next year’s elections.
The move to redraw Texas’ maps sparked a national battle over redistricting for partisan advantage in both Republican- and Democratic-led states. For example, Democratic-controlled California redraws its congressional district lines to shift up to five seats currently held by Republicans to Democrats.
Partisanship and racial gerrymandering
There has been a decades-long legal battle in the Supreme Court over a practice known as gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing district lines to alienate certain voters and increase the influence of others.
In 2019, the court issued its most significant ruling on the issue to date, declaring that gerrymandering for partisan reasons, aimed at increasing one’s own party’s electoral chances and weakening political opponents, cannot be challenged in federal court. But gerrymandering, which is primarily based on race, remains illegal under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
Many Texas Republicans say the new map was designed in response to President Trump’s request to redraw electoral maps to favor partisanship in House races. But an El Paso-based court ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the map likely constituted illegal racial gerrymandering, siding with civil rights groups that had sued to block the map.
Each of the 50 states is represented in Congress by two U.S. senators, and population determines representation in the 435-seat House of Representatives. California, the most populous state, has the most members in the House of Representatives, with 52 members, followed by Texas, which ranks second with 38 members. Republicans currently hold 25 of the 38 House seats in Texas.
“Racial consideration”
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who authored the Texas decision, wrote that “the ultimate impetus” for Texas to redraw its maps was a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice urging state officials to “introduce racial considerations into what Texas claims is a racially insensitive process.”
Brown, a Trump judicial appointee, wrote that the Justice Department’s analysis was based on the “legally false argument” that the racial composition of four congressional districts in Texas’ previous electoral maps was unconstitutional and needed to be redrawn.
“If the Trump administration had sent a letter to Texas asking it to redraw its congressional maps to improve the performance of Republican candidates, plaintiff organizations would face a far greater burden of showing that race, not partisanship, was the driving force behind the 2025 map,” Brown wrote.
“However, there is nothing in the DOJ letter that speaks from a partisan political perspective,” the judge wrote. “Instead, the letter orders Texas to redraw four electoral districts for one reason alone: the racial demographics of Texas voters.”
“While Texas’ population is only 40% white, white voters control more than 73% of the state’s seats in the state legislature,” the NAACP civil rights organization said in a statement after the ruling.
The court directed that the state’s previous electoral map, approved by the Republican-led Legislature in 2021, be used for the 2026 election.
The ruling marked the latest setback in President Trump’s efforts to tilt the political map. On November 14, the Indiana Republican Party abandoned a legislative session that had been convened to create a new congressional map for the state.
Democratic-controlled California responded to Texas’ redistricting by launching its own initiative targeting five Republican-controlled districts in the state. California voters overwhelmingly approved new maps favoring Democrats in November. The Trump administration sued California to prevent the new congressional map from taking effect.
Virginia is moving forward with plans to redraw its political maps, and if a Texas court ruling stands, Democrats could have an advantage in the redistricting battle.
Redistricting is typically done to reflect population changes as measured by the decennial census, but this year’s redistricting is motivated by partisan advantage.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has already heard arguments in another major case involving race and redistricting during its current term. Conservative judges in a case over Louisiana’s congressional district maps have signaled they intend to water down another key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 federal law Congress enacted to prevent racial discrimination in voting.
(Reuters Reporting by John Kruzel; Additional reporting by Andrew Chan; Editing by Will Dunham, Amy Stevens and Edmund Claman)
