A federal three-judge panel has found that plaintiffs are likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered its 2025 congressional map in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The 2-1 decision, issued Monday in the Western District of Texas, is a preliminary injunction that blocks implementation of the new districts and requires Texas to use its 2021 map for the upcoming midterm elections.
Redistricting began when President Donald Trump pressured Texas lawmakers to redraw congressional boundaries to create five additional Republican seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. However, when initial partisan appeals met resistance from Texas legislators concerned about potential backlash, the Trump administration reframed its request around race.
On July 7, 2025, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton claiming four Texas congressional districts were “unconstitutional” because they were “coalition districts”—majority-non-White districts where no single racial group constituted more than 50% of the voting population.
The DOJ letter threatened legal action and demanded Texas immediately dismantle these districts based entirely on their racial makeup, citing the Fifth Circuit’s 2024 decision in Petteway v. Galveston County, which held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not require states to create coalition districts.
Two days after receiving the DOJ letter, Governor Abbott added redistricting to a special legislative session agenda, explicitly citing “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice”. In multiple press interviews, Abbott stated his predominant motivation was to eliminate coalition districts and create more majority-Hispanic districts, not partisan gain.
The Texas Legislature passed the new map on August 23, 2025, and Abbott signed it into law on August 29. The map drastically reconfigured districts in Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with some districts retaining less than 3% of their original populations.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee who authored the majority opinion joined by Senior U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama, found substantial evidence of racial gerrymandering. U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry E. Smith filed a dissenting opinion.
The court concluded that the DOJ letter’s legal reasoning was “clearly wrong,” noting that Petteway does not prohibit states from voluntarily creating coalition districts—it merely holds that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require them. The court characterized the DOJ letter as containing “so many factual, legal, and typographical errors” that even Texas Attorney General staff described it as “legally unsound,” “baseless,” and “a mess”.
Judge Brown wrote that by incorporating the DOJ’s race-based redistricting request, Governor Abbott was “asking the Legislature to give DOJ the racial rebalancing it wanted—and for the reasons that DOJ cited”. The court found that race, not partisanship, was the predominant factor in drawing district lines, supported by statements from legislative sponsors and the governor’s repeated public declarations about eliminating coalition districts.
The ruling noted that the Legislature “dismantled and left unrecognizable not only all of the districts DOJ identified in the letter, but also several other ‘coalition districts’ around the State.”
Republicans were hoping to expand their control of Texas’s 38 congressional districts from 25 to 30 seats, potentially helping protect the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House. The ruling comes as candidate filing for the March primary is underway, with a December 8 deadline.
The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court, making it part of a broader legal battle over Texas redistricting that began in 2021. The same three-judge panel is currently considering challenges to Texas’s state legislative maps from a trial held earlier this year and has indicated it may await Supreme Court rulings on major voting rights cases before issuing final decisions.
