Can Texas use its new congressional map for 2026? A trio of judges will decide.

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This week, a trio of federal judges will consider whether Texas can use its new congressional map in the 2026 election, marking the first legal test for the districts produced by a summer of intense partisan clashing.

State lawmakers redrew the electoral lines with the goal of adding five more Republican seats from Texas to the GOP’s narrow House majority. But a cadre of individuals and advocacy groups now argue this unusual mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional on several fronts, including that lawmakers illegally relied on race and drew a map that violates Black and Hispanic voters’ rights to equal protection.

They are asking the court to stop the state from using the map for the fast-approaching midterms, which would likely mean reverting to the most recent version passed in 2021 and used in each of the last two elections. The state, meanwhile, argues the new lines should stand because they were drawn with the nakedly political — yet court-sanctioned — motive of winning more GOP seats, without regard for race.

The hearing, which begins Wednesday in El Paso, will stretch for nine days. The three-judge panel, which is also overseeing an ongoing lawsuit against the four-year-old maps, will then issue a ruling on whether the new districts can be used in the midterm and, if not, which map should be used instead.

As both sides, and all three judges, are acutely aware, time is short. The filing deadline for candidates is Dec. 8, with other election administration deadlines approaching even faster.

“All of this, every part of this, is about the clock right now,” said Justin Levitt, a voting rights expert at Loyola Law School. “The plaintiffs want an answer as soon as possible. Texas wants to stall like crazy. All of this is about what's going to get a court to deliver an answer before the next election.”

The case turns on a familiar argument, with plaintiffs arguing in one of their motions for a preliminary injunction that, if the districts are allowed to stand, “Latino and Black Texans will be irreparably harmed, deprived of their right to exercise their voting rights on equal terms with Anglo Texans.”

As with the 2021 map, the state is rebutting those claims by contending the maps were drawn “race-blind.” Their court filings have also embraced the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling that the courts cannot intervene to stop partisan gerrymandering, as long as the map in question abides by other constitutional protections.

It was Trump’s demand for more GOP seats and the ensuing “political arms-race that motivated Texas legislators to redistrict mid-decade, not race,” the state wrote last week. Quoting Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the state said, “as is often the case, ‘when Donald Trump says jump, the Republicans simply ask how high.’”

How we got here

In 2021, after the decennial census, Texas redrew its voting maps to reflect the state’s population growth and change over the last decade. Soon after, nearly a dozen groups representing individual Texans of color and interest groups sued over the maps, claiming they violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution. The courts consolidated those complaints into one case, League of United Latin American Citizens v. Abbott.

Unlike most federal lawsuits, which are heard by a single district judge and then appealed to a circuit court, voting rights lawsuits are initially heard by two district judges and one circuit judge, and their ruling can only be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

LULAC v. Abbott was assigned to U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, a Barack Obama appointee in El Paso; U.S. District Judge Jeff Brown, a Trump appointee in Galveston; and Judge Jerry Smith, who was appointed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Ronald Reagan. All proceedings have taken place in El Paso.

The case was supposed to go to trial in 2022, but was postponed for more than two years amid disputes over which private communications state leaders would be required to turn over. The judges finally heard arguments this May, almost four years after the maps passed.

At the monthlong trial, state lawmakers repeatedly dismissed the plaintiffs’ allegations that the maps were drawn with discriminatory intent, insisting the process was conducted “race-blind.”

But this summer, just as the trial was ending and before the judges could rule, Texas leaders began facing significant pressure from the White House to redraw their congressional map once again. Democrats decried this as a blatantly partisan power grab intended to insulate Republicans from voters’ disapproval of Trump’s policies.

At first, Republicans aggressively rejected that narrative. But as the new districts made their way through the legislative pipeline, some lawmakers changed their posture, saying it was purely political gamesmanship that led them to redraw the lines. The state’s lawyers have adopted the same argument in court.

“With 2026 elections coming, President Trump’s legislative agenda relied on a slim and endangered majority,” the state’s brief says. “Any loss of Republican Representatives in the House could prevent any movement forward on his policies — and almost certainly result in a slew of resource-draining impeachment attempts.”

After Trump began demanding more Republican seats from Texas, California Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened a retaliatory redraw to cancel out those gains. Lawyers for the state claim this left lawmakers with “little political choice” but to embark on redistricting.

The state’s insistence that they redrew the maps with only partisan goals in mind reflects the changing legal landscape around gerrymandering. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that while “excessive partisanship in districting … is incompatible with democratic principles,” it is not an issue for the courts to resolve.

Levitt equated this to a police department announcing they weren’t going to stop shoplifters at the mall anymore: Even though the courts agree that drawing brazenly partisan maps is wrong, there is no one with the authority to stop states from implementing them.

Between this ruling, and the arm-twisting from Trump, the state might have had a very clean argument to bring before the judges — if it wasn’t for the letter.

The DOJ letter

In July, as Trump’s team was ramping up pressure on Texas to redistrict, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton a letter.

Dhillon threatened to bring legal action if Texas did not redraw four of its “coalition” districts, where Black and Hispanic voters combine to form a majority. Dhillon cited a 2024 5th Circuit ruling that said racial groups could not join together to claim their voting rights had been violated if neither makes up a majority of the district on their own.

Abbott, a defendant in the LULAC lawsuit, added redistricting to his special session agenda “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice,” adding in a television interview that redistricting was necessary to “make sure that we have maps that don’t impose coalition districts.”

Around the same time, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows said in a press release they were working closely together on “legislation to address concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice over Texas congressional districts.”

Legal experts told The Texas Tribune that Dhillon’s letter mischaracterized the 5th Circuit ruling. While the ruling did say different racial and ethnic groups couldn’t join together to sue, it did not require states to dismantle existing districts where multiple racial groups made up a majority.

In fact, legal experts said, going back into the maps and redrawing racially diverse districts on that basis alone could be a violation of voters’ constitutional rights — which is exactly what the plaintiffs are arguing in their new legal filings.

“In intentionally destroying majority-minority districts and replacing them with majority-Anglo districts, the legislature also engaged in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, placing voters within and without particular districts on the predominant basis of their race without adequate reason, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” one group of plaintiffs wrote.

Lawmakers began distancing themselves from the letter midway through the process, but in these filings, the state goes even further. The letter was a “poor attempt at ‘cover’” for redistricting, the lawyers say, but a “legislative act based on a mistake — or that cite[s] a Washington official’s mistake as political cover for lawful political redistricting — remains a valid legislative act.”

Years of legal buildup erased

It will be up to the three judges to sort through similar claims from the different plaintiff groups to determine whether the map should be allowed to remain in effect.

A preliminary injunction is typically an extraordinary measure, granted by a court only when they believe the plaintiffs are likely to succeed at trial and there is potential harm to wait that long to intervene.

These same players, from the judges to the plaintiffs to many of the witnesses, have been locked in litigation with each other for four years. Because the judges have yet to rule on the 2021 maps, it’s hard to predict how they might handle this request, Levitt said.

But returning to El Paso so soon after the monthlong trial concluded, it’s safe to anticipate some tension from everyone involved, he said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the three-judge panel hearing this case is crazy frustrated,” he said. “Four years of [this case], and then Texas just comes in with an Etch-A-Sketch redraw that basically erased their work.”

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