Texas leaders have repeatedly claimed the state’s voting maps are race blind. Until the Trump DOJ disagreed.
By Eleanor Klibanoff and Gabby Birenbaum
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At first, the question of whether Texas would take the extraordinary step of redrawing its congressional maps in the middle of the decade was just a political calculation — would Gov. Greg Abbott go along with President Donald Trump’s plan to try to squeeze a few more GOP seats out of the midterms, despite concerns from congressional Republicans?
But then, the Department of Justice offered Texas a legal justification to pursue this long-shot strategy, warning the state in a letter Monday that four majority-minority congressional districts in the Houston and Fort Worth areas are unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. Soon after, Abbott set a special session agenda calling for mid-cycle redistricting “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
This comes just weeks after the conclusion of a trial over Texas’ current maps, in which representatives for the state argued repeatedly that a race-blind process was used to draw the boundaries of the existing districts. Critics say the apparent reversal — with Abbott now acknowledging concerns that some districts were drawn “along strict racial lines” — suggests this is a ploy to provide Texas with political and legal cover to try and add more Republican seats.
“They contended that what they drew was completely satisfactory, so now that they are acquiescing in some concocted allegation of illegality from the Trump administration is astounding,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is part of the legal challenge.
Any new maps would inevitably face a legal challenge. Federal courts have found at least one of Texas’ maps to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act every decade since it went into effect in 1965. But these court battles can take years to resolve, and the candidate filing deadline for the 2026 midterms is just months away.
Even one cycle under a new map carries high upside for Trump, whose legislative agenda rests on Republicans maintaining their slim 220-212 majority in the U.S. House. A Democratic majority could mean obstruction, investigations and talk of impeachment.
With Texas lawmakers drawing a new map so close to the midterms, “even if it violates the law, it might be left in place for one election,” Saenz said.
Targeting “coalition districts”
Texas’ current maps were drawn by the Republican-dominated Legislature in 2021 with an eye toward protecting incumbents and ensuring that two congressional seats Texas gained due to population growth would be held by the GOP. The maps worked as intended, with Republicans winning 25 of 38 congressional seats in 2022 and 2024.
The map was immediately challenged in court by a group of plaintiffs alleging that it discriminated against Black and Latino voters. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits election and voting practices that disadvantage minority groups, including drawing boundaries that dilute their ability to elect their preferred candidate by packing them into a single district or dispersing them throughout multiple.
The nearly 4-year-old legal challenge went to trial in May and has yet to be decided.
At trial in El Paso, representatives for the state and its map-drawers repeatedly testified that they were blind to race when crafting the maps and said they did not draw “coalition districts,” where different minority groups are combined to constitute a majority, which the state maintains are unconstitutional.
But in its July 7 letter, the DOJ argued that four of Texas’ districts should be redrawn, three because they are coalition districts and one because it is a majority Hispanic district created as a result of neighboring coalition districts.
All four seats are held by Black or Latino Democrats, or were until recently — Texas’ 18th Congressional District is currently vacant but was previously represented by Sylvester Turner, who died in March.
That seat and the adjacent 9th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Al Green of Houston, are plurality Hispanic districts with sizable Black populations. The letter says those districts gave rise to Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s neighboring 29th District, where a majority of residents are Hispanic. The 33rd District, held by Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, is also an unconstitutional coalition district, the letter says.
The DOJ cites a 2024 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the Voting Rights Act’s protections do not apply to racial or ethnic groups that have combined their ranks to form a majority in a district. The case, which involved a challenge to Galveston County’s commissioners court map, reversed years of precedent, including by the 5th Circuit itself, putting the appellate court for Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana at odds with most other circuits.
“Although the state’s interest when configuring these districts was to comply with Fifth Circuit precedent prior to the 2024 … decision, that interest no longer exists,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote, adding these districts are “nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutionally racially based gerrymandering past, which must now be abandoned, and must now be corrected by Texas.”
In his proclamation announcing the July 21 special session, Abbott referred to "constitutional concerns" raised by the DOJ, apparently alluding to Dhillon's letter. And on Friday, House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Republican Senate leader, released a joint statement that said both chambers were "aligned in their focus to ensure redistricting plans remain in compliance with the U.S. Constitution."
Chad Dunn, one of the lawyers challenging the state’s current maps, said Texas’ swift acquiescence to the DOJ letter contradicts legislators’ testimony.
“During the trial we had in El Paso, ‘blind to race’ was used by a member of the Legislature more times than I can count,” said Dunn, who was previously general counsel for the Texas Democratic Party. “Now the Department of Justice is saying that the Republican legislators who authored this plan weren't telling the truth, and actually were drawing it on the basis of race. It's going to be interesting to get to the bottom of that.”
Several of the plaintiffs asked Thursday to reopen the case for new testimony, saying the DOJ letter and the state’s testimony are “flatly contradictory.”
An emerging trend
Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert who served in the DOJ under former President Barack Obama, said the agency misinterpreted Petteway in its letter. That 2024 decision, Levitt said, did not rule on what constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander — it just asserted that the Voting Rights Act does not let individual racial or ethnic groups join together to claim that political boundaries dilute their votes.
The argument laid out in the letter, he added, is not befitting of DOJ’s typical quality, in both Democratic and Republican administrations — especially on a topic so familiar to the agency.
“It's sloppily dashed-off work,” Levitt said. “It looks like the sort of thing I'd expect from an AI engine that didn't know how to do law.”
The DOJ declined to comment. Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Texas does not need legal justification to craft new maps in the middle of the decade. The Legislature did so in 2003 at the behest of then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. But if the DOJ letter is meant to establish a legal basis for the redistricting process’ political intent, Levitt said it’s a poorly reasoned attempt.
“Nothing in this letter is going to convince Texas to redraw lines that it wasn't planning on redrawing anyway,” Levitt said.
This is the second time in just over a month that Texas has swiftly surrendered to a request from Trump’s DOJ. In early June, the agency sued Texas over its policy granting in-state tuition to undocumented students, just days after the Legislature adjourned without undoing that longstanding law. Texas immediately agreed to a consent judgment striking down the statute, raising questions about whether the lawsuit was legitimate or “collusive.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed credit for working with the Trump administration to end what he called a “discriminatory and un-American provision.”
Saenz’s group has asked a judge to allow it to intervene in that case, as well, and he said the echoes are eerie — and frustrating.
“It's a disturbing pattern, frankly, of collusion between the Department of Justice federally and the state of Texas, and that collusion should alarm everyone who believes in democratic processes at the state level,” Saenz said.
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