A panel of federal judges has blocked Texas’ newly redrawn congressional map — which made five districts in the state more favorable to Republicans — saying the plan appeared to be an illegal race-based gerrymander.
In a 2-1 ruling, the court ordered Texas to rely instead on the boundaries legislators drew in 2021. The new map, the majority concluded, appears likely to be unconstitutional and was drawn at the urging of the Trump administration.
“The map ultimately passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor — the 2025 Map — achieved all but one of the racial objectives that DOJ demanded,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Galveston-based Trump appointee, wrote for the panel majority.
The decision is a massive blow in the White House’s push to redistrict across the country. Texas’ five-seat map represented the biggest gains for the GOP through redrawing. Texas appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court later Tuesday.
Brown was joined by U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, an El Paso-based Obama appointee. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith, a Houston-based Reagan appointee, dissented but did not immediately release an opinion explaining his reasoning.
The majority repeatedly derided the Justice Department’s effort to goad Texas into targeting the four districts with non-white majorities — known as “coalition districts.” That effort, Brown said, began on July 7, with a letter from DOJ’s Civil Rights Division that was “challenging to unpack … because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.”
According to the court, the letter selected the four districts “based entirely on their racial makeup” and was the key factor that spurred Texas Republicans to take up the extraordinary redistricting effort. The bulk of Brown’s 160-page opinion delves into the mindset of the state lawmakers and advisers who drew the new maps, suggesting that their motives clearly aligned with DOJ’s race-based push and that their characterization of the new maps as based only on race-blind partisanship were not believable.
The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, in a statement, pushed back against the ruling and suggestion that the newly drawn maps are unfair or biased.
“Any claim that these maps are discriminatory is absurd and unsupported by the testimony offered during ten days of hearings,” he stated. “This ruling is clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.”
The court also downplayed the notion that scrapping Texas’ new maps would lead to chaos in the midterm elections. Though the judges acknowledged that it would scramble the calculus of some candidates who had announced their bids for office based on the new maps, they said filing deadlines had not yet elapsed.
“Simply put, the 2026 congressional election is not underway,” Brown wrote. “In any event, any disruption that would happen here is attributable to the Legislature, not the Court. The Legislature—not the Court—set the timetable for this injunction. The Legislature—not the Court—redrew Texas’s congressional map weeks before precinct-chair and candidate-filing periods opened. The State chose to ‘toy with its election laws close to’ the 2026 congressional election, though that is certainly its prerogative.”
The state’s candidate filing deadline is rapidly approaching: Dec. 8. Courts and state election officials are generally hesitant to move deadlines, but they can if necessary.
Two other states — Missouri and North Carolina — have passed maps that net Republicans one red-leaning seat each. And in Ohio, which was legally required to redraw its maps this year, Republicans and Democrats cut a deal that made two Democratic-held seats redder, but Democrats insist both will remain competitive in 2026.
Democrats have also filed legal challenges in North Carolina and Missouri, and they have long prioritized the courts as a way to stop Republican gerrymandering efforts.
Without the Texas map in place, Democrats’ five-seat pickup in California through Proposition 50 fully thwarts the GOP’s gains so far, though other red states are still being pressured by the White House to take up the issue ahead of next year’s midterms.
The decision is likely to put even more pressure on Indiana Republicans, who are being asked to draw a new map that would give the GOP two more red-leaning districts. So far, Indiana GOP Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray has resisted calls to alter maps in the state, making a path forward very difficult for the redistricting effort.
Lawmakers in the Hoosier State are already facing threats of primaries from the White House after Bray said his caucus did not have the votes to pass a new map, and President Donald Trump said Republican Gov. Mike Braun “must produce on this” in a social media post Tuesday.
The ruling in Texas is the latest in a saga that took the summer by storm, when Texas Democrats decamped from the state in an effort to stop the new map from being passed.
On Tuesday, the Democrats who led that effort hailed the court’s decision.
“Greg Abbott and his Republican cronies tried to silence Texans’ voices to placate Donald Trump, but now have delivered him absolutely nothing,” Texas Minority Leader Gene Wu said in a statement.
