The Texas redistricting lawsuit is a consolidated federal case, led by LULAC v. Abbott, challenging the congressional and legislative maps Texas drew after the 2020 census and the mid-decade congressional remap the state enacted in August 2025. A three-judge federal panel ruled on November 18, 2025, that the 2025 congressional map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, but on December 4, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed that ruling and allowed Texas to use the map for the 2026 elections while the appeal plays out.{{mfn}}Texas Tribune. Texas Congressional Redistricting Explained[/mfn]
What the Lawsuit Challenges
The litigation covers two separate rounds of map-drawing. The first is the set of congressional, state House, and state Senate maps Governor Greg Abbott signed on October 25, 2021. The second is HB 4, the mid-decade congressional map (designated PlanC2333) that Abbott signed on August 29, 2025, which was projected to add five Republican-leaning seats.[/mfn]
At least eight lawsuits were filed against the 2021 maps within weeks of enactment, and the Western District of Texas consolidated them in El Paso under docket No. 3:21-cv-00259. The lead case was brought by the League of United Latin American Citizens, represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Other plaintiffs include the Texas NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a coalition of Latino and Black Texans in Brooks v. Abbott, and the Fair Maps Texas Action Committee (which includes the League of Women Voters of Texas, the ACLU of Texas, Common Cause Texas, and several Asian American organizations).[/mfn] The U.S. Department of Justice sued on December 6, 2021, but withdrew from the case after the Trump administration took office in 2025.[/mfn]
After the 2025 remap, the NAACP and the Lawyers’ Committee filed a new suit on August 26, 2025, specifically challenging HB 4 as a racial gerrymander and naming Abbott and Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson as defendants.[/mfn]
What Plaintiffs Say Texas Did
The core allegation across the lawsuits is that Texas used racial gerrymandering — cracking communities of color across multiple districts and packing them into a few others — to prevent minority voters from electing their preferred candidates, in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.[/mfn]
The demographic backdrop drives the claim. Texas added nearly four million residents between 2010 and 2020, and about 95 percent of that growth came from communities of color, roughly half from Latino residents alone.[/mfn] Even so, the 2021 congressional map reduced Hispanic-majority districts from eight to seven, eliminated the state’s only Black-majority congressional district, and increased white-majority districts from 22 to 23. White residents now make up under 39 percent of the Texas population.[/mfn]
MALDEF has argued Texas should have drawn at least three additional Latino-majority congressional districts in Houston, South/Central Texas, and Dallas. The Brooks plaintiffs focus on Texas Senate District 10, which they say was dismantled as a crossover district where Latino and Black voters together had been able to elect their candidates of choice. The NAACP challenges all three 2021 map sets.[/mfn]
How the 2025 Mid-Decade Remap Happened
On July 7, 2025, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under the Trump administration, sent Texas officials a letter asserting that four congressional districts in the Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth areas — CD 9, CD 18, CD 29, and CD 33 — were constitutionally suspect because they were “coalition districts” with no single racial majority. The letter urged Texas to replace them with majority-minority districts.[/mfn]
Abbott, who had previously resisted mid-decade redistricting, added the issue to a special legislative session two days later. HB 4 passed the Texas House 88–52 and the Senate 18–11 and was signed on August 29, 2025.[/mfn]
The district court later found that the stated goal of converting coalition districts into majority-minority ones was the mechanism Texas used to achieve partisan gains. Legislators testified that creating nominal majority-minority districts made the map more “sellable” than a straightforwardly partisan one. The resulting districts hit bare-majority racial thresholds by narrow margins such as 50.2 to 50.5 percent of a single group, a precision the court viewed as evidence of deliberate racial targeting.[/mfn]
The Federal Court Ruling Blocking the 2025 Map
A three-judge panel heard arguments on the 2025 map over nine days beginning October 1, 2025. On November 18, 2025, Judge Jeffrey Brown issued a 160-page opinion, joined by Senior U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, granting a preliminary injunction and ordering the 2026 elections to proceed under the 2021 congressional map instead.[/mfn]
The majority concluded that while the legislature’s ultimate objective was partisan, race was the “predominant factor” in how the lines were actually drawn. The court pointed to several categories of evidence:
- The DOJ letter had no valid legal basis for demanding that coalition districts be dismantled, yet the governor and legislature adopted its racial framing wholesale.[/mfn]
- Abbott repeatedly described the map in public statements as a means to convert coalition districts into majority-Black or majority-Hispanic districts.[/mfn]
- Districts were configured to hit bare racial majorities such as 50.3 percent Hispanic or 50.5 percent Black, numbers the court found inconsistent with race-neutral line-drawing.[/mfn]
- A statistician generated thousands of simulated maps based on race-neutral and partisan criteria, and none replicated the demographics of the enacted plan.[/mfn]
- The court “questioned the veracity” of the official mapmaker, who claimed he did not use racial data even though it was preloaded into his redistricting software.[/mfn]
The court identified districts TX-16, TX-23, and TX-29 as districts where race predominated. Because race was the dominant motive, the panel applied strict scrutiny and found the map failed it.[/mfn]
Judge Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit dissented in a 104-page opinion, arguing the plaintiffs failed to prove race predominated over legitimate partisan motivations. He characterized the map as a “political document” and called the majority’s ruling “pernicious judicial misbehavior.” He also invoked the Purcell principle, which counsels against judicial changes to election rules close to an election.[/mfn]
The Supreme Court Stay
Texas appealed immediately. On December 4, 2025, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned order staying the injunction and allowing the 2025 map to be used in the 2026 elections. LULAC reported the vote was 6–3.[/mfn]
The majority gave two main reasons. First, the district court failed to honor the “presumption of legislative good faith” established in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024), which requires courts to presume a legislature acted lawfully when evidence could support either a racial or a political motive. Second, the district court should have drawn an adverse inference against the plaintiffs for not producing a viable alternative map that achieved the state’s stated partisan goals without the racial patterns the court found objectionable. The Court also cited Purcell, concluding that the district court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign.”[/mfn]
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, concurred to emphasize that because race and partisan preference are correlated in Texas, challengers must “disentangle race and politics” by offering an alternative map, and that the district court’s factual findings rested on a “mistaken impression of applicable legal principles.”[/mfn]
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. She wrote that the majority had effectively reversed a trial court’s factual findings “on a cold paper record over a holiday weekend” without applying the clear-error standard of review, and that the district court had performed a “singularly factual” task over a nine-day hearing. She also pushed back on Purcell, noting the election was eleven months away when the injunction issued.[/mfn]
Which Maps Are in Effect Right Now
As of mid-2026, Texas is using the 2025 congressional map (PlanC2333) for its elections, including the 2026 primaries, under the Supreme Court’s stay.[/mfn]
The 2021 state House and Senate maps also remain in effect. A bench trial on those maps ran from May 21 to June 11, 2025, in El Paso and produced a record of roughly 3,000 pages, 23 witnesses, and thousands of exhibits, but the panel has not yet issued a ruling. The district court stayed those proceedings pending the Supreme Court’s resolution of Louisiana v. Callais and related cases.[/mfn]
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Callais 6–3, holding that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-Black congressional district and striking down the remedial map that had done so. The ruling tightened the standard for Section 2 claims by requiring proof of intentional racial discrimination rather than disparate impact. The League of Women Voters characterized the decision as weakening Section 2 “to the point of inoperability.”[/mfn] Callais likely strengthens Texas’s position on appeal.
What Comes Next
The Supreme Court has not yet scheduled briefing or oral argument on the merits of the 2025 congressional map appeal. The stay order remains in effect pending the timely filing of an appeal and jurisdictional statement, after which it continues until the Court acts. MALDEF has said it intends to press the challenge at both the trial court and the Supreme Court. The appeal is docketed as Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, No. 25A608.[/mfn]