A group of Texas residents are suing Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, alleging the redrawn districts in the new congressional map approved by the Texas Legislature are racially discriminatory.
The complaint argues that the mid-decade revision of the state’s congressional districts “intentionally dismantles majority-minority districts” and results in a map that “hands Anglo voters control of an even larger share of Texas’s congressional seats.” It has been filed on behalf of 13 Texas residents, collectively known as the Gonzalez plaintiffs, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.
It was filed as a supplemental complaint in the ongoing lawsuit, LULAC v. Abbott, challenging Texas’s 2021-enacted congressional maps. Newsweek has contacted lawyers for the plaintiffs and Abbott’s office for comment via emails sent outside regular business hours.
Why It Matters
The lawsuit was filed hours after the Texas Senate gave final approval to a new congressional voting map in House Bill 4 early on Saturday, which Abbott is expected to quickly sign into law. It has five new districts that would favor Republicans.
President Donald Trump has pushed for the map to help the GOP maintain its slim majority in Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.
Texas Democrats fled the state for two weeks earlier this month in a bid to stop the effort by Trump and Texas’ Republican-majority Legislature. The move has also inflamed a broader redistricting battle in at least nine states, with governors from both parties pledging to redraw their states’ congressional maps.
What To Know
The lawsuit alleges that lawmakers “engaged in race-based districting” to dilute the vote of Black and Latino Texans, violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
It also alleges that the new map violates the Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act for not creating at least six Latino-majority districts.
“Politically cohesive communities of Latino voters could easily make up a majority of the voting-eligible population of additional reasonably compact districts in which they would have the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice” in six regions, the complaint says.
“But instead, the legislature either scattered those voters across multiple dirtiest or carefully crafted districts to ensure that, even where Latino voters might comprise a majority on paper, in practice their preferred candidates will be consistently defeated by Anglo Texans voting as a bloc for other candidates.”
The lawsuit also argues that the Texas Legislature’s mid-decade changes to the state’s congressional districts violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Redistricting usually comes at the start of the decade after U.S. Census data is released.
“Even if racial and partisan considerations are an unavoidable part of redistricting, there is no need for legislatures to take those considerations into account a second time in a single decade,” the complaint says.
What People Are Saying
Marina Jenkins, the executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, which brought LULAC’s initial lawsuit and is also directing the new case, said in a statement: “What’s happening in Texas underscores that racially discriminatory voting practices, unfortunately, remain alive and well to this day, and the courts must continue to enforce voting rights protections.
“Texas’s existing map already dilutes the voting power of communities of color, which now make up 60 percent of the statewide population in the Lone Star State, and has been the subject of ongoing litigation. In spite of that, the state has doubled down with an even more extreme racial gerrymander that goes even further to pack and crack communities of color and minimize the number of congressional districts where minority voters have the ability to elect candidates of their choice. The court has already agreed to consider expediting this case, and we are confident that justice will be delivered for Texans.”
Abbott said in a statement posted on X on Saturday: “The One Big Beautiful Map has passed the Senate and is on its way to my desk, where it will be swiftly signed into law. I promised we would get this done, and delivered on that promise.”
What’s Next
The complaint asks the court to declare that House Bill 4 violates the Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, order the adoption of a new redistricting plan and enjoin the state from enforcing the boundaries drawn in House Bill or administering elections using those boundaries.
Other lawsuits challenging the new congressional map are expected.
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