The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a
role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows
that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map. Here’s why.
Earlier this year, President Trump began urging Texas to redraw its U.S. House map to
create five additional Republican seats. Lawmakers reportedly met that request to redistrict on
purely partisan grounds with apprehension. When the Governor announced his intent to call a
special legislative session, he didn’t even place redistricting on the legislative agenda.
But when the Trump Administration reframed its request as a demand to redistrict
congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board.
On July 7, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice
(“DOJ”), sent a letter (“the DOJ Letter”) to the Governor and Attorney General of Texas making
the legally incorrect assertion that four congressional districts in Texas were “unconstitutional”
because they were “coalition districts”—majority-non-White districts in which no single racial
group constituted a 50% majority. In the letter, DOJ threatened legal action if Texas didn’t
immediately dismantle and redraw these districts—a threat based entirely on their racial makeup.
Notably, the DOJ Letter targeted only majority-non-White districts. Any mention of majorityWhite Democrat districts—which DOJ presumably would have also targeted if its aims were
partisan rather than racial—was conspicuously absent.
Here is the federal district court's 2–1 ruling, authored by a very conservative Trump appointee, striking down Texas' new Republican gerrymander on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates against racial minorities. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
