A panel of U.S. District Court judges on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction barring Texas from enacting new congressional district lines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, concluding that plaintiffs who sued to block what they called a racial gerrymander were likely to succeed at trial.
In a blistering 160-page opinion, Judge Jeffrey Brown ordered the state to revert to congressional district lines drawn in 2021, following the decennial census. Writing for the majority of a three-judge panel, Brown said plaintiffs had met the legal bar to block the maps as racial gerrymanders, discounting testimony from a Republican strategist who said he had drawn map lines without considering racial demographics.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map,” Brown wrote. “But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said late Tuesday he would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The radical left is once again trying to undermine the will of the people,” Paxton said in a statement. “The Big Beautiful Map was entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliation of Texas.”
Brown, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, was appointed to the U.S. District Court by President Trump during Trump’s first term in office.
He pointed to a July 7 letter from the Department of Justice, which ordered Texas to redraw congressional district boundaries to undo what it called “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”
The letter, sent by Harmeet Dhillon, a California Republican operative who serves as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is “challenging” to unpack, Brown wrote, “because it contains so many factual, legal and typographical errors.”
The ruling is a stinging blow to Texas Republicans — and to Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, who kicked off a national war over mid-decade redistricting in an effort to secure control of Congress even in the face of a difficult midterm election.
The Texas legislature returned to special session in July to consider new map lines that would have created five new Republican-leaning seats in the state’s House delegation. After House Democrats fled the state to delay the redistricting process, Republicans won approval for map lines later signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Minority plaintiffs sued to block the map lines, claiming they unfairly diluted the political power of Black and Hispanic residents. In a nine-day trial earlier this month in El Paso, the court said those plaintiffs had sufficiently proven that the map lines did amount to a racial gerrymander — rather than a political gerrymander, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is beyond the scope of federal courts.
Brown pointed to comments from Abbott, President Donald Trump and others in which they specifically cited race as a factor in drawing district lines.
“The Court heard the evidence and made the right call,” Matt Angle, director of the Democtratic-aligned Lone Star Project, said in a statement. “The Trump/Abbott map is a hostile attack on Black, Hispanic, and other minority Texans, and it is an insult to every Texan.”
Brown wrote that it would be impractical for the legislature to return for another special session in advance of the end of candidate filing, on Dec. 8, or in time for next year’s primary elections, which are scheduled for March.
This post has been updated with reaction from Attorney General Ken Paxton.