Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday that the state will immediately appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court after a federal three-judge panel blocked implementation of the state’s 2025 congressional map, ruling that it racially gerrymandered districts to diminish Black and Hispanic voting power.
Paxton said he will ask the high court for an emergency stay of the injunction that forces Texas to continue using its 2021 districts for the 2026 elections.
“The radical left is once again trying to undermine the will of the people. The Big Beautiful Map was entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliations of Texas,” Paxton said in a statement. “I will be appealing this decision to the Supreme Court of the United States, and I fully expect the Court to uphold Texas’s sovereign right to engage in partisan redistricting.”
The 2-1 ruling handed down Tuesday in El Paso found that Texas lawmakers intentionally used race — not just politics — when redrawing the map Abbott signed into law in August.
“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,” the majority wrote in an opinion joined by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee.
The panel concluded that Texas relied on flawed legal guidance from the Trump Justice Department that wrongly labeled certain coalition districts — where Black and Hispanic voters together outnumber whites — as unconstitutional. The new map eliminated five of the nine such districts and reduced the number of minority-majority districts from 16 to 14.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded to the federal court’s ruling, calling its claim of racial discrimination “absurd.”
“The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences – and for no other reason. Any claim that these maps are discriminatory is absurd and unsupported by the testimony offered during ten days of hearings. 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 State of Texas will swiftly appeal to the United States Supreme Court,” Abbott said in a written statement.
Civil rights groups that challenged the map celebrated the court’s decision.
“Today’s decision is a critical victory for voting rights and a powerful rebuke of Texas’s brazen attempt to dilute the political power of Latino and Black voters,” said Abha Khanna of the Elias Law Group, per the Associated Press.
The ruling blocks Republican efforts in Texas to gain as many as five additional U.S. House seats, and is part of a nationwide redistricting fight involving Missouri, North Carolina, and California.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice sued California to block a similar redistricting map that would have helped the state gain up to five more Democratic seats in the House. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi called California’s redistricting plan a “brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” AP reported.