The Department of Justice weighed in Monday on Texas’s contentious mid-cycle redistricting, siding with the state’s Republican-led legislature and arguing the new map is not an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
According to Fox News, Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s ruling that blocked the map through the 2026 midterms.
“This is not a close case,” Sauer wrote, claiming the lower court misread the legislature’s intent.
Sauer emphasized that the changes, which shifted five districts in favor of Republicans, were motivated by partisan objectives, not race.
“There is overwhelming evidence — both direct and circumstantial — of partisan objectives, and any inference that the State inexplicably chose to use racial means is implausible,” he wrote.
A key point of contention is a letter from Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon earlier this year, which challenged so-called “coalition districts” favorable to Democrats.
Plaintiffs argued the letter pushed Texas to reconfigure districts in ways that diluted Black and Latino votes. Sauer countered, saying the lower court misinterpreted both the letter and its significance in the legislature’s adoption of the 2025 map.
Plaintiffs, including voting and immigrant rights groups, have called the letter “riddled with legal and factual errors” and accused the state of packing minority voters into other districts.
The Texas case is part of a broader wave of redistricting disputes nationwide ahead of the 2026 midterms. California voters recently approved a measure aimed at neutralizing the Republican gains in Texas, while Utah, Virginia, and Louisiana are all seeing their maps challenged or revised.
The DOJ has also sued California over its redistricting, arguing that those changes were unlawfully race-based.
A three-judge panel in the Western District of Texas ruled last week that race played too significant a role in Texas’s map. Judge Jerry Brown, a Reagan appointee and the panel’s lone dissenter, called the decision “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism” he had ever seen.
Texas has requested that the Supreme Court block the ruling, arguing that interfering now could disrupt the 2026 midterm elections, where candidates have already filed to run under the new map. Justice Samuel Alito has administratively paused the panel’s ruling while the Supreme Court considers a final decision.
