In a decision that could potentially reshape the 2026 midterm elections and cement the Democratic Party’s future control of the US House, a federal court just struck down the gerrymandered Texas maps that President Donald Trump pressured that state to enact. If the decision holds, it could cost Republicans as many as five House seats.
And that’s not all. The most remarkable thing about the three-judge panel’s decision in League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Abbott is that it turns on an incompetent decision by Trump’s own administration.
As Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, explains in the court’s opinion, Texas lawmakers initially “didn’t have much appetite to redistrict on purely partisan grounds” — even as Trump urged them to do so. But Texas Republicans appear to have changed their mind after the Justice Department sent a letter last July to Texas’s top officials, which demanded that the state redraw several districts to change their racial makeup.
That letter, as I’ll explain in more detail below, misread a federal appeals court opinion to mean that the state was required to remake its maps. According to Judge Brown’s opinion, “it’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.” He added that “even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally[] unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’”
In reality, the Supreme Court has long held that “if a legislature gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map” is subject to the most skeptical level of constitutional review and “may be held unconstitutional.” When the Justice Department told Texas to redraw several of its congressional districts to change their racial makeup, it ordered Texas to give “race a predominant role.” Oops.
Notably, the Court has held that this restriction on maps that predominantly rely on race can be found in the Constitution itself, not in federal statutes like the Voting Rights Act. So, even if the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, as it is expected to do during its current term, that will not undermine the panel’s decision in LULAC.
Key Texas officials, moreover, appear to have embraced the DOJ’s call to redraw the state’s maps for racial reasons. As Brown writes, “though the Trump Administration’s plea to redistrict for political reasons failed to gain any immediate traction, the Administration’s demand that Texas redistrict for racial reasons achieved quick results.” Just two days after the DOJ sent its letter, “Governor Abbott issued a proclamation adding the following item to the agenda for the upcoming special legislative session: ‘Legislation that provides a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.’”
Abbott, in other words, specifically convened the state legislature to comply with the Justice Department’s demand for a racial gerrymander.
There’s also other evidence that race predominated the recent redistricting in Texas. Abbott told CNN’s Jake Tapper, for example, that the maps were being redrawn to eliminate districts where Black and Hispanic voters combined made up a majority, and to replace them with seats that “turned out to provide more seats for Hispanics.” Brown’s opinion also quotes state lawmakers who indicated that they shared the DOJ’s racial goals.
The irony of this decision is that, if Texas had enacted the exact same maps without bringing up the topic of race, then they would have been legal under current Supreme Court precedents. The Trump administration sabotaged its own redistricting effort by feeding Texas a racial justification for this gerrymander. And Texas officials further sabotaged the gerrymander by embracing the DOJ’s racial rhetoric.
The three-judge panel’s decision in LULAC will appeal directly to the Supreme Court, so it remains to be seen whether the justices will agree that the Texas maps are illegal. But there is a very real chance that even this Supreme Court will go along with the panel’s decision to strike them down. The Court reaffirmed that maps that give “race a predominant role” are constitutionally suspect as recently as 2024.
How did the Justice Department manage to screw up Texas’s gerrymander?
To understand the panel’s decision in LULAC, it’s helpful to first understand some of the history of voting rights law within the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which oversees most federal lawsuits arising out of Texas.
In Campos v. City of Baytown (1988), the Fifth Circuit held that the federal Voting Rights Act sometimes requires states to draw “coalition districts.” These are districts where a group of two or more non-white racial groups make up the majority, but no single group is in the majority. A district that is 30 percent Black, 30 percent Hispanic, and 40 percent white, for example, is a coalition district because the two groups of people of color combined add up to more than 50 percent of the district’s voters.
The Fifth Circuit recently overruled Campos, however, in Petteway v. Galveston County (2024), which held that the Voting Rights Act “does not authorize separately protected minority groups to aggregate their populations for purposes of a vote dilution claim.” In other words, after Petteway, Texas no longer has an affirmative obligation to draw coalition districts.
The Justice Department’s July letter, however, misread Petteway to hold that “‘coalition districts’ run afoul the [sic] Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment.” Thus, under the DOJ’s misunderstanding of Petteway, Texas is forbidden from enacting any congressional map that includes a district where white people are in the minority, and where two or more non-white racial groups make up the majority.
But that’s wrong. As Judge Brown writes in the LULAC opinion, “even though federal courts in this Circuit can no longer force a legislative body to create a coalition district” after Petteway, “that doesn’t prohibit such a body from voluntarily creating a coalition district for political or other race-neutral reasons.” The law may forbid Texas from intentionally drawing coalition districts because the state wants to group certain racial groups together, but the law does not forbid any map that happens to include a district where two non-white racial groups make up the majority.
Crucially, moreover, Brown’s opinion finds that Texas did not create the coalition districts in its pre-2025 maps because it was trying to achieve some kind of racial goal. “[N]othing in the current record indicates that the Legislature drew the 2021 Map with an eye toward creating coalition districts,” Brown writes. The coalition districts that did appear in that map appear to be “coincidental by-products of the Legislature applying race-neutral redistricting criteria like partisanship.”
So, to summarize: The Justice Department misread Petteway to forbid any congressional map that includes a district where two or more non-white racial groups make up the majority. It then demanded that Texas redraw its maps to eliminate such districts, despite the Supreme Court’s longstanding command that states should not give “race a predominant role” when they draw legislative maps. And top Texas officials appear to have embraced the Justice Department’s misreading of the law to justify the new gerrymandered maps.
Again, it remains to be seen what will happen when this case reaches the Supreme Court. But there is a very real chance that Texas’s gerrymander will fall entirely because of inept lawyering by Trump’s Justice Department.
