Civil Rights Groups Urge Supreme Court to Block Texas’ Gerrymandered Map

The original civil rights groups who challenged Texas’ new gerrymandered maps back in August of this year have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a lower court ruling that would temporarily block the use of the redistricted map in the 2026 elections. 

The involvement of the Supreme Court in the dispute over Texas’s recently redrawn map is only one part of a larger redistricting war that the Trump administration has been waging across the country for months now. The Trump administration has been pushing red states to redraw their district lines to help Republicans flip seats held by Democrats in red states, with the goal of maintaining control of the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm elections. 

Until recently, the Trump-backed redistricting pressure campaign appeared to be losing steam, but with Texas’ gerrymandered map back in play, the results of Trump’s efforts to predetermine the outcome of the midterms are up in the air.

Texas’ involvement in the Trump administration’s gerrymandering blitz began back in August, when GOP ​​Gov. Greg Abbott, bent to pressure from the Trump administration and signed the new maps passed by his Republican-controlled state legislature into law. The new maps are expected to flip five congressional seats currently held by Democrats, giving Republicans control of 30 of the state’s 38 congressional seats. 

But last week a federal court enjoined the use of that new map, instead ordering the state to use an older map for the 2026 election. In his order, District Judge Jeff Brown, a 2019 Trump appointee, described the new map as being racially gerrymandered and therefore unconstitutional. 

In response to this ruling, the state then filed an emergency petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the lower court’s order blocking the use of the new map has caused “chaos.” On Friday, in response to the state’s appeal, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito placed a temporary hold on the lower court’s order to give the full court time to review the issue before making a final decision. 

In asking the Supreme Court to reinstate the lower court’s ruling to block the use of the new map, civil groups such as the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and the Texas State Conference of the NAACP, argued once again that the new map is racially gerrymandered. 

“The District Court documented a sequence of events that demonstrated the predominance of race in Texas’s 2025 redistricting process,” the civil rights groups wrote in the Monday filing. 

“First, the U.S. Department of Justice directed the State, in a public letter to Governor Abbott, to dismantle four identified majority-minority Congressional districts based on their racial composition. In response, the Governor put redistricting on the agenda for the Legislature’s special session and pledged repeatedly in videotaped interviews that Texas would follow DOJ’s directive to ‘remove’ so-called coalition Congressional districts,” the brief outlines. “In doing so, they took a sledgehammer to the voting power of Black and Latino citizens in those districts.”

The groups also noted in their Monday brief that using the 2025 map would cause chaos, too. 

“…even if Defendants were correct that using the 2021 map would cause some confusion, so would using the 2025 map,” the brief notes. “As discussed above, the 2025 map was enacted just three months ago, elections proceeded under the 2021 map just weeks ago, and uncertainty has abounded since the map was passed.”

The court will not make a final decision until the state of Texas responds to this latest court filing.