Diana Castillo-Perez from San Antonio holds up a sign during the Fight the Trump Takeover rally at the Texas Capitol on Saturday, August. 16, 2025. Thousands attended the rally to protest proposed redistricting, immigration enforcement, and other Trump-backed legislation and proposed changes.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
A three-judge panel in El Paso on Tuesday blocked Texas Republicans’ newly redrawn congressional map, dealing a major blow to President Donald Trump, who hoped the redistricting would help the party pick up five more seats in next year’s midterm election.
In a 2-1 ruling, the judges said the plaintiffs’ argument was likely to prevail that the new map violated the U.S. Constitution by drawing districts based on race, rather than simply to give Republicans a partisan edge.
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WHAT THIS MEANS: How the court’s redistricting decision could affect Texas’s primary election
The determination, which was quickly appealed, could have major implications for the upcoming March 3 primary election. Filing for the race opened Nov. 8 and lasts for one month.
Some Democrats in Congress, including U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin, have said they won’t decide whether to run for reelection until the map is settled. The redrawn version had wiped out a Democratic-leaning district in Houston, Austin and Dallas, and made two South Texas districts held by Democrats more Republican-leaning.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, an appointee of President Donald Trump, focused in the 160-page ruling on a letter from the president’s administration that Gov. Greg Abbott had originally used to justify the redistricting push.
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The letter, from the Department of Justice, asserted that four Democrat-held districts in Texas had been unconstitutionally drawn based on racial makeup, without mentioning any Republican districts. By citing the document in his call to lawmakers, Brown wrote, Abbott “explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race.”
KEY EXCERPTS: ‘A mess’: Why Texas’s Trump-backed congressional map was struck down
“In press appearances, the Governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts,” Brown wrote.
Joining Brown in the decision was Judge David C. Guaderrama, appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama. Judge Jerry E. Smith, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, dissented but did not immediately publish his reasons.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton quickly filed a notice of appeal on Tuesday, calling the ruling an effort to “undermine the will of the people.” Gov. Greg Abbott said “any claim that these maps are discriminatory is absurd.”
“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,” Abbott said in a statement, vowing to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Brown acknowledged that the order likely scrambles the filing process for candidates of both parties planning to run for Congress in the midterms. But, he noted, the ruling comes in advance of the Dec. 8 filing date to gain ballot access for the Democratic and Republican primaries, and they put the onus on the GOP map drawers for any hiccup their decision might cause.
“Any disruption that would happen here is attributable to the Legislature, not the Court,” he wrote, adding later: “The Legislature — not the Court — redrew Texas’s congressional map weeks before precinct-chair and candidate-filing periods opened.”
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State Rep. Gene Wu, the Houston Democrat who led his party’s walkout in the Texas House that temporarily delayed passage of the GOP-drawn districts, called the judges’ ruling a vindication.
“Greg Abbott and his Republican cronies tried to silence Texans’ voices to placate Donald Trump, but now have delivered him absolutely nothing,” Wu said in a statement.
Earlier this month, voters in California overwhelmingly approved a move to redraw their state’s congressional boundaries in response to the new Texas map. The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against the California map.
“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and the driving force behind Prop 50, said on X. “This ruling is a win for Texas, and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”
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Doggett, Texas’s longest serving member in Congress, said the ruling breathes new life into a political career that begin in the early 1970s and that up until Tuesday had appeared moribund.
“To borrow from Mark Twain, the reports of my death, politically, are greatly exaggerated,” Doggett said in a statement. “This federal court order means that I have a renewed opportunity to continue serving the only town I have ever called home, as democracy faces greater challenges than at any point in my lifetime.”
Bayliss Wagner and Taylor Goldenstein contributed reporting.
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