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.
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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.
See here for the previous update. This response was due to SCOTUS on Monday; I can’t tell if there’s a deadline yet for the state to file its response, but my guess is that it would be no later than this coming Monday and might even be as soon as this evening. As noted, that filing deadline is fast approaching.
SCOTUSBlog adds some details.
The Trump administration filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting Texas and urging the justices to pause the lower court’s order. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court that the majority of the three-judge district court had “misconstrued” the Department of Justice letter “as having demanded that Texas redraw its map in order to racially gerrymander certain districts, even though the letter denounced racial gerrymandering and asked Texas to rectify racial gerrymanders in the prior map. The court then proceeded to treat any mention of DOJ by a state official as compelling evidence of racial predominance,” Sauer continued, “even though none of those officials said that they needed to engage in race-based redistricting to address DOJ’s concerns.”
In their filings, the challengers pushed back against the state’s suggestion that the Purcell principle required the Supreme Court to stay the three-judge district court’s decision. As one group of individual challengers emphasized, “the election is a year away. The candidate filing deadline for the spring primary is open for weeks yet, and the State submitted declaration testimony—affirmed live at trial—that the filing period could be extended for at least an additional week without causing any disruption.”
There is no reason to believe, another set of individual plaintiffs continued, “that conducting the 2026 elections under the same districts that have governed the last two congressional elections, on the same schedule that the elections would ordinarily have been conducted on, would cause any confusion.” Instead, they contended, the lower court’s order “simply reinstates the status quo: the legislatively-drawn 2021 district boundaries that have governed Texas congressional elections since 2022.”
Moreover, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus added, “[i]f Texas’s interpretation of Purcell were correct, States could insulate any redistricting plan—no matter how unconstitutional—simply by enacting it close to an election.”
The challengers also disputed the state’s argument that, under the Supreme Court’s redistricting cases, the lower court should have required them to offer their own alternative maps. Although such maps may be necessary when the plaintiffs can only muster “meager” direct evidence, the Texas NAACP acknowledged in its brief, the group insisted that the evidence in this case is far from “meager.” “In modern redistricting litigation,” the Texas NAACP wrote, “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for plaintiffs to provide evidence that is so voluminous, diverse, pervasive, and unequivocal as the evidence adduced here.” “When the government officials say they’re doing racial gerrymandering,” one group of individual challengers said, “courts don’t need to sift through hypothetical maps to circumstantially assess their motivations.”
Turning to some of the other factors that the court considers in determining whether to temporarily block a lower court’s order, another set of individual plaintiffs contended that if the 2021 map is reinstated, Texas will not be permanently harmed “from the continued use of congressional districts that the Texas Legislature enacted just four years ago, that have been used for the past two federal elections, and that Texas has consistently defended in court as fair and constitutional.”
U.S. Reps. Alexander Green and Jasmine Crockett, both Democratic members of Congress from Texas, argued that “[i]t is a foundational principle of constitutional law that the deprivation of protected rights—even for a single election cycle—constitutes irreparable injury.” And in this case, they wrote, it “would not be a theoretical injury. As the trial record reaffirms, many voters—especially in the targeted districts—face immediate loss of coalition representation, sharp declines in political power, and confusion about district boundaries and candidate pools.”
You can see all of the filings related to this administrative stay here; there are already a bunch of amicus briefs. Once SCOTUS has the state’s response they can issue a ruling any time.