Minority Voters Argue Texas Gerrymander Driven By Race as Hearing Kicks Off 

EL PASO, TEXAS — A federal court began a hearing in a case here Wednesday to decide whether Texas can use its new gerrymandered congressional map in next year’s midterms.

At stake is the future of minority communities’ voting strength in Texas – and perhaps the balance of power in the U.S. Congress. 

President Donald Trump pressured Texas Republicans this summer to draw a new map creating five more GOP seats in Congress — at the expense of Texas minority voters, who will no longer be able to elect the candidates of their choice and will see their political strength greatly diminished.

Federal courts since 2019 have allowed partisan gerrymandering, but racial discrimination in redistricting is illegal. As a result, much of Wednesday’s hearing focused on the motivation for the Texas gerrymander.

Lawyers for the map’s challengers — a group of minority voters and pro-voting groups — argued that the new district lines are racially discriminatory, and that Texas’ goal was to eliminate coalition districts. Those are districts where multiple minority groups together make up a majority of the population. 

Texas insisted the map was drawn only to maximize Republican electoral wins.  

To make the case that Texas was motivated by race, the plaintiffs noted a July interview given by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in which he said that, thanks to a ruling by a federal court last year, coalition districts “are no longer required, and so we want to make sure that we have maps that don’t impose coalition districts.”

They also pointed to a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) urging the state to eliminate coalition districts — which Abbott cited when announcing the special legislative session for the redraw. 

State attorneys responded by arguing that neither Abbott or Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, who sent the DOJ letter, are members of the Texas legislature.

Two Democratic lawmakers – state Sen. Carol Alvarado and state Rep. Joe Moody – expressed frustration in their testimony with an unusually rushed, secretive redistricting process. They noted that Republican leaders rarely offered answers to basic questions about when a map would be presented, who was drawing the map or even what the purpose of the new map was.

Attorneys challenging the map also repeatedly played comments made by state Rep. Todd Hunter (R) — the redistricting bill author – as he defended his bill by reciting racial data statistics for each new district while making the case that the new map was actually more favorable to minority voters than the previous one. Opponents of the map argued Hunter’s comments prove that racial data was used to draw the map. 

Texas said Hunter was simply providing data he had been criticized for not sharing during the last redistricting in 2021. 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs also sought to make the case that a climate of racial appeals has existed in the state’s politics — something that can bolster a charge of a racial discrimination in voting. They played a video clip of a Texas senator saying at a 2022 hearing that one way to deal with immigrants might be: “Shoot, shovel, and shut up.” 

After the clip was unearthed recently by Democracy Docket, the senator apologized.

*Some Texas voters are represented by the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG firm chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.