Federal judges are blocking a Texas congressional map that was drawn to help the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections

Texas cannot use a new congressional map drawn by Republicans in hopes of securing additional seats for the party in the House of Representatives, a panel of three federal judges ruled Tuesday.

The ruling was a blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to get GOP lawmakers in multiple states to redraw their maps to help the party maintain its razor-thin House majority in potentially tough 2026 midterm elections.

“The public perception of this case is that it is about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map. But it was more than just politics. Strong evidence indicates that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map,” the ruling said.

This summer, Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the new state map to give the Republican Party five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats five additional seats there.

The 2-1 decision came after a nearly two-week trial in El Paso, Texas.

A coalition of civil rights groups representing Black and Latino voters argued that the map downplayed the influence of minority voters, making it a racial gerrymander that violates the federal Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.

They sought an order barring Texas from using the map while it pursues their case, which would force the state to use the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 for next year’s election.

The panel of judges granted the critics’ request, indicating that they believed the critics had a good chance of winning their case at trial. One of the judges was appointed by Trump, another by Republican President Ronald Reagan, and one by Democratic President Barack Obama.

Texas Republicans said repeatedly during Legislature debates this summer and afterwards that they were redrawing districts just to help Republicans win more seats. The U.S. Supreme Court gave states the green light to pursue partisan gerrymandering by ruling in 2019 that it was a political issue beyond the reach of federal courts.

Read more: The Justice Department is suing to block a California map that could transfer control of Congress to Democrats

Republicans hold 25 of Texas’ 38 congressional seats, while Democrats hold two of their 13 seats in districts won by Trump in 2024. Had the new map been drawn up last year, Trump would have carried 30 congressional districts by 10 percentage points or more, making it likely the GOP would have won that number of seats as well.

Democrats across the United States have called the redistricting in Texas and other states a power grab by Trump aimed at preventing congressional oversight of him, regardless of voter anger. Republicans are keen to avoid a repeat of what happened in the 2018 midterm elections, when they lost the majority and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump twice.

The new map reduced the number of congressional districts from 16 to 14 where minorities make up the majority of voting-age citizens.

In doing so, they removed what had been five of nine “coalition” districts, where no racial or ethnic minority has a majority, but combined minorities outnumber non-Hispanic whites among the voting-age population. Five of the six Democratic lawmakers selected in districts with other incumbents are Black or Hispanic.

However, Republicans argue that the map is better for minority voters. While five “coalition” districts are being abolished, there is an eighth district that is majority-Latino, and two new districts that are majority-black.

Critics consider each of these new districts a sham, arguing that the majority is so small that white voters, who tend to cast ballots in larger numbers, will control the election results.