Only eight days have passed since Texas lawmakers gaveled in for a 30-day special session, which includes, among 17 other items, a mid-decade redistricting mandate issued by President Donald Trump via the U.S. Department of Justice.
There’s no map to review and no bill to discuss but a July 7 letter from the DOJ to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggests that legal action will be taken if the districts aren’t promptly addressed to their satisfaction. Abbott released a proclamation adding redistricting to the special session agenda on July 9.
Already there have been claims of racism, illegality, and political theater — capped by the arrest of Congressional District 18 candidate Isaiah Martin, who refused to leave the mic past the two-minute time limit during a public hearing in Austin on July 24.
While accusing lawmakers of racial gerrymandering, Martin was allegedly tackled and later charged with misdemeanors for disrupting a meeting, resisting arrest and criminal trespass. Martin’s campaign said the charges were dropped after the candidate was held overnight in the Travis County Jail.
Some Republican government watchers have said Martin and other Democrats could be using the redistricting discussion as a platform to raise funds and garner more attention for upcoming elections. The District 18 seat has been vacant since former Rep. Sylvester Turner died in March, with a special election set for November.
During a recent public hearing in Houston, another District 18 candidate, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, pointed out that Abbott delayed the special election to November when he could have called it immediately after Turner’s death, preventing the district from having representation and ensuring that the U.S. Congress would maintain its narrow Republican majority.
“Back when Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee was in office, if there was a hurricane that happened, she was on the phone with the county, working with FEMA to get resources back into the community,” Menefee said.
“That’s what’s missing right now. We don’t have an advocate who can get those resources directly into our community. We don’t have people who are in place to handle new veterans’ cases, new immigrant cases, and of course, we don’t have a vote,” he said. “It’s a major impact to our communities, and it’s completely inhumane that the governor did it, and he gave a nonsense reason when he did it. He said there was a problem with the county’s elections.”
Texas legislators are constitutionally required to redraw district boundaries every 10 years following the U.S. Census to ensure fair representation. They did so in 2021, when two congressional districts were added.
Texas lawmakers, including Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have defended the 2021 redistricting process in a recent lawsuit in El Paso, saying the lines were drawn without racial bias, so a process to dismantle districts now because they exhibit racial bias is contradictory to the state’s position, several speakers pointed out in last week’s public hearings.
Although Texans don’t have a map to criticize, they have taken issue with the apparent order from the White House to redistrict mid-decade, an unusual and unnecessary occurrence, according to redistricting committee vice chair Rep. Jon Rosenthal, D-Houston.
Congressional Districts 9, 18, 29 and 33 — three of which cover parts of Harris County — were specifically named in the DOJ letter as potentially violating the Voting Rights Act. But none of those four were mentioned among the 14 congressional districts identified for potential changes in the committee’s public hearing notices, further adding to the confusion around why the panel was convening.
“This, in my view, is far from anything resembling a practical solution,” Rosenthal said. “If you look at the four districts in question that the Department of Justice listed on their letter, this process is aimed at removing Black congressional representatives. That is an attempt to racially gerrymander our state.”
The DOJ letter claims the four Texas congressional districts need revision because they are “unconstitutional coalition districts,” meaning they have a majority minority composed of both Black and Latino voters rather than just one non-white majority.
Ellen Katz, a law professor and associate dean at the University of Michigan, said such an aggregation of voters within a single district does not “run afoul of the Voting Rights Act,” and there’s case law to support her position. The assertion from the DOJ is also inaccurate, she added.
“The DOJ is simply wrong,” she said. The 29th Congressional District, which covers east Houston, is 74.5 percent Hispanic, according to a legislative analysis.
“What the letter is instructing Texas to do, were Texas to do it, would in fact be illegal,” Katz said, explaining that dismantling the four targeted districts would violate the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. “What the letter is doing is asking Texas to inject race-based considerations into a districting process that your attorney general has said was race-neutral.”
“The letter itself is engaging in repeated race-based considerations by relying on the racial composition of each of these districts as the sole basis to argue that they’re unlawful, and it’s asking Texas to go back to the process that it says was race-neutral and think about race and use race to dismantle districts that the justice department itself is recognizing to be effective coalition districts,” she added.
The DOJ letter was signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. Members of the Texas redistricting committee have invited Dhillon to testify, saying they have questions for her.
Rep. Senfronia Thompson said she resents the DOJ accusing Texas of drawing “race-based maps and putting scorn on our elected officials.”
“I think this is a waste of good taxpayers’ dollars that we ought to be putting somewhere like flood victims,” she said.
Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, and other lawmakers questioned committee chair Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton, on whether he’d spoken directly with Abbott about why redistricting was on the agenda and whether he’d seen maps from the Trump administration.
Vasut said he hadn’t spoken with anyone in the Trump administration and the committee was holding public hearings because Abbott put the matter on the special session agenda and appointed the committee to convene and hear public testimony.
“As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of this process is to solely respond to the governor’s call,” Vasut said. Documents related to redistricting are posted on a public website, and that’s where the proposed maps will be posted, once they’re available, the committee chair said.
Texas Democrats have repeatedly said they’re ready for a fight. Following a public hearing in Austin and hours prior to another committee meeting in Houston, several Dems visited California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to meet with officials who “haven’t abandoned their constituents to see how they’re confronting the multibillion-dollar cuts to programs their citizens rely on under Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” according to a press release from the Texas House Democratic Caucus.
Some surmised the trip signaled a plan to break quorum, but the delegation was back in Texas within 24 hours.
Bishop James Dixon, testifying on behalf of the NAACP and Ministers of Houston, cautioned lawmakers that their decisions regarding redistricting affect not just people of color but everyone who lives in Harris County.
“We’re here today not because the data has dictated it,” he said. “We’re here today because there’s been a decision that the people of this state don’t deserve to elect their own representatives. Political and racial gerrymandering proves that the elected choose their voters as opposed to the voters choosing their elected. Whenever that occurs, the people always lose.”
“What is being done is oppressive, it’s racist, and we need to be clear on this; it’s unconstitutional and immoral,” he added. “When you oppress God’s people and your hearts are too hard to change, the wrath of God will come. This is a warning to Texas: don’t play with God’s poor, oppressed people, taking their insurance, their healthcare and their Medicare. Judgment shall come.”
Political scientists have said it’s unlikely that sweeping change can occur to Texas’ district maps that will negatively impact Democrats. Republicans just redrew the boundaries in 2021, and there’s little more they can do to create more red districts.
Redistricting critics, however, point out that since the directive came from Trump, who appears concerned about losing the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress during the midterm elections next year, anything could happen. District 29 Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia has said she thinks Trump ultimately plans to eliminate the Voting Rights Act.
Texas lawmakers are pretending that the governor did not approve the very maps “he’s now insisting be changed,” Garcia said.
“This political theater will hurt communities in my district, and it’s shameful,” she said. “And we do so without even a map. Where’s the map? This is putting the cart before the horse. We’re talking about impact when we haven’t seen anything.”
U.S. Congress members Lizzie Fletcher and Joaquin Castro agreed that Texas voters will suffer from an unnecessary mid-decade redistricting. Fletcher explained that redistricting can break up the voices of Black and Latino voters by packing them tightly into compact districts or “cracking” them so they have such a small presence in various districts that they don’t have enough political power to choose a candidate they believe represents their interests.
“They’re going to have their districts cracked and packed and un-Blacked,” Castro said.
U.S. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett testified in Houston that only 40 percent of Texas is Anglo, but more than 60 percent of the Congressional seats are elected by Anglo-majority districts.
“As I said in 2021, as I argued against these maps, the math ain’t mathin’,” she said. It’s important to keep “communities with common interests,” like those zoned for Houston ISD, together, so when they want to make changes such as defunding the school district, they have a federal representative who understands their plight, Crockett added.
Redistricting is the most talked-about special session agenda item and flooding/disaster preparedness has the most traction in moving forward with a bipartisan slate of bills, but there’s plenty more to do in the special session that has less than three weeks remaining.
The Legislature convened briefly Monday morning and adjourned until 3 p.m. Wednesday, at which time it’s expected bills will be introduced and referred to committees.
A third redistricting public hearing was held Monday evening in Arlington. Some of the speakers at the Austin and Houston events suggested that public hearings must be held once there’s a proposed map available to comment on. Vasut said he expects a public hearing would be held on a bill, if one is filed, to revise the redistricting plan.
Can a controversial mid-decade redistricting plan be approved before the session wraps up on August 20?
Political scientists like Rice University’s Mark Jones have said it can be done if the Trump administration already has a map that it wants Abbott to push through and the governor gets full backing from Republicans. That plan could be quickly derailed if Democrats break quorum or if a significant number of Republicans join Dems in voting against the proposed map. The governor can also continue calling special sessions until his priority bills are passed.
Democrats have accused the Republican governor of holding them hostage at the Capitol to vote on disaster preparedness bills in response to the July 4 Hill Country floods so they’ll have to be present when a vote on redistricting is taken.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
