AUSTIN — On Tuesday morning, a special Senate committee held a virtual hearing on a rare mid-decade redistricting effort in the Texas Legislature. It was the last in a series of four hearings, each dedicated to a different geographic chunk of the state. Dozens of Far West Texas residents signed up to speak, representing all walks of life, from constitutional law experts to city council members to retired grandparents.
State Sen. César Blanco, who represents the Big Bend, listened to constituent concerns on the floor as a guest of honor. He was concerned that the maps would be unfairly skewed — during the last redistricting effort, the region lost a seat in the statehouse despite El Paso’s growing population. “We all have unique districts, but I always like to say that ours is truly unique,” he said. “We cannot allow history to repeat itself.”
The process for drawing congressional districts is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Since 1790, these efforts have followed a national census conducted every 10 years. The only time in recent memory that Texas has bucked that schedule was in 2003, when former Rep. Tom DeLay forced redistricting through the Legislature. Democrats fled the state to try to thwart DeLay’s efforts, but Republicans prevailed — and have held the majority of the state’s congressional delegation ever since.
This year’s special session of the Legislature was officially announced by Gov. Greg Abbott on June 23, the day after he teased calling a session in his veto proclamation on HB 3, a controversial bill that would have outlawed THC products in Texas. Gov. Abbott’s initial list of priorities includes water regulations and laws around “the operation of a cement kiln,” but does not mention redistricting.
The disastrous floods in Central Texas over the weekend of July 4 seemed to shake up the governor’s priorities, and flood prevention measures and emergency management funding was placed at the top of the official list released on July 9. Toward the very end of that list, the governor calls for “Legislation that provides a revised redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
That press release was the first that many Texans had heard of rumbling in D.C. over the state’s congressional districts. The New York Times broke the story in June, when rumors that Trump’s team was pushing political leaders in Texas to redraw the maps in order to maintain the Republican party’s slim majority in Congress. “The push from Washington has unnerved some Texas Republicans, who worry that reworking the boundaries of Texas House seats to turn Democratic districts red by adding reliably Republican voters from neighboring Republican districts could backfire in an election that is already expected to favor Democrats,” the Times reported.
That talk turned to action on July 7, when Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general in the federal Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, sent a memo to Gov. Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on the subject of “Unconstitutional Race-Based Congressional Districts.” In the letter, Dhillon argues that TX-09, TX-18, TX-29 and TX-33 are “unconstitutional coalition districts” based on a reading of Petteway v. Galveston County, a 2024 Fifth Circuit opinion.
All of the districts named by Dhillon — three of which are in Houston — are majority-minority districts where Black and Latino voters comprise the lion’s share of the votes. Dhillon concludes the letter with an entreaty to respond “by July 7, 2025” — an apparent typo that state lawmakers are choosing to interpret as “August 7.” (Lawmakers discussed the legality of serving Dhillon with a subpoena from out of state on Tuesday morning to clarify a number of questions not addressed in the letter; in a post on X, state Sen. Carol Alvarado clarified that they would indeed be seeking a subpoena if the DOJ did not respond immediately.)
Tuesday’s hearing was overseen by the Senate Special Committee on Redistricting, composed of nine members led by Chair Phil King (R-Weatherford) and Vice Chair Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe). The other members are Carol Alvarado (D-Houston), Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen), Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola), Borris L. Miles (D-Houston), Tan Parker (R-Flower Mound), Angela Paxton (R-McKinney) and Kevin Sparks (R-Midland). All members were present for the hearing with the exception of Sen. Paxton.
Compared to earlier hearings, the West Texas edition of the battle over redistricting could be described as a bit more subdued than in-person proceedings held in Houston, Arlington and Austin that attracted big-name speakers and standing-room-only crowds. Last Thursday, congressional hopeful Isaiah Martin, campaigning to represent a slice of Houston in D.C., was dragged to the ground by police and arrested after refusing to yield the floor after his allotted two minutes were up. (Charges against Martin have since been dropped.)
There were no arrests at Tuesdays’ hearing and — at least from the Zoom footage — no chanting crowds lined up outside the chamber, but the tension was palpable. Committee Chair King began the proceedings with a short address. “Witness after witness has said what I believe are very inappropriate, incorrect and frankly offensive comments directed at Republicans in general,” he said, referring to comments made through the course of hundreds of testimonies that described the GOP as “a racist party” and “the party of pedophiles,” as well as “deriding and ugly remarks about the president.”
King said that the maps drawn in 2021 were “legal” — implying that he disagreed with the letter from the DOJ — but that the Legislature was still legally able to consider the question. “That doesn’t mean we don’t have the right to take up redistricting if we choose to do that — we can do that every session,” he explained. “We have a lot of good things to say here that are a direct result of having a strong Republican majority and the result of having President Trump.”
Numerous people in attendance bristled at King’s comments, including Sen. Miles, the lone Black member of the committee. “If you do racist things, Mr. Chairman, people will call it racist,” he said. “It’s your actions, not your words — majority-minority communities have been targeted, and that’s a racist act.”
The vast majority of constituents who signed up to speak hailed from El Paso, but there were notable exceptions, including Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Perales hails from San Antonio and served as counsel for Latino voters in litigation over the state’s most recent round of maps prepared in 2021, which still hasn’t reached a verdict. “The Voting Rights Act demands the creation of more majority-minority districts,” she explained, pointing out that every redistricting effort in Texas since the law was passed has been declared illegal in some way by federal authorities.
Perales was also concerned that hearings were being held before example maps could be produced. “This map is being drawn by somebody,” she said. “As a lawyer, I would never let anyone write a legal brief for me and then tell me I could only fix the typos.” (After the hearing’s close, Phil Jankowski of the Dallas Morning News confirmed in a post on X that Adam Kincaid, a Virginia-based Republican consultant who also drew the 2021 maps, was once again at the helm.)
Just before The Big Bend Sentinel went to press on Wednesday, the Texas Tribune published drafts of the maps, which re-draw the lines in Houston, Dallas, Austin and South Texas. The line between TX-16 and TX-23 east of El Paso is also included in the new map, but it’s not clear how many Far West Texans could be impacted by this change.
Maya Sanchez, the former mayor of El Paso suburb San Elizario, summed up the thoughts of many participants: they weren’t happy with the lines drawn in 2021, but didn’t think that this was a good-faith effort to try to fix the mistakes made. San Elizario is a part of the sprawling TX-23 district, which also includes Big Bend and parts of San Antonio — a vast distance she didn’t think was physically possible to serve with any fairness. “Doing it at the directive of our president is not the best way to do this,” she said. “I hope you can see why it seems a little fishy to your constituency.”
Cathy Fulton, a part-time Fort Davis resident, was one of just two tri-county locals who signed up to speak. Fulton stressed that she was not officially affiliated with either the Republican or Democratic party and felt that the makeup of the committee itself was unfair — the nine-member committee only had three Democrats, who also happened to be the only non-white legislators in the room. “This tells me a lot about how this committee is skewed in favor of a party,” she said.
Fulton said she’d slogged through nearly 15 hours of hearings and had only personally heard eight people speak out in support of redistricting. “That means there’s around 99.98% of the population not in favor of redistricting,” she said after doing some quick napkin math. “So my question to all the senators is, ‘Who are you loyal to?’ Are you loyal to Texas and Texan voters, or are you loyal to one man in Washington?’”
Ramon Rodriguez Aranda, chair of the Presidio County Democrats, gave the last word. Rodriguez warned that — beyond numerous potential racial and ethical issues raised by the prospect of redistricting — it was a risky political move to follow the Trump administration’s directives so soon before a midterm election. “This isn’t just a map, it’s a message,” he said. “Texans will not forget — they will remember who listened.”