EL PASO, Texas (March 25, 2025) — A coalition of Texas voting and civil rights advocates announced this week they will not continue to pursue litigation related to the discriminatory gerrymandering of Congressional and state legislative districts in the state.
“We made a difficult decision to forgo further litigation, but this is not a retreat by any means,” said Plaintiff Deborah Chen of OCA-Greater Houston. “Millions of Asian, Black, and Latino voters in Texas are silenced by these discriminatory voting maps that cater to politicians and not the people of our great state. But we in Texas are anything but quiet, and will fight to make sure our state focuses on the people’s needs instead of the desires of wealthy special interests.”
Senior U.S. District Court Judge David Guaderrama signed an order Monday, March 24 allowing the voluntary dismissal of claims of vote dilution of Asian, Black, and Latino Texans in light of a challenging legal landscape for voting rights cases.
This move follows a Feb. 21, 2025, decision by a trial-court panel of federal judges dismissing plaintiffs’ claims brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Fair Maps Texas Action Committee v. Abbott, a years-long fight for fair voting maps that would provide equal voting power to Asian, Black, and Latino voters. In dismissing these claims, the panel followed a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 2024 that reversed decades of law to find that Section 2 of the VRA does not allow a class of minority voters like the Fair Maps coalition to collectively challenge voting maps as discriminatory in effect. A 2024 Supreme Court decision also significantly rolled back constitutional voting rights protections for people of color in a South Carolina case by making it harder for voting rights plaintiffs to challenge illegal racial gerrymandering.
“Our involvement in this litigation has ended but our fight to take the drawing of district lines out of the hands of self-interested politicians goes on,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. “Texans deserve an independent redistricting commission that would prioritize proper representation over partisan politics, and we’re going to keep fighting until we make that a reality.”
The dismissal in the Texas case also underscores the need for comprehensive voting rights protections at the federal level.
“We recognize that freedom is not free, and we will continue to challenge those who seek to drag this country back to the days of Jim and Jane Crow,” said Aya Eneli, a plaintiff from Bell County. “We will fight on every front—legally, legislatively, and in our communities—to ensure that every person, regardless of race or background, has an equal say in the future of this nation.”
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was re-introduced in Congress earlier this month and would make clear that minority voters can bring coalition claims under the Voting Rights Act and also restore the pre-clearance protections that Texans once had to prevent election laws and voting maps from taking effect if they could disproportionately harm voters of color.
Case background: Fair Maps Texas Action Committee, OCA-Greater Houston, North Texas Chapter of the Asian Pacific Islander Americans Public Affairs Association, Emgage Texas, and 13 individuals filed a federal lawsuit in 2021 arguing Texas’ state legislative and Congressional maps violated the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act by failing to create districts that allowed Black, Asian and Latino voters to elect candidates of their choice. The groups were represented by Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), the ACLU of Texas, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), and Brennan Center for Justice. More information is available here.
###
Southern Coalition for Social Justice, founded in 2007, partners with communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities in the South to defend and advance their political, social, and economic rights through the combination of legal advocacy, research, organizing, and communications. Learn more at southerncoalition.org.