The US Supreme Court on Monday reversed a district court ruling that had blocked Texas’s 2025 congressional map as a likely racial gerrymander, allowing the Republican-drawn districts to stand for the 2026 midterm elections.

The unsigned, one-paragraph order cited the Court’s own 2025 decision in Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens as controlling, without elaboration. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the disposition.

A three-judge federal panel had blocked the map in November 2025 after a nine-day hearing involving 23 witnesses and a 160-page opinion, finding plaintiffs were likely to succeed on racial gerrymandering claims under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Voting Rights Act. The district court found that the drawing in six of the state’s congressional districts was predominantly based on race.

Governor Greg Abbott signed the map into law in August 2025 at President Donald Trump’s request, targeting five House seats then held by Democrats, all in districts with substantial minority populations. Texas Democrats left the state in an unsuccessful bid to break quorum and block the redistricting vote. The Supreme Court had temporarily restored the map in December 2025, ruling Texas was likely to show the district court failed to apply a presumption of legislative good faith and erred by declining to draw an adverse inference when plaintiffs did not produce a comparable alternative map.

Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the ruling “has added a profound insult to an already harmful injury,” arguing the Trump administration had “told Texas to take a wrecking ball to majority-minority Congressional districts.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called the decision a victory for the state ahead of the 2026 elections.

The map will now govern Texas’s congressional elections through at least the 2026 midterms. The ruling resolves the immediate dispute for this cycle, though the underlying litigation over Texas’s congressional boundaries may continue.