The Texas redistricting fight has been the backdrop for the Trump administration to test a new legal strategy

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On July 7, the Justice Department sent a harshly written letter threatening to sue the staunchly Republican state of Texas, notwithstanding its efforts to help elect Donald Trump and the fact that the president had singled out its leaders as key allies in his immigration crackdown.

The letter decried the congressional map previously passed by the state’s Republican-led Legislature as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” It demanded that Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton respond the same day with a plan to comply. Otherwise, the Justice Department said, it reserved “the right to seek legal action against the state.”

Despite its adversarial tone, the letter was hardly unwelcome. In fact, it was just the opposite.

It set in motion a chain of events that gave Abbott and Paxton the political cover needed to provide Trump with exactly what he wanted: a mid-decade redrawing of district lines designed to ease that path for his party to maintain control of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections.

Republican lawmakers prioritized passage of the new political map above nearly all other legislation during the state’s second special session, including disaster preparedness and relief for victims of the July 4 flooding that killed more than 130 Texans. The new congressional boundaries, crafted to net Republicans up to five more seats, drew an immediate legal challenge from a coalition of Black and Latino voters who, on Saturday morning, alleged that it discriminates against nonwhite voters. Abbott is expected to sign it into law this week.

“The One Big Beautiful Map has passed the Senate and is on its way to my desk, where it will be swiftly signed into law,” Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. “I promised we would get this done, and delivered on that promise.”

The series of events is part of a larger trend this summer of the Trump administration using legal action or the threat of the courts to seemingly coerce Republican governors and other politically aligned defendants to do precisely what he wants them to do. The strategy has allowed his administration to sidestep state legislatures and Congress, according to legal experts and critics. In some cases, it has allowed red states to achieve a politically valuable goal they’d wanted all along.

In Texas, Trump has been met with state leaders who have been willing, if not eager, collaborators in carrying out his agenda.

Over the past three months, the Trump administration has employed a series of legal tactics in the state to achieve a desired outcome.

It filed a federal lawsuit and, in one day, killed a decades-old law allowing Texas students who were not U.S. citizens or permanent residents to receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities if they met specific criteria. The move came just two days after bills to repeal the law failed to pass the state Legislature.

The Trump administration also maneuvered within the court system, reaching an agreement to settle a lawsuit against the federal government that effectively gutted a ban on churches participating in political campaigns. Trump has long opposed the ban, which he vowed to end, but the president lacked congressional support for such a move.

On redistricting, Trump used his heft within the party to force the state Legislature to redraw the typically once-a-decade political map it had approved just four years earlier, leading to a standoff with the governors of Democratic states. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed measures that will ask voters in his state to approve five new districts that would favor Democrats in direct response to Texas’ redistricting.

Trump is not the first president to use a “sue and settle” strategy.

Republicans complained bitterly about the Obama administration encouraging liberal groups and Democratic state attorneys general to file suits against the Environmental Protection Agency, which then led to the rapid adoption of consent agreements for more stringent enforcement of environmental policies than Congress was likely to pass, said Marquette University law professor Paul Nolette.

But Trump’s strategy, Nollette said, is even more aggressive.

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre and Andrew Mahaleris, an Abbott spokesperson, declined to respond to questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The White House acknowledged an email seeking comment, but did not provide one.

Taken together, Trump’s legal strategies in Texas this summer show a win-at-all-costs mindset that is trampling on legal norms, said University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson. He is among several legal scholars and lawyers representing civil rights and religious liberty groups who told ProPublica and the Tribune they fear the administration’s strategy to bypass the checks provided by the legislative and judicial branches of government will cause lasting harm.

“One ought to be extremely disturbed by this thoroughly authoritarian administration,” said Levinson, who has taught constitutional law for 45 years. He added that through such initiatives, Trump is “trying to enforce the ‘Führerprinzip’ of absolute loyalty to himself, rather than to abstract constitutional norms.”

“What is truly incredible is the extent to which the GOP has fallen in line,” Levinson said.

“New level”

The first clear sign that the administration was working with the state’s Republican leadership to bypass lawmakers was its successful June 4 effort to nullify the Texas Dream Act.

The 2001 law granted in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to students who lived in the state for three years and graduated from a Texas high school, even if they were not permanent residents or U.S. citizens.

Efforts to repeal or sharply curtail the benefit for immigrant children have gone nowhere in the Republican-led Legislature, including this year. It would never have passed, or remained in place for so long, without the support of Texas Republicans, said former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a lead sponsor of the 2001 law. The San Antonio Democrat recalled in an interview that the law, which former Gov. Rick Perry signed, had the support of most major groups representing Texas businesses because many believed that encouraging immigrant youth to pursue higher education expands their lifelong earnings, bolsters the workforce and benefits state coffers.

On June 4, two days after the Legislature adjourned, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Texas in federal court in Wichita Falls. There, only one district judge sits — Reed O’Connor, a Trump appointee. Within hours, Paxton, who is charged with defending the state’s laws, joined the federal government in filing a joint motion that asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional. O’Connor, who did not respond to a request for comment about the case, quickly agreed.

Paxton’s communications office did not respond to written questions from ProPublica and the Tribune. It’s unclear if Abbott, who succeeded Perry, supported the move by Bondi and Paxton to bypass the legislative process and kill the law.

Abbott has not said a lot about the issue since his initial run for governor in 2014, and Mahaleris, his spokesperson, did not respond to questions about it. Back then, pressed by Democratic opponent Wendy Davis, who predicted that GOP lawmakers would try to repeal in-state tuition for immigrant youth and said she’d veto any such legislation, Abbott suggested he supported making some changes and left the door open to signing a repeal bill.

“Greg Abbott believes that the objective of the program is noble. But he believes the law as structured is flawed and it must be reformed,” an Abbott spokesperson said at the time.

Had the Republican-led Legislature truly been interested in repealing the law, it would have done so, said Van de Putte, who pointed to this year’s passage of a program that allows families to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s private school education. “I mean, they got vouchers,” Van de Putte said. “This wasn’t a policy imperative.”

Van de Putte, now a lobbyist, said that when she heard of Paxton and Bondi’s maneuver, her “heart ripped.”

On June 5, a day after the Justice Department and Paxton worked together to overturn the law, Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli exulted over the collaboration, saying that because they “were able to have that line of communication and talk in advance, a statute that’s been a problem for the state for 24 years, we got rid of it in six hours.” In audio obtained by NBC News, Kambli told GOP state attorneys general at a private gathering that the president’s legal team was “learning how to be offensive-minded” and “brought in a lot of people from state-AG world” conversant in the tactics.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment about Kambli’s remarks. According to NBC, a department spokesperson did not dispute that Kambli made the statements and said it was “pretty standard” for department lawyers to notify state attorneys general of federal lawsuits ahead of time.

The same day Kambli spoke to the gathering with GOP state attorneys general, Bondi and Paxton issued a joint news release celebrating the victory. Bondi praised Paxton “for swiftly working with us to halt a program that was treating Americans like second-class citizens in their own country.” For his part, Paxton said he was “proud to stand with Attorney General Bondi and the Trump Administration to stop an unconstitutional and un-American law that gave in-state tuition to illegal aliens.” In ensuing weeks, the Justice Department sought to repeat its Texas victory by filing suits challenging immigrant-tuition benefits in Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma. Oklahoma joined Texas in agreeing to end its benefits, while Democratic statewide officials in Minnesota and Kentucky are pushing back.

The effort was “coordinated and planned collusion to circumvent the people and Texas’ legislative process,” said Kristin Etter of the Texas Immigration Law Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group.

Marquette’s Nolette, an expert on state attorneys general, said Paxton, a three-term Republican attorney general, and Trump’s Justice Department have moved to a “new level” of using the courts to achieve favored policy outcomes. He said the collaboration between Paxton and the Justice Department is an expansion of the “sue and settle” approach that the Obama administration employed. In many of those cases, there was at least a provision of the federal Clean Air Act allowing suits against the EPA administrator for lax policing, Nolette said.

“With Paxton, however, he is working with U.S. DOJ to challenge Texas’s own laws. There are no statutes that allow, or even anticipate, this behavior,” he said.

Court tactics

Fresh off its success in dismantling the Texas Dream Act, the Trump administration moved swiftly to overturn a 71-year-old federal law banning nonprofits, including religious institutions, from endorsing political candidates.

The ban, known as the Johnson Amendment, did not specifically target religious groups, but, in the past three decades or so, evangelical churches that tend to align with the GOP have railed against it, saying it impermissibly muzzles their rights to free speech and exercise of religion.

In August 2024, the National Religious Broadcasters, the conservative group Intercessors for America, and two Texas churches — Sand Springs Church of Athens and First Baptist Church of Waskom, near the Louisiana line — sued in Tyler to overturn the Johnson Amendment’s strictures against secular nonprofits as well as churches.

On July 7, their case gained significant momentum when the Justice Department joined conservative lawyers for evangelical churches in filing a motion similar to the one used to end the Texas Dream Act. In both cases, the administration’s intervention set the stage for a consent judgment, an agreement reached between the plaintiffs and the defendants as part of a settlement submitted to the judge hearing the case.

In this instance, the Justice Department said the ban unconstitutionally prohibited nonprofit organizations from engaging in political speech and that religious leaders should be able to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The proposed settlement of the suit, however, only applied to houses of worship.

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the consent judgment proposed to U.S. District Judge J. Campbell “Cam” Barker in Tyler amounts to “improper collusion between … the Trump administration and some religious extremists to achieve a policy objective.” Her group supports keeping the Johnson Amendment.

Barker, a Trump appointee, is allowing interested people and groups to file amicus briefs in the case. So far, he has not adopted or rejected the agreement between the administration and the evangelical groups.

Trump, who has said he learned about the Johnson Amendment when he collected evangelical ministers’ blessings as he first ran for the White House in 2015, sought to end it through an executive order. His Capitol Hill allies also tried in 2017 to repeal the tax code’s constraint on churches’ political activity but failed to attract the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which supports preservation of the Johnson Amendment, said that, if approved by Campbell, the consent order would amount to an end-run around Congress — and one defying most Americans’ wishes.

“The majority of Americans in poll after poll support the rule and don’t want nonprofits, including houses of worship, turned into just another partisan mechanism that divides communities,” Hollman said.

One of the leading Christian conservative lawyers trying to overturn the Johnson Amendment, Michael P. Farris, who represents the National Religious Broadcasters, pushed back on allegations of collusion.

“The answer to your question is pretty simple. This case was filed on August 28, 2024,” or before Trump reclaimed the presidency, he said. “We will not reply further,” said Farris, who played a key role in drafting Paxton’s bid to have the Supreme Court overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to The New York Times.

“We are answering no media questions until the judge rules,” he wrote in an email to ProPublica and the Tribune.

Trump’s work with state officials to reach his desired outcomes is unprecedented and dangerous, said Jim Harrington, retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal group that advocates for voting rights and racial and economic justice. Filing “collusive lawsuits,” such as the ones over in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and revocation of tax-exempt status for churches that dabble in politics, and carefully selecting courts where the judges are likely to be sympathetic, lets Trump evade constraints created by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, Harrington said.

The administration’s tactics are a quick way to get around recalcitrant lawmakers but risk undermining the judiciary’s role as an independent branch of government, he said.

“Even conservative judges should raise their eyebrows about the undermining of the integrity of the judicial system that’s going on,” said Harrington, who has taught for 27 years as an adjunct law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is a really serious attack on our system.”

Race-based debates

Legal challenges to Texas’ new map have previously taken years to resolve, raising uncertainty over whether Saturday’s lawsuit will be decided before next year’s midterm election.

A decision will hinge, in part, on how the courts view an assertion by the Trump administration that the congressional map passed by the Legislature four years ago, and defended by GOP lawyers in court as race-neutral, suddenly must be changed because it paid too much attention to race.

Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that works on election- and democracy-related issues, said that the administration’s reasoning is flawed and that both the 2021 map and the new one discriminate against nonwhite voters.

The 2021 map drew intense criticism for its dispersal of nonwhite groups into districts where they’d have less influence. Dramatic gains among Texas’ Hispanic, Black and Asian American communities accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth. But lawmakers drew a map where 23 of the 38 congressional districts had white majorities, even though in the 2020 census, white and Hispanic Texans constituted roughly equal shares of the total population.

To reduce the threat to suburban GOP U.S. House members, diverse neighborhoods in Dallas and Collin counties were removed from districts that were becoming more favorable for Democrats and attached to sprawling rural districts dominated by white Republican voters.

“I’ve stated it, and I’ll state it again — we drew these maps race blind,” said the state Senate’s point person on redistricting at the time, Houston Republican Joan Huffman, who did not respond to a request for comment. “We have not looked at any racial data as we drew these maps, and to this day I have not looked at any racial data.”

During a four-week federal court trial in El Paso that ended last month, Texas officials denied practicing racial discrimination. The three judges hearing the case have delayed issuing a decision, citing the special session in Austin.

In their July 7 letter to Abbott, however, Justice Department lawyers Harmeet Dhillon and Michael Gates warned Texas to change its U.S. House map, which they said was overly biased in favor of creating districts that members of racial minorities could win.

Texas’ 2021 map for U.S. House districts has four suspect “coalition districts,” they wrote, citing three districts near Houston and one in Dallas-Fort Worth where Black and Hispanic voters combine to form a majority. In recent years, all four have been represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats.

Neither Abbott spokesperson Mahaleris, nor Baldassarre, the Justice Department spokesperson, responded to questions.

The Brennan Center’s Li disputed Dhillon and Gates’ characterization of recent rulings by federal judges. Courts haven’t forbidden states from drawing minority-coalition districts but merely stated that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to proactively create them, he said.

“Given that Texas has consistently said it didn’t consider race at all in 2021, there’s certainly not a case for dismantling any of these districts.”

Misty Harris of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

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