In 2002, U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a Republican, nearly lost his South Texas seat to Democrat Henry Cuellar. So when the GOP used its newfound majority in the state Legislature to redraw the voting maps the next year, they sawed through Cuellar’s hometown of Laredo and scattered Latino voters, who tended to vote Democratic, into other districts.
Latino advocacy groups sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the cornerstone provision of the law that prevents government bodies from diluting the voting power of specific groups. The Supreme Court found Texas lawmakers had taken away Latino voting power “because they were about to exercise it.”
“Latino voters were poised to elect their candidate of choice,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The State not only made fruitless the Latinos’ mobilization efforts but also acted against those Latinos who were becoming most politically active.”
Bonilla’s 23rd Congressional District was redrawn, and he lost to a Democrat. Just five years later, Latino voters flipped it back to Republican control; the seat was held most recently by GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales, who resigned last month.
Nina Perales, who argued that case at the Supreme Court, sees that district as an enduring testament to the power of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“A lot of the districts that we see in the map today were created to make sure that minority communities were not accidentally chopped up, and that minority communities could have a voice in some parts of the state,” Perales said. “In CD-23, when a majority of Latino voters support Gonzales, they get to elect Gonzales, and it’s irrelevant what Gonzales’ political party is.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2, raising the bar for voter dilution claims so high as to make the statute a “dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. Partisan gerrymandering, like the type used to try to keep Bonilla in power, is a defense against allegations of vote dilution, the conservative majority ruled. Under the new standard, plaintiffs will have to prove mapmakers intentionally set out to discriminate against voters on the basis of their race.
Even as it diminishes in power, the legacy of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is deeply woven into Texas’ political maps, reflected in districts carefully drawn to ensure voters of color could have a say. The landmark 1965 law also gave rise to a new generation of leaders, elected from Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. From that point on, both parties would have to look out for voters of color when drawing their maps — and if they didn’t, voters would have legal recourse.
Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, said his career has been “defined” by the Voting Rights Act. As a young Black state representative, he was elected in 2012 to a congressional district drawn to right what a court found to be a legislative wrong: Texas had divided communities of color in North Texas across multiple majority-white seats designed to elect Republicans. Fourteen years later, Veasey is now departing Congress after GOP lawmakers redrew the district out from under him last summer.
With Section 2 of the VRA now significantly weakened, it will be harder to make the legal case that this redraw had an improper racial, rather than partisan, intent.
The recent hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act created a disconcerting full circle moment for Veasey, who recalled that his district was originally drawn for Willow Park GOP Rep. Roger Williams. Under the new lines, Veasey noted, Williams “will end up representing my neighborhood after all.”
How Section 2 remade Texas’ maps
In 1965, when Texas’ favorite son, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he said the vote “is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”
The law included two pillars with significant implications for Texas — Section 2, which prohibits voter discrimination based on race, and Section 5, which requires jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to get preapproval from the Department of Justice for any voting changes, including new electoral maps.
Before the law went into effect, Texas had just two people of color in its congressional delegation — Reps. Henry Gonzalez of San Antonio and Kika De La Garza from the Rio Grande Valley, both of whom were Mexican-American. They each voted for the Voting Rights Act that would enable the ranks of Hispanic lawmakers to swell significantly.
In the 1970s, Barbara Jordan became the first Black member of Congress from Texas. As a state senator, Jordan helped draw the district she would soon be elected to, a seat that provides Black Houstonians the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice to this day. Three new representatives of color joined Texas’ congressional delegation in the 1980s. By the 1990s, there were 13 members of color who served at any point during the decade.
With two more election cycles to go, the 2020s have already reached a peak of 22 members of color, some of whom have represented white-majority districts.
During her sophomore term, in 1975, Jordan got Texas added to the list of states that needed preclearance for its maps. In 1982, Congress reinforced the law with an amendment that said maps ran afoul of the law if they had the effect of diluting racial or ethnic groups’ vote, even if that wasn’t the intent. These new provisions, the second of which overruled a Supreme Court decision to the contrary, opened the floodgates to litigation against Texas’ maps, at every level of government.
Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine/Public Domain
In each decade since the law’s passage, at least one of Texas’ maps has been found to have violated the law, and courts have ordered at least one new district to be drawn. The maps drawn in 2021 and 2025 are still under active litigation.
In the 1980s, plaintiffs successfully sued over the state Senate and state House maps under the Voting Rights Act, compelling redraws of legislative seats that were found to have diluted Black and Hispanic voting strength by packing them into just a few districts in the state’s urban counties. Through preclearance, the Department of Justice also got the courts to redraw districts that diluted Black and Hispanic voters’ strength, including two congressional seats in South Texas.
The effects of those redraws can still be seen in today’s maps.
“You had charges and claims against the South Texas district[s], because they were packed down against the border,” said Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and founder of the Lone Star Project who has been involved in Texas redistricting cases for decades. “That’s why now, you see South Texas districts running north and south instead of along the bottom. It’s because [of] the court rulings under the Voting Rights Act, that you couldn’t pack those districts down against the border.”
More subtle, but just as important, was the way the Voting Rights Act pushed Texas lawmakers to proactively consider voters of color when drawing their electoral maps, Perales said. In the 1990s, for example, the majority-Hispanic 28th and 29th Congressional Districts “were born out of an understanding that the state needed to comply with Section 2,” she said.
Having grasped that it would be better to comply on the front end than be hauled into court later, the Legislature used to bring MALDEF and other groups in around the decennial census to train legislators on how to draw maps that met the law’s requirements.
“Part of that legal training was always on the obligation to avoid discriminating against minority voters under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” she said. “The guidance was, don’t inadvertently chop up minority communities when you’re drawing lines, because even if it’s inadvertent, it could be a legal problem.”
In 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated preclearance for most jurisdictions, including Texas. The state immediately reinstated a voter ID law that had been caught up under Section 5. The decision also freed Texas’ 2011 electoral maps from preclearance, though some
