EL PASO—Day nine of Texas’ redistricting trial saw prolonged and contentious questioning of the State’s expert witness, Dr. Sean Trende, despite a prior informal courtroom agreement to keep cross-examination brief. Following Trende’s questioning, both parties made final arguments.
At issue is Texas’ latest congressional map, which creates five new GOP-opportunity districts. The case will determine whether Texas’ new boundaries are used in the 2026 midterm election.
Plaintiffs suing over the map include the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus (MALC).
The Plaintiffs’ have argued that Texas’s latest legislative maps discriminate against minority voters. However, the State contends the process was strictly guided by partisan objectives.
Dr. Sean Trende
One of the Plaintiffs’ attorneys, Mark Gaber, extended his questioning well beyond the previously agreed-upon time limit. Trende was forced to adjust his travel plans and endure repetitive questioning over how else the map “could have” been drawn while still achieving partisan objectives.
Visibly irritated, Trende sparred with Gaber. When asked if a precinct change “made sense,” Trende dryly noted, “I’m not sure if it makes sense but I see you’re doing it.”
At one point, Gaber asked Trende if a certain adjustment satisfied partisan criteria. Trende disagreed, accusing Gaber of using different criteria from the mapmaker to achieve under 50 percent minority citizen voting age population (CVAP) while still achieving a partisan outcome.
After Gaber denied having a racial target, Trende leaned into the microphone and sternly said, “I don’t believe you.”
State attorney Ryan Kercher said such exercises would only be fair to conduct with mapmaker Adam Kincaid, given his familiarity with the constraints, and noted Plaintiffs had already tried this with Kincaid and, in his words, “were ran through a buzz saw.”
The Plaintiffs sought to challenge Trende’s testimony that discredited Dr. Matt Barreto’s report, which alleged racial—rather than partisan—gerrymandering. Trende highlighted major methodological flaws in Barreto’s work, including undisclosed inputs and outputs, a lack of diagnostics, and low plan diversity.
While Barreto claims to have generated 51,000 maps, Trende found most of them to be duplicates—a result of not running diagnostics. Rather than 51,000 maps, only 107 unique maps were generated—an extremely low and unreliable diversity of map samples.
Barreto had alleged that because the 2025 map has 440 Voting Tabulation District splits, it must be racial gerrymandering. Trende highlighted that these splits often follow natural boundaries such as interstates, railroads, and waterways—a traditional mapping practice. He contends that these splits would have constituted “pretty incompetent” racial gerrymandering when analyzed against racial data.
Plaintiffs pointed out that sometimes racial groups cluster to one side of a railroad track or waterway, and that Kincaid may have been using natural boundaries to racial gerrymander.
Plaintiffs’ Closing Arguments
Six attorneys presented closing arguments for the Plaintiffs, though lead lawyer Chad Dunn notably did not speak.
David Fox of Elias Law Group, representing the Gonzales Plaintiffs, opened by claiming the 2025 redistricting process was driven by a Department of Justice letter referencing the Petteway decision, which removed protections for minority coalition districts.
He argued that if such districts were dismantled because they were coalition-based, the state acted with racial intent. Judge Jerry Smith challenged him on whether Plaintiffs could still win if state map drawer Adam Kincaid’s testimony was truthful. Fox said yes but mischaracterized Kincaid’s statements, claiming that even without reviewing racial data, he must have relied on prior knowledge of racial composition—contradicting Kincaid’s repeated testimony.
MALDEF attorney Nina Perales alleged that Kincaid intentionally crafted districts to appear just above 50 percent minority CVAP while preventing Hispanic voters from electing their candidate of choice.
Paired with Fox’s contention, the theory suggests that Kincaid was able to recall Texas’ 2021 block-level racial data from memory, and artificially create multiple districts just above 50 percent minority CVAP. This was widely dismissed as implausible.
Perales also cited State Rep. Todd Hunter’s “nothing is a coincidence” comment about minority CVAP districts, though Hunter’s full quote explains that such figures resulted from a long list of traditional redistricting considerations. The list did not include race, and Hunter has denied racial considerations repeatedly.
She further invoked Voting Rights Act claims of unintentional vote dilution, but Judge Smith reminded her that only intentional racial gerrymandering is relevant to the preliminary injunction hearings.
Attorney Gary Bledsoe, who was not in court but prepared a statement to be read, argued that majority-black Democrat districts were “butchered” while majority-white Democrat districts were preserved. However, Judge Smith referenced Kincaid’s “convincing” explanation that partisan constraints dictated those choices.
Former Obama official Robert Weiner mistakenly claimed that the new Congressional District 18 “does not perform” as a black-majority district before being corrected by Judge Smith, and admitting that it actually does perform.
Sean McCaffity of MALC concluded with a moral appeal to the judges, acknowledging it can be hard to make a decision implying that somebody is racist, but that “sometimes the hard thing is the right thing.”
Mark Gaber ended by invoking Gov. Greg Abbott’s CNN comments as evidence of racial intent—even though Abbott neither drew the maps nor served in the Legislature, and Kincaid denied his characterization.
State’s Closing Arguments
Ryan Kercher, Chief of Special Litigation for the Texas attorney general’s office, delivered a forceful closing argument, rejecting the Plaintiffs’ racial gerrymandering claims.
Kercher said the push for 2025 redistricting began not with a DOJ letter, but after President Donald Trump publicly called for flipping five congressional seats—a moment he saw firsthand during the 2021 redistricting trial.
Plaintiffs immediately assumed lawmakers would take action on redistricting in response to the President. They made no mention of race at the time, which Kercher argued was telling under legal precedent that initial, unfiltered reactions are most reliable.
He stressed that Plaintiffs’ own witnesses acknowledged the correlation between race and partisanship, but to prove intentional racial discrimination they must separate the two—something they failed to do.
Kercher warned against the double standard of allowing Democrats to gerrymander because their base includes more minorities, while denying Republicans the same right because their base is predominantly white. He framed the issue as one of equal protection.
The 2025 map, he said, is universally recognized as a partisan success, and questioned why a Republican mapmaker like Kincaid would jeopardize that advantage with racial considerations when Trump’s target was partisan.
Kercher noted that aggressive gerrymanders are common nationwide, citing Democrat control in states like Massachusetts, which has not elected a Republican to Congress in decades.
He closed by underscoring the high legal threshold Plaintiffs must meet to prove racial gerrymandering and secure a preliminary injunction—concluding they have fallen well short.
Next Steps
The three-judge panel will determine whether a preliminary injunction is issued.
Both parties are asking for a ruling as quickly as possible—ideally before the candidate filing period opens on November 8 for the 2026 elections.
If the injunction is granted, Plaintiffs want the State to revert to the 2021 maps—the same maps which they had previously alleged were racist. The State would prefer an opportunity to redraw the 2025 maps in a way which satisfies the Plaintiffs’ concerns.
Should the court deny a preliminary injunction, the 2025 maps will be in effect. The trial would then continue concerning both the racial gerrymandering and vote dilution claims—perhaps not until January 2027, according to the Plaintiffs.
An appeal to the Supreme Court is expected regardless of the judges’ decision.
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