El Paso will be the site of hearings in October that could help shape whether Republicans or Democrats control the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.
A three-judge panel will hear arguments starting Oct. 1 and continuing through Oct. 10, if needed, over the legality of a Texas congressional redistricting plan at the Albert Armendariz Sr. United States Courthouse in Downtown El Paso, according to a schedule handed down Thursday by Senior U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama of El Paso. The order includes a rare Saturday session.
The panel includes Guaderrama, of the Western District of Texas; Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals; and Judge Jeffrey Brown, a district judge in the Southern District of Texas.
The panel has been hearing challenges to a lawsuit stemming from Texas’ 2021 redistricting plan. Federal law requires three-judge panels, rather than a single judge, to determine challenges to the consitutionality of redistricting plans.
Smith was nominated to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican. He voted in 2011 to strike down a Republican-drawn congressional map approved by the Texas Legislature and signed by then-Gov Rick Perry.
Brown was nominated by Republican President Donald Trump. Guaderrama was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama.
The hearings in October will focus on whether to issue a preliminary injunction to block the redistricting. The judges are on a tight schedule because candidates can begin filing for the 2026 primaries in December, so district boundaries have to be set by then.
Any decisions by the three-judge panel are almost certain to be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In an effort to preserve a narrow Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, Trump pushed the state GOP to draw new boundaries for the state’s 38 seats in a way that could give the party the likelihood of winning five additional seats. Republicans currently control 25 of those seats.
Meeting in a special session in Austin, the Legislature passed the redistricting plan with partyline votes. Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives disrupted the initial special session with a walkout in July that denied a quorum necessary to vote on the plan, but they returned earlier this month and the redistricting plan was swiftly approved in the state House and Senate.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed the redistricting bill Friday.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights advocacy group, is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuits challenging the 2021 and 2025 redistricting efforts.
“The new Plan C2333 abandons the State’s obligation under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act to provide Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in elections and elect their candidate of choice. The new map weakens or completely eliminates the ability of Latino voters to elect their preferred candidates in existing Latino majority districts across the state,” LULAC attorneys said in a complaint filed Thursday. “The new district boundaries intentionally discriminate against Latino voters, including assigning them to districts based on their race to satisfy arbitrary numerical targets and without sufficient justification under the Voting Rights Act.”
During the debate over the redistricting plan, Republican lawmakers repeatedly stressed the effort was done to give GOP candidates better chances of winning more congressional seats. They denied taking race or ethnicity into account.
The Supreme Court has said drawing district boundaries for partisan gain is generally legal, while doing so for racial or ethnic reasons is not.
The redistricting plan doesn’t change the partisan balance of the two congressional districts that include El Paso County, but it does make some important changes. Most notably, Horizon City – which swung hard to support Republican candidates in 2024 – is being moved from El Paso Democrat Veronica Escobar’s 16th Congressional District to the 23rd Congressional District of San Antonio Republican Tony Gonzales.
Republicans considered whether to redraw El Paso County lines to target Escobar’s seat, but eventually focused their efforts to gain new GOP seats in South Texas, Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The redistricting map in the aborted first special session would have moved key areas of Fort Bliss and El Paso International Airport to Gonzales’ district. That plan was a replay of a 2021 redistricting effort that was blocked amid opposition by a bipartisan group of El Paso business and political leaders, drawing harsh backlash from Gonzales.
The redistricting map introduced in the second special session – and eventually approved by the state House and Senate and signed by Abbott – kept the airport and the Fort Bliss headquarters in Escobar’s district.
