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Lone Star Project Founder and Director Matt Angle

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With Texas Democrats back in the state and in the House — one of them (Rep. Nicole Collier literally locked in there — and with a final vote on the GOP’s wildly gerrymandered congressional redistricting maps set for Wednesday, a “key citizen plaintiff group” is wasting no time getting the federal courts involved in the battle to keep Donald Trump from stealing away Democrat-held congressional seats in the 2026 midterms.

The Lone Star Project reports today (Tuesday, Aug. 19) that The Brooks Plaintiffs, joined by other plaintiff groups, has filed a motion with the sitting three-judge panel in the Western District Federal Court in El Paso.

Mark Gaber, legal counsel for the Brooks Plaintiffs, stated in the motion: “Plaintiffs respectfully request that the court schedule an expedited September preliminary injunction hearing on Texas’ soon-to-be-enacted congressional map. The map is egregiously unconstitutional, and its implementation must be immediately enjoined.”

The motion also asks the court to rule, finally, on the four-year-old voting rights challenges to the current Texas legislature maps, “which are widely considered among the worst legislative racial gerrymanders in the country,” Lone Star Report notes.

The motion reads: “It is highly prejudicial to plaintiffs, whose claims have been pending for close to four years and through two election cycles for the court to allow another election cycle pass without those claims being adjudicated because of unrelated developments.”

You can read the full motion online.

Of the move to file the motion pre-emptively, Lone Star Project writes, “The aggressive move to request a preliminary injunction hearing even before the Legislature has adopted the new congressional map should not be surprising. Texas Republicans collapsed to Trump’s demand for a new map weeks ago. Adoption of the map is certain.

“And the motion’s claim that the map is ‘egregiously unconstitutional’ is also no stretch,” Lone Star Project continues.  “The Trump map repeats the Texas Republican practice of achieving partisan gain through overt racial discrimination. Minority citizens make up over 60 percent of the Texas population, yet the Trump map cuts the number of Texas congressional districts where minority citizens can elect their candidate of choice from 13 of 38 to only 8 of 38.”

Lone Star Project Founder and Director Matt Angle said, “The single most important factor in Republicans gaining and holding one-party control in Texas over the past two decades has been their relentless attacks on minority voting strength. The strong move now by the Brooks Plaintiffs is not only fair, [it is] an essential response to repeated acts of intentional discrimination.”

— Tammye Nash