Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta speaks during a press conference Monday, flanked by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to announce that the Justice Department was suing Texas over its recent redistricting plan.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Texas on Monday, charging that the state's redistricting plans for the congressional delegation and the state legislature discriminate against minority voters.
The department contends that the state's redistricting plans violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a complaint filed in the Western District of Texas.
At a press conference, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said, "Our complaint today alleges that the redistricting plans approved by the Texas state legislature and signed into law by the governor will deny Black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the voting process and elect representatives of their choice."
She went on to say, "Our complaint also contends that some of those districts were designed with discriminatory purpose."
The complaint was labeled "absurd" by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, who described it as "the Biden administration's latest tactic to influence Texas votes."
"I am certain that our legislature's redistricting decisions will be found to be legal, and that this absurd attempt to manipulate democracy will fail," Paxton said.
According to the Justice Department's lawsuit, Texas' population rose by around 4 million people over the last decade, with minorities accounting for 95% of the growth. However, it claims that the state legislature failed to reflect the rising minority electorate in its redistricting plans, which were approved in a hasty and opaque process with little chance for public participation, according to the department.
"Despite the huge rise in the number and proportion of eligible Latino and Black voters in Texas," Gupta stated, "the recently passed redistricting plans will not provide minority voters with an equitable chance to elect representatives of their choosing." "Instead, our analysis found that Texas' redistricting plans will dilute the enhanced minority vote power that these major demographic shifts should have produced."
According to the lawsuit, Texas was given two extra congressional seats as a result of the last census, and the state structured those congressional districts "to have Anglo voting majorities."
It also claims that Texas "surgically excised" minority communities from the Dallas-Fort Worth area by attaching them to heavily Anglo rural counties and that the state "intentionally eliminated a Latino electoral opportunity" in a West Texas congressional district where courts had found Voting Rights Act violations in the previous two redistricting cycles.
"This is not the first time Texas has taken steps to limit minority individuals' voting rights," the department claims in its complaint. "Texas has passed redistricting schemes that violate the Voting Rights Act decade after decade."
Texas is also being sued by the Department of Justice for its new restricted voting legislation.