Raw politics now drives enforcement at the Justice Department's Civil Rights division

The Hill

11-08-2025

The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department has hit a new low in manipulating federal law enforcement to further the president's political schemes. On July 7, 2025, the DOJ wrote the Texas governor a letter pressuring him to re-gerrymander Texas's already discriminatory congressional map. Texas obliged, triggering a potential nationwide race to the bottom as states seek to imitate Texas's gambit or counteract it with their own gerrymandering.
In June 2025, with the president's tiny House majority at risk in the midterm elections, the Trump White House asked Texas to redraw the Texas congressional map to yield more Republican House seats. Less than a month later, the head of the Civil Rights Division followed up with the Texas governor, claiming that four majority-minority districts were racially gerrymandered in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The DOJ's letter demanded that Texas redistrict, or the DOJ could sue.
Normally, before advancing a serious and difficult charge like racial gerrymandering, the Civil Rights Division conducts a careful preliminary investigation. It seeks information from the state and consults with voters and advocates. Here, it appears, no meaningful inquiry occurred, which is not surprising. There were only three lawyers left in the Voting Section. The rest were driven out by the new leadership's hostility to civil rights and anyone who had tried to protect them.
The legal rationale in the letter, moreover, was feeble; it argued that under a recent Fifth Circuit ruling in Petteway v. Galveston County, coalition districts, where different minority groups combine to form a majority, 'run afoul [of] the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment.' That is not even close to the court's holding. The court interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to allow discrimination claims by a racial minority that has a majority in a district, but not claims by minority groups that join together to form a majority. The case does not address racial gerrymandering, much less suggest that 'coalition districts' violate the Fourteenth Amendment.
The sham legal rationale could not camouflage that the DOJ was instructing Texas to dismantle congressional districts where minority voters held a majority. The Supreme Court has suggested that deliberately breaking up coalitions with minority voters raises 'serious questions under both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.'
Previously, the DOJ and private plaintiffs (including the Texas NAACP, represented by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law) sued Texas alleging that its 2021 redistricting plan discriminated against people of color — notinfavorof them. When the case was tried in May and June 2025, the state's witnesses, despite damning statistical evidence, repeatedly denied under oath that race played any role in its redistricting. Nevertheless, DOJ's racial accusations led the governor to include redistricting in a special legislative session on July 21. And the governor said explicitly that he was targeting coalition districts — a purposeful, focused effort to reduce representation of minority voters.
Strikingly, in the ongoing litigation on the 2021 redistricting plan, the DOJ dropped its discrimination claims in March 2025, six months after the Pettewaydecision on coalition districts. In doing so, the department never even hinted that the Democratic, majority minority districts it disparaged in the July 7 letter were racially gerrymandered to favor minorities.
So, what happened between March and July 7 to prompt such extraordinary new allegations of racial gerrymandering in the 2021 plan? Plainly, not an investigation. Nor any change in the law. Pettewaywas old news. And not any significant factual revelations. The only relevant intervening event was Donald Trump's call for redistricting in Texas to help him politically in the House in November 2026.
The Civil Rights Division's attempt to further the president's political scheme was sordid and reprehensible, especially given Texas's long history of racial discrimination in voting. At least since Watergate, the Justice Department has tried to insulate its legal judgments from political influence and to shield investigatory decisions from partisanship. Attorney General Edward Levi, appointed by President Ford to restore the Justice Department's integrity after Watergate, warned that: 'Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of the goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.'
Apparently, the current leadership of the Civil Rights Division does not agree. They appear to regard themselves as White House staffers executing Donald Trump's personal agenda, even extending that role to nonpartisan career employees.
The political manipulation reflected in the July 7 letter and its inversion of the Division's anti-discrimination mission reflects this approach. And there is no reason to believe the malfeasance will stop with Texas or redistricting, as Trump seeks new ways to undermine the electoral system. The approach is wrong and destructive. It demeans standards that have guided the department for at least 50 years. It undermines the department's credibility and effectiveness. And it threatens our democracy.
As Attorney General Levi warned, the law cannot be 'an instrument of partisan purpose.' The Justice Department must reclaim its independence.
Robert N. Weiner is the Voting Rights Project director at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. He was previously senior counsel in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.