Texas GOP Hopes to Dilute Asian American Voting Power — Again
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 22 Jul, 2025

The sole purpose of GOP effort at redistricting would be to deprive Asian Americans and other minority groups of the voting power to which they’re constitutionally entitled.

The Texas state legislature convened on Monday with a mission to directly undermine democracy. Their stated goal — one that President Trump has repeatedly expressed out loud — is to create new congressional maps that will help net as many new seats for the Republican Party as possible. 

There is effectively one way to pull off such an act: gerrymandering that dilutes the power of minority voters including Hispanics, Blacks and Asian Americans.

2011-2021

The current scheme has roots that reach back at least four years to 2021, the last time that Texas redistricted.  For context, redistricting typically coincides with the release of the US Census, which is taken at the start of every decade (ie 2000, 2010, 2020).

As CBS news explained, “The 2020 Census showed that people of color accounted for 95% of Texas' population growth over the prior decade” and that “the number of Asian Americans in Texas grew by nearly 92,000 people.” 

In effect, even though the maps drawn a decade earlier in 2011 were done with the intent of benefitting Republicans, Asian, Black and Hispanic populations grew so quickly that the districts intended to be safely Republican were no longer so. 

As redistricting expert Michael Li stated, "When you gerrymander, you're making a bet that you know what the politics of the future will look like” but the rate of growth by minority groups was effectively too much for Republicans to predict.  “It's just changing too fast."

So the 2021 plan was to further split up the minority communities.  Per NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, where Li works:

“Suburban communities of color in places like Fort Bend County were ruthlessly divided — some voters of color were kept in existing districts, while others were surgically moved into Democratic-held swing districts.”

Fort Bend’s Asian American neighborhoods were split into three different districts: CD-7, DC-9, and CD-22.  By being spread out, they do not have the numbers to elect a single AAPI member of Congress. There are none in the entire state of Texas.

The result of the 2021 redistricting was a net gain of at least two GOP-held seats. To give you a sense of how undemocratic the results were: Republicans locked in 25 seats across the state compared to 12 for Democrats, plus one vacancy following the death of Congressman Sylvester Turner. This means that 66% of Texans are represented by a Republican in Congress even though only 56% of Texans voted for a Republican.

2025

And, yet, President Trump and Republicans are not satisfied. 

The President told reporters on July 15 that the goal is “A very simple redraw [where] we pick up five seats.”  He was presumably talking about five seats nationally, with a couple of them coming from the Texas redraw.  Republicans currently hold an eight-seat majority in the US House but it will likely shrink to six following two special elections this Fall in which Democrats are favored. 

As I mentioned earlier, map redrawing typically happens at the top of the decade.  Pulling this off now required a few additional steps.

Enter: Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division Harmeet K. Dhillon, one of a handful of high profile Indian Americans in the Trump administration. 

Even though the current Texas maps are the creation of the Republican Party, Dhillon is challenging them on the grounds that four districts were created by taking race into account, which is unconstitutional.  This argument feels like something of a paradox. The republicans making the maps explicitly said that they had political affiliation in mind rather than race though, clearly, race was very much at the focus of their redistricting.  The Trump administration may feel like their own maps gave non-White voters too much power while many of those voters feel the opposite way. 

One of the four districts being challenged is CD-9, which has a 9.7% population of Asian American voters, double the statewide average of 5%. TX-33, which is 8.1% Asian, is also being challenged.  The other two districts in question are TX-18 and TX-29.

While it remains to be seen what exactly the GOP is planning, it would be no surprise to see the Asian communities split up even further. 

The risks

There are a few ways in which the plan could backfire.

The first is a repeat of 2011.  In an overzealous effort to skew the congressional map in their favor, Texas republicans failed to account for population growth including within the AAPI community. 

We may now see the same efforts backfire again within the next few years.  Since 2010, nearly one in five new Texans has been Asian American and the trend doesn’t appear to be slowing. 

Of course, it’s possible if not likely that the GOP is concerned only with winning next year’s midterms and may yet again find a justification to redistrict shortly after should it become clear that population growth is threatening their gains.

Their plans may also be deemed unconstitutional.  This is less of a concern given that any demands that their new maps be thrown out would likely not happen until after the 2026 midterms.  And as with many issues conservatives may well get the final say given their 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court. 

In 2017, a three-judge federal court ruled that the 2017 maps were illegal.  The US Supreme Court later reversed most of the ruling. 

Finally, California Governor Gavin Newsom has pledged to adopt the same gerrymandering tactics in his own state, should Texas move ahead with their own plans.  While such a move by Newsom could of course offset the changes in Texas, it is unclear whether his own party would go along with it. 

Now, as we wait for the results of Texas’s latest, the question appears not to be “whether” the GOP will further strip non-white voters of their political agency, but “how.”