The redistricting battle in Texas has taken a turn. After state House Democrats returned from their walkout, they were informed on Monday that they would need a police escort when they leave the chamber floor in order to prevent them from fleeing the state again before the House reconvenes on Wednesday.

State Rep. Nicole Collier, however, refused to sign what Democrats are calling “permission slips,” and she spent the night on the chamber floor in protest.

“My constituents sent me to Austin to protect their voices and rights,” she said. “I refuse to sign away my dignity as a duly elected representative just so Republicans can control my movements and monitor me with police escorts.”

Collier added that her community, which is majority-minority, expects her to fight for fair representation.

“When I press that button to vote, I know these maps will harm my constituents — I won’t just go along quietly with their intimidation or their discrimination,” she said.

Dozens of Texas House Democrats fled to Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts on Aug. 3. They hoped that their absence would deny the chamber the quorum it needs to conduct business and, as a result, block the proposed congressional map, which is designed to aggressively favor the Republican Party in the 2026 midterm elections.
They later said they were prepared to return once their Republican colleagues adjourn the special legislative session and California releases a retaliatory map of its own.

Advocates have criticized the Texas map, unveiled just days before the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, for potentially chipping away at the political power of Texans of color.

Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones is one of the Democrats who left the state.

“The districts that are targeted overwhelmingly are Black districts [that are represented by Democrats],” Jones said at a press conference earlier this month. “They’re pitting [U.S. Rep.] Jasmine Crockett against [U.S. Rep.] Marc Veasey. And they’re pitting [U.S. Rep] Al Green against [the vacant] CD18, where there was a Black representative.”

For instance, in Green’s current district, which includes a portion of the Greater Houston area, the Black voting-age population would drop from 39% to 11%. Similarly, the Black voting-age population of Veasey’s Fort Worth-based district, currently 25%, would also drop.

On Aug. 14, California Gov. Gavin Newsom formally called on state lawmakers to approve a Nov. 4 ballot measure that would temporarily allow California to redraw its map without having to go through its independent commission.

Here’s more information about the latest developments in the Lone Star State — and beyond.

Why did Texas House Democrats flee the state?

For months, President Donald Trump has been pushing his allies in Texas to redraw district lines. Doing so could give the Republican Party five additional seats in the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections.

Historically, midterm elections haven’t been kind to the party of the sitting president. Trump is attempting to build on Republicans’ 219-212 majority in the House, where four seats are vacant. It wasn’t until after Trump called Abbott this summer that the Texas governor put redistricting on the agenda for a special legislative session, according to The Texas Tribune.

The 30-day session began on July 21. Its agenda included 18 items, from national disaster preparation and property taxes to redistricting.

Texas House Democrats slammed Abbott for putting items related to this summer’s deadly flooding on an agenda that they say was filled with partisan priorities. The lawmakers hoped to run out the clock on the session by leaving the state, though Abbott has already called another session.

Yet the battle over map-drawing is expected to have ramifications across the U.S. And some say that it could possibly trigger a redistricting arms race.

Democratic leaders in a number of other states — including California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York — have vowed to retaliate if Texas House Republicans continue with the unusual move to redistrict in the middle of the decade instead of after the next census in 2030.

And according to some legal scholars, the U.S. Supreme Court likely won’t provide a way out of the crisis.

“The court determined in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering presented a non-justiciable political question, so federal courts couldn’t intervene and hear those cases,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, told Capital B. “The only avenues for relief would be state courts or redistricting commissions.”

What are politicians saying about the Texas map?

Crockett, a vocal Democratic critic of the Trump administration, blasted state Republicans on Aug. 3, but said that the issue is “bigger than Texas.”

“This isn’t just about the five seats in Texas,” Crockett told MSNBC. “This is about a power grab. It’s about basically setting the tone for what Donald Trump will try to do throughout the country so that he can suppress the voices of Black and brown folk just so that he can stay in power.”

Texas state Rep. Ron Reynolds, one of the Democrats who left the state, echoed some of these thoughts, saying that he and his colleagues won’t “relent to an authoritarian president that wants to steal and racially gerrymander our Black and Brown districts.”

Trump has also pressured Republican state lawmakers in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio to redraw their maps. Some Democratic leaders have vowed to use every tactic at their disposal to prevent any mid-cycle redistricting.

“Everything is on the table,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has met with the Texas Democrats, said on July 30. “We’ve got to preserve democracy.”

Maryland House Majority Leader David Moon, also a Democrat, went even further.

He told The Associated Press on Aug. 1 that he would introduce a bill permitting mid-cycle redistricting if Texas continues down its current path because “we can’t have one state, especially a very large state, constantly trying to one-up and alter the course of congressional control while the other states sit idly by.”

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who runs the Democratic Party’s redistricting efforts and has traditionally pushed for a nonpartisan approach, seemed to give the green light — at least for now — to Democrats exploring map-drawing outside the census period.

“We have to understand that the nature of the threat that has been put upon the country through what they’re trying to do in Texas has really increased the danger to our democracy,” he told ABC News on Aug. 3. “As a result of that, we’ve got to do things that, perhaps in the past, I would not have supported.”

“I think that responsible Democrats in other states have to take into account the threat to our democracy, the need to preserve our democracy, so that we can ultimately try to heal it,” he added. “And I would hope that they will take steps that are, again, as I said, temporary but responsible.”

What does the walkout say about the Voting Rights Act?

To many advocates, the redistricting battle illustrates the precarious state of voting rights.

On Aug. 13, Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu, one of the Democrats who left the state, called the Texas map a “racist and unconstitutional gerrymandering effort.” He also said that it was an attempt to “stifle Americans who have had enough.”

This latest controversy erupted on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which some legal scholars say is standing on its last leg.

Over the past decade, the Voting Rights Act has been scaled back through various legal challenges. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a section of the act that required jurisdictions with histories of discrimination against Black voters to secure federal approval before changing its election laws.

“If we don’t know our history, we don’t know nothing,” Khadidah Stone, who was a plaintiff in a major 2023 Supreme Court case, recently told Capital B. “Especially if you aren’t a white man, you need to be putting yourself on the line fighting for voting rights just as much as anybody else.”

What’s the next move for Democrats?

Though many Democratic leaders are exploring retaliatory measures, not all of them can move as quickly as Texas House Republicans.

That’s because different states have different procedures for redrawing maps.

In Texas and a number of other Republican-controlled states, state legislatures handle redistricting. This means that in these states the task of redrawing maps is simpler and faster and that the party in power can almost guarantee that its lawmakers will be reelected.

Meanwhile, in many Democratic-controlled states, including California and New York, redistricting is done through an independent commission. This is meant to minimize partisan influence and maximize competitiveness, though reliance on this model also slows down the speed with which maps can be redrawn.

It remains to be seen how Democratic leaders’ countermoves will play out.

This story has been updated.