Texas State Rep. Vince Perez (D-El Paso) said he isn’t backing down from fighting what he calls an “overtly racist” redistricting map that would disenfranchise millions of non-white voters.
Perez, the House Democrats’ deputy whip, and dozens of other Democratic state lawmakers are facing threats of arrest and violence after leaving the state to deny House Republicans a quorum to gerrymander district lines.
If Republicans get their way, President Donald Trump will pick up five more GOP-leaning congressional seats in Texas ahead of the 2026 midterms. The new map will also take voting power away from Latino and Black voters.
Perez, speaking to HuffPost from an undisclosed location in Illinois, explained the dire implications of the new map. There are more than 11 million white residents in Texas, and the Latino population is roughly the same. Currently, Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional districts. But under the proposed new lines, Republicans could take 30.
The new redistricting would only give Latinos one-third of the political power of a white resident, Perez said.
“There’s a great disparity in the political representation,” Perez explained. “When you divide the 11 million by the 26 seats that are coming to white residents, that means that it only takes 435,000 white residents to get one congressional seat. But if you’re Latino, it takes 1.2 million to get one congressional seat. That means that white voters have three times the voting power of Latino voters.”
Perez said the voting power for the more than 3 million Black residents in Texas will be one-fifth that of a white voter. He called it “the worst map Texas has seen since before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965.”
“This is clearly a racially engineered map that I think all Americans would be appalled by if they really looked at the details of this,” he added.
Trump has not been coy about his blatant power grab, saying he’s “entitled” to pick up five seats.
“We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” Trump said on CNBC Tuesday. “We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas,” Trump said on CNBC Tuesday. “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”
Perez called the move “blatantly unconstitutional.”
“President Trump is trying to get five additional seats at all costs,” he said. “He doesn’t care how racist or discriminatory or segregationist this map is, he just wants the five additional seats. I think this map is so bad, Republicans have to know that this is clearly not only a violation of the Voting Rights Act, it’s blatantly unconstitutional.”
“They’re going to pass something that is overtly racist, and they’re going to leave it to the courts to clean up,” he added.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R) threatened to push for even more GOP-leaning congressional seats if Democrats continue to block the redistricting effort. And Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) has asked the FBI to track down and arrest Democrats who have left the state.
Earlier this week, Texas lawmakers were forced to evacuate their hotel in Chicago due to a bomb threat.
“This morning there was a bomb threat at our hotel. We were evacuated and everyone is safe,” Texas state Rep. John Bucey III wrote in a post online. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down.’ Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated.”
Perez said threats of arrest and violence won’t stop him and his colleagues from fighting for their constituents.
“Any sort of damage that they try to do to me ― arrest me, take me to wherever they want to take me ― pales in comparison to the damage that’s going to be done to generations of Texans who will live in a society where the color of their skin determines the value of their political representation. We cannot allow that to happen.”
