A federal court on Tuesday blocked Texas from using its new congressional map, which is expected to yield five additional GOP-held House seats, in the 2026 midterm elections. The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that Texas must adhere with the congressional districts passed in 2021. “The Court orders that the 2026 congressional election in Texas shall proceed under the map that the Texas Legislature enacted in 2021,” the court said, according to The New York Times. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he will appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The radical left is once again trying to undermine the will of the people. The Big Beautiful Map was entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliations of Texas. For years, Democrats have engaged in partisan redistricting intended to eliminate Republican representation. Democratic states across the country, from California to Illinois to New York, have systematically reduced representation of Republican voters in their congressional delegations,” Paxton said. “But when Republicans respond in kind, Democrats rely on false accusations of racism to secure a partisan advantage. I will be appealing this decision to the Supreme Court of the United States, and I fully expect the Court to uphold Texas’s sovereign right to engage in partisan redistricting,” he continued. The Texas Tribune has more: The decision is a major blow for Republicans, in Texas and nationally, who pushed through this unusual mid-decade redistricting at the behest of President Donald Trump. They were hoping the new map would yield control of 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts — up from the 25 they currently hold — and help protect the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House. “The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” U.S. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the ruling striking down the new lines. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” Civil rights groups had filed a lawsuit to invalidate the new congressional map. “Today’s ruling is a victory for Black voters and other communities of color in Texas,” said Robert Weiner, the director of the voting rights project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, according to The New York Times. “It is a clear violation of the Constitution to design a plan to purposefully dismantle districts where Black and Brown voters together are a majority of voters. That’s discrimination by design and that is illegal,” he added. “A federal court just stopped one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen,” Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu said in a statement. “Greg Abbott and his Republican cronies tried to silence Texans’ voices to placate Donald Trump, but now have delivered him absolutely nothing,” he added. More from The New York Times: The court’s decision is the latest setback to Mr. Trump’s attempt to tilt more states’ congressional maps in Republicans’ favor before the 2026 midterms. Last week, Republicans in Indiana announced that they would not be taking up the president’s request to redraw the state’s map, drawing blowback from Mr. Trump on social media over the weekend. At the outset of this year’s sudden and unusual push to redraw congressional maps in the middle of the decade, it appeared that Mr. Trump and Republicans had the upper hand, with their party in control of the mapmaking process in more states. But since Texas passed its maps in August, Democrats have countered with gerrymanders of their own in states like California, with Virginia likely to follow. Should the federal court decision in Texas hold, Democrats could find themselves ahead in the redistricting battle. At the same time, the Texas court decision signals that litigation could still be a bulwark against both parties’ efforts to redraw congressional maps ahead of the midterms. Courts have long been the venue for civil rights groups and political parties to challenge the validity of maps, and nearly every newly passed congressional map this year is already facing legal challenges.