Trump Admin Asks SCOTUS To Block CA’s Congressional Map

The Trump administration has joined the California GOP in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Golden State’s new gerrymandered congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The Department of Justice filed a brief with SCOTUS on Thursday in support of the California Republican Party’s emergency application to pause a lower court ruling permitting the contested map to go into effect. The latter alleged that the new map — which further gerrymandered the state in Democrats’ favor and was approved by voters last year — is unconstitutional because California “expressly used race as the ‘predominant factor’ in placing ‘a significant number of voters within or without’ Congressional District 13.”

“California’s recent redistricting is tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” the Trump DOJ’s filing reads. “This Court should immediately enjoin, pending appeal, California’s use of the Prop 50 map that displaced the independent commission’s 2021 map.”

In their filings, the DOJ and California GOP highlight remarks from Paul Mitchell, the political data scientist tapped by California officials to draw the new map. As alleged by the former, Mitchell “candidly admitted that he drew district boundaries to ‘”ensure that the Latino districts” are “bolstered in order to make them most effective, particularly in the Central Valley”‘ … where District 13 is located.”

“[T]he mapmaker’s statements are direct evidence that race, not politics, predominated in the drawing of District 13,” the DOJ brief reads.

The Trump administration also cited the observations of Judge Kenneth Lee, who dissented from the lower court panel’s decision to uphold the new map. They specifically noted Lee’s assessment that Mitchell “went to great lengths to avoid testifying under oath about how he drew the California map—even though he publicly talked about it to the press and interest groups before this lawsuit.”

“And unlike the plaintiffs in the Texas case, applicants and the United States provided three alternative maps … each of which achieved California’s stated partisan goals for District 13 without ‘separating its citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race,’” the DOJ brief reads. “Under this Court’s precedents, that direct and indirect evidence is more than enough to overcome the presumption of good faith … and establish that race predominated in drawing the boundaries of District 13.”

While the Trump administration acknowledged that California’s motivation in drawing a new map likely stems from its desire to counteract recent “political gerrymander[ing]” in Texas, it reaffirmed that such an “overarching political goal is not a license for district-level racial gerrymandering.”

“That is plainly what occurred in District 13,” the administration asserted.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan — who oversees applications from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — asked California to file a brief responding to plaintiffs’ request by Jan. 29.

The California GOP and DOJ’s request to pause the Golden State’s map comes more than a month after the Supreme Court temporarily paused a lower court injunction that attempted to prevent Texas’ new congressional map from being used in the 2026 elections. In its 6-3 order, the high court determined that the lower court in that case “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

Associate Justice Samuel Alito authored a concurring opinion in the matter, in which he (as well as Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) noted the “strong inference that [Texas’] map was indeed based on partisanship, not race.” The Lone Star State’s new map could help Republicans net five additional seats in the midterms.