WASHINGTON — The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court turns on a question that often divides judges: Were the voting districts drawn based on politics, or race?

The answer, likely to come in a few days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees appeals from Texas, put a temporary hold on a judicial ruling that branded the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racial gerrymander.”

The state’s lawyers asked for a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have a Dec. 8 deadline to file for election.

They said the judges violated the so-called Purcell principle by making major changes in the election map “midway through the candidate filing period,” and that alone calls for blocking it.

Texas Republicans have reason to be confident the court’s conservative majority will side with them.

“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote for a 6-3 majority last year in a South Carolina case.

That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters in or out of newly drawn congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.

In 2019, the conservatives upheld partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that drawing election districts is a “political question” left to states and their lawmakers, not judges.

All the justices — conservative and liberal — say drawing districts based on the race of the voters violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But the conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.

They also looked poised to restrict the reach of the Voting Rights Act in a pending case from Louisiana.

For decades, the civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their choice.”

The Trump administration joined in support of Louisiana’s Republicans in October and claimed the voting rights law has been “deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” that should be ended.

If so, election law experts warned that Republican-led states across the South could erase the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats who serve in Congress.

The Texas mid-decade redistricting case did not look to trigger a major legal clash because the partisan motives were so obvious.

In July, President Trump called for Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts in order to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.

At stake was control of the closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.

Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and by the end of August, he signed into law a map with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.

But last week federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared to be unconstitutional.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”

He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”

This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.

She said the Trump administration views these as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.

The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for the special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.

Voting rights advocates saw a violation.

“They said their aim was to get rid of the coalition districts. And to do so, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project.

Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” in believing these coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on her advice as basis for redrawing its election map.

He was joined by a second district judge in putting the new map on hold and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that had been drawn by the same Texas Republicans.

The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee on the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas.”

The “obvious reason for the 2025 redistricting, of course, is partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”

Most federal cases go before a district judge, and they may be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then the Supreme Court.
Election-related cases are different. A three-judge panel weighs the facts and issues a ruling, which then goes directly to the Supreme Court to be affirmed or reversed.

Late Friday, Texas attorneys filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to put on hold the decision by Brown.

The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal noted that Texas is not alone in pursuing a political advantage by redrawing its election maps.

“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset the new Texas districts, despite Democrats already controlling 43 out of 52 of California’s congressional seats,” they said.

They argued that the “last-minute disruption to state election procedures — and resulting candidate and voter confusion —demonstrates” the need to block the lower court ruling.

Election law experts question that claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The state opted for a fast-track, mid-decade redistricting at the behest of Trump.

On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should deny it.

“The election is over a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’ congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.

“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts on account of their racial composition,” he said, and the judges heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.

In recent election disputes, however, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from new judicial rulings that came too close to the election.

Granting a stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP friendly map for the 2026 election.

The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal questions early next year.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at bolstering U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives as it unveiled its new “Genesis Mission” to accelerate AI use for scientific purposes. 

The “Genesis Mission” will direct the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and their national labs to work with private companies to share federal data sets, advanced supercomputing capabilities, and scientific facilities. 

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“The private sector has launched artificial intelligence at huge scale, but with a little bit different focus – on language, on business, on processes, on consumer services,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told reporters Monday. “What we’re doing here is just pivoting those efforts to focus on scientific discovery, engineering advancements. And to do that, you need the data sets that are contained across our national labs.” 

Additionally, the executive order instructs the Department of Energy and national labs to create an integrated platform aimed at expediting scientific discovery, in an attempt to connect AI capability with scientists, engineers, technical staff, and the labs’ scientific instruments, according to a White House official.

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Trump hinted an effort like this was in the works during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum Wednesday in Washington, where he said the U.S. would work “to build the largest, most powerful, most innovative AI ecosystem in the world.”

The effort comes after Trump issued an AI policy document called “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan” in July. The document laid out a framework focused on accelerating AI innovation, ensuring the U.S. is the leader in international AI diplomacy and security, and using the private sector to help build up and operate AI infrastructure. 

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Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also currently considering other executive orders pertaining to AI, and more executive orders could be on the horizon. 

For example, Fox News Digital previously reported that the White House was gearing up an executive order instructing the Justice Department to sue states that adopt their own laws regulating AI. 

Trump appeared to address the initiative at the U.S-Saudi Investment Forum as well, claiming that a series of AI regulations imposed at the state level would prove a “disaster.”

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“And we are going to work it so that you’ll have a one approval process to not have to go through 50 states,” Trump said. 

Fox News’ Amanda Macias and Dennis Collins contributed to this report. 

Southern California lawmakers are demanding answers from U.S. Homeland Security officials following the deaths of two Orange County residents and nearly two dozen others while in federal immigration custody.

In a letter Friday to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, U.S. Reps. Dave Min (D-Irvine) and Judy Chu (D-Pasadena) pointed to the deaths of 25 people so far this year while being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The number of in-custody deaths has reached an annual record since the agency began keeping track in 2018.

Two Mexican immigrants — who had long made their homes in Orange County and were sent to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center north of Hesperia — were among the deaths.

“These are not just numbers on a website, but real people — with families, jobs, and hopes and dreams — each of whom died in ICE custody,” the lawmakers wrote. “The following cases illustrate systemic patterns of delayed treatment, neglect, and failure to properly notify families.”

Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, died Sept. 22 about a month after being apprehended while working at the Fountain Valley Auto Wash, where he had worked for 15 years, according to a GoFundMe post by his family.

He had lived in Westminster since he was 4 years old, and had previously been protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. The Times previously reported that his application for continued protection was not renewed in 2016.

Ayala-Uribe’s relatives and members of Congress have alleged that he was denied proper medical care after being taken into ICE custody in August. Adelanto detention staff members were aware of his medical crisis, according to internal emails obtained by The Times. But Ayala-Uribe initially was taken back to his Adelanto dorm room, where he waited for another three days before being moved to Victor Valley Global Medical Center in Victorville.

ICE officials acknowledged that Ayala-Uribe died at the Victorville hospital while waiting for surgery for an abscess on his buttock. The suspected cause of the sore was not disclosed.

Ayala-Uribe’s cause of death is under investigation, ICE has previously said.

A second man — Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, 56, who lived near Costa Mesa — died Oct. 23, about a week after being detained.

ICE said Garcia-Aviles was arrested Oct. 14 in Santa Ana by the U.S. Border Patrol for an outstanding warrant, and eventually sent to the Adelanto center. ICE said in a previous statement that he was only at the Adelanto facility for a few hours before he was taken to the Victorville hospital for “suspected alcohol withdrawal symptoms.”

His condition rapidly worsened.

The deaths have focused attention on the treatment of detained immigrants as well as long-standing concerns about medical care inside Adelanto, one of the largest federal immigration detention centers in California. The situation raises broader concerns about whether immigration detention centers throughout the country are equipped to care for the deluge of people rounded up since President Trump prioritized mass deportations as part of his second-term agenda.

“These deaths raise serious questions about ICE’s ability to comply with basic detention standards, medical care protocols, and notification requirements, and underscore a pattern of gross negligence that demands immediate accountability,” Min and Chu wrote in the letter to Noem and Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE.

The letter was signed by 43 other lawmakers, including Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), J. Luis Correa (D-Santa Ana), John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) and Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).

An ICE representative did not immediately respond to an email Saturday seeking comment.

The lawmakers stressed the need to treat the immigrants with humanity.

The lawmakers said Garcia-Aviles had lived in the U.S. for three decades. His family did not learn of his dire medical condition until “he was on his deathbed.” Family members drove to the hospital to find him “unconscious, intubated, and . . . [with] dried blood on his forehead” as well as “a cut on his tongue … broken teeth and bruising on his body.”

“We never got the chance to speak to him anymore and [the family] never was called to let us know why he had been transferred to the hospital,” his daugher wrote on a GoFundMe page, seeking help to pay for his funeral costs. “His absence has left a hole in our hearts.”