Tarrant County redistricting was ‘racially discriminatory,’ lawsuit says
Less than 24 hours after the Tarrant County Commissioners Court approved a contentious mid-decade redistricting plan, a group of county residents have filed a lawsuit alleging the new map disenfranchises minority voters.
The map commissioners voted along party lines to adopt is “racially discriminatory,” the lawsuit states, and “surgically moves minority voters” into new precincts in a way that “unlawfully dilutes” their voting power.
The federal lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of Texas in Fort Worth, was brought by three Black and two Latina Tarrant County voters whose precincts are changed in the approved map. The defendants listed are Tarrant County, the Tarrant County Commissioners Court and Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare.
O’Hare’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Star-Telegram also reached out to the offices of the four county commissioners, but did not receive immediate responses.
A county spokesperson said the county does not comment on pending litigation.
A spokesperson for the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office said, “We’ve seen a copy of the lawsuit. Generally, this office represents the county in litigation matters.”
The new map, presented to the public on May 30, alters the Democratic Precincts 1 and 2 in southern Tarrant County. Precinct 2 Commissioner Alisa Simmons of Arlington, up for reelection in 2026, will be in a Republican-leaning district.
The approved map “gerrymanders the County to eliminate one of the two existing majority-minority precincts and instead pack the bulk of the County’s minority voters into a single precinct while cracking others across the remaining three precincts,” the lawsuit states.
“Packing” refers to the practice of concentrating minority voters into one district, while “cracking” refers to breaking up existing concentrations of minority voters into multiple districts, both with the intention of diluting their voting power.
The new map disenfranchises 19% of Black adults and 12% of Latino adults in Tarrant County, while disenfranchising 5% of white adults, the lawsuit alleges.
More than 150,000 Tarrant County residents of voting age who were set to elect a commissioner in 2026 will now have to wait until 2028 to cast a ballot, according to the complaint, since the new map puts them in a different district. The last time these residents voted for a county commissioner was in 2022, so “their right to vote is abridged by forcing them to wait six years,” the lawsuit states.
“This disenfranchisement falls starkly along racial lines,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit argues that the redistricting violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and asks the court to block the implementation of the new map.
“Intentional discrimination is still against the law,” said Chad Dunn, the plaintiffs’ lawyer. “The map they drew, the process they used to draw it, and the animosity shown to the citizens of Tarrant County violate the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution.”
Redistricting lawsuit cites Tarrant County Judge’s ‘racially divisive tenure’
“O’Hare has a noted history of divisive actions against minority citizens,” the lawsuit alleges.
As example, it points to O’Hare’s time as mayor of Farmers Branch, where he led an “aggressive anti-immigrant effort that included passing a city resolution blocking undocumented immigrants from being able to secure housing.”
O’Hare served as mayor of Farmers Branch from 2008 to 2011. His city ordinance prohibiting landlords from renting to people in the country without legal status embroiled Farmers Branch in a seven-year-long legal battle that ended up costing the city $6.6 million. A federal court ruled the ordinance unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.
The lawsuit also references O’Hare’s ties to the True Texas Project, whose founders were criticized for posting justifications for the actions of a North Texas man who murdered 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019.
In August of that year, Fred McCarty, former head of the NE Tarrant Tea Party, which became the True Texas Project, was criticized for echoing the shooter’s online references to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and the “great replacement theory.”
“You’re not going to demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blow-back,” McCarty said then.
“You can’t coexist with people who want to take away your right to self-determination,” he continued. “Imagine flooding a place with foreign people to the point that the native population will become a minority. Then imagine being shocked at the strife and hostility that results. Imagine.”
O’Hare told attendees at a 2023 True Texas Project meeting to take advantage of low voter turnout in municipal elections in order to get Republicans into local offices.
The lawsuit also cites O’Hare saying in a podcast in August 2021: “If you’re a Republican officeholder and you haven’t been called a racist, then you probably haven’t done a thing.”
O’Hare’s attempt to eliminate early voting sites from majority-minority university campuses and his ordering of Simmons, who is Black, to “sit there and be quiet and listen to me talk,” are also referenced in the lawsuit.
Did Tarrant County redistrict or just ‘look at’ changing maps in 2021?
One point of debate during Tuesday’s commissioners court session was whether or not Tarrant County actually redistricted in 2021 after the release of the 2020 census data.
About a third of the people who spoke on the redistricting plan expressed support for a new map, and many of those said that support was based on the county not redistricting since 2011.
The Commissioners Court voted in 2021 to approve the maps drawn in 2011.
In his comments before Tuesday’s vote, O’Hare said the county “looked at redistricting and did not change a single aspect of the map, so there has been no redistricting.”
The lawsuit alleges that Tarrant County conducted a “full redistricting process” in 2021, pointing to the county’s hiring of the Austin-based legal firm Bickerstaff, Heath, Delgado, Acosta LLP for legal counsel and population growth analysis.
“The demographic analysis revealed that while Tarrant County’s population had increased significantly, the growth was even across the county,” the lawsuit states.
The issue is one of semantics, according to Robert Heath, an attorney at the firm who worked on Tarrant County’s 2021 redistricting process.
“We looked at the census and determined that the four commissioner precincts were in balance,” he said in an interview. “In fact, they were in better balance in 2021 than they were in 2011, although in both cases they were very close to ideally balanced.”
The firm presented its findings to the court and to the public at several hearings that saw very low attendance, he said. The data was fully analyzed and presented to the public as with any redistricting process that results in new maps.
“Now, was there a process? Sure. Did it result in different districts? No,” he said.
Voting rights groups express support for Tarrant County redistricting lawsuit
The UCLA Voting Rights Project mentioned the lawsuit in a press release sent Wednesday that included a 23-page data analysis report the project sent to the county commissioners on June 2.
“The data speaks for itself,” the project’s senior data scientist Michael Rios said. “There is no question that the newly adopted map both dilutes and denies voting rights to Black and Hispanic communities in Tarrant County. There is clear evidence of racially polarized voting across nine recent elections, showing clearly that Anglos in Tarrant bloc-vote against Black and Hispanic candidates of choice. The new PILF map creates three out of four districts that perform for Anglos, even though they are only 41% of the Tarrant population.”
PILF is the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the Virginia-based firm hired as legal counsel for the redistricting process and which submitted all seven maps that were considered. None of the maps submitted by Tarrant County citizens were considered or presented in an open meeting before the vote.
Redistricting experts told the Star-Telegram before the vote that the proposed maps showed the “telltale signs of racial gerrymandering.”
The Lone Star Project, an advocacy group with the goal of “defeating Republicans in Texas,” also sent a press release supporting the lawsuit and calling the adoption of the new map an “overt attack by Tim O’Hare on minority citizens.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2025 at 4:26 PM.
