Just-adopted Tarrant County Mid-Decade Redistricting Draws Immediate Federal Lawsuit Claiming Intentional Racial Discrimination.
A federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Tarrant County minority citizens barely a day after MAGA Republican Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare and his followers on the Court, Republicans Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez, forced adoption of a redrawn Commissioners Court map. The suit claims that O’Hare and his acolytes have engaged in intentional racial discrimination in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.
Lead legal counsel for the citizen plaintiffs, Chad Dunn, stated plainly, “Intentional discrimination is still against the law. 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.”
The full complaint can be read here and states in part:
The map that Mr. Kincaid drew (in Virginia), which was adopted by the Commissioners Court on June 3, 2025 (“Map 7”), 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. Map 7 surgically moves minority voters from District 2 to District 1 while just as carefully moving Anglo voters from District 1 to District 2. The resulting map—in a county in which the majority of residents are non-Anglo—has three Anglo-majority precincts and one majority-minority precinct.
The mid-decade redraw was ferociously opposed by Commissioners Alisa Simmons in Precinct 2 and Roderick Miles, Jr. in Precinct 1 – whose majority minority districts were shredded under the redrawn map. In a classic “packing and cracking” move, large Black and other minority neighborhoods in Precinct 2 were carved out and added to Precinct 1 in a bizarre configuration snaking across the county and intertwining the two districts.
Commissioners Simmons and Miles, along with voting rights experts, the Lone Star Project, and ordinary citizens warned from the outset that Tim O’Hare’s efforts were blatantly discriminatory and would be challenged by lengthy and expensive voting rights legal challenges.
Just a day before the vote, the highly respected Voting Rights Project at UCLA released a detailed analysis of the maps proposed by O’Hare. Their report detailed how the proposed maps illegally packed and cracked minority neighborhoods destroying the established voting strength of Black, Hispanic, and other Tarrant County citizens.
The overt attack by Tim O’Hare on minority citizens is no surprise. O’Hare’s political career has been built on animosity to minority Texans. While campaigning for County Judge, O’Hare boasted about his attacks on minority citizens saying, “If you’re a Republican office holder and you haven’t been called a racist, then you probably haven’t done a thing.”
