The Supreme Court on Monday vacated lower court judgments tied to Washington’s remedial legislative maps and sent the case back to the Ninth Circuit. The brief order pointed to the Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a ruling described as weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Courthouse News reported the justices acted after Republican state lawmaker Alex Ybarra and voter Jose Trevino pressed equal protection challenges to a court-drawn map centered on the Yakima Valley and Legislative District 15. The remand gives lower courts a chance to apply the new Callais standard to the same dispute.
The legal stakes are plain. Section 2 claims once steered the map revise. Now the high court’s intervening decision has changed the rules that lower courts used. Who draws the lines, and under what constitutional test, is back open.
After the 2020 census, Washington’s redistricting commission drew new legislative maps. In 2022, voting rights groups sued. They claimed the maps intentionally split Latino voters across several districts in the Yakima Valley and created what they called a “facade Latino opportunity district” that diluted Latino voting power.
Washington state first fought the suit, then conceded that the Section 2 claims were valid. Trevino and Ybarra intervened to defend Legislative District 15. Trevino said the later remedial map moved him into a less Hispanic district and diluted Hispanic votes on the basis of race. Ybarra said the district he represented was reconfigured, with Hispanic voters removed and replaced by voters who were more white and Democrat-leaning.
In 2023, a federal court ordered new maps. The Legislature turned down the chance to enact one. The court then asked the parties for proposals. In 2024, the court adopted the remedial map put forward by the voting rights groups.
The Supreme Court had already turned down multiple chances to step in, both before and after that map took effect. Last year, the Ninth Circuit rejected Trevino and Ybarra’s claims on the merits. That merits decision came before Callais.
In April, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. Courthouse News described the decision as a landmark voting rights ruling that weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. On Monday, the justices vacated the lower court judgments in the Washington matter and remanded to the Ninth Circuit specifically in light of that decision.
State officials supported that grant, vacate, and remand path. They told the Court the prior rulings matched the law as it stood when issued, but Callais had moved the goalposts.
“The lower courts correctly applied the law in this case as it existed at the time, but this court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais substantially changed the relevant standards,”
State officials also asked the justices to send the appeals court opinion back for fresh review under the new framework.
“This court should therefore grant, vacate, and remand the court of appeals’ opinion to the Ninth Circuit.”
Voting rights groups had urged the Court to deny the petition. They argued Trevino and Ybarra lacked standing. The Monday order did not adopt that request. It wiped the prior judgments and returned the case for further work under Callais.
Trevino and Ybarra did not only want a remand. They pressed the justices to correct what they called errors on standing and on the strict scrutiny trigger. In their petition they attacked the Ninth Circuit’s race standard head-on.
“The Ninth Circuit held that even though race may have been ‘a’ motivation for the court in drawing the remedial map, a mere motivation to draw district lines based on race is insufficient to trigger strict scrutiny, which can only be applied when race is the ‘predominant factor’ in map drawing,”
That quarrel sits at the center of the equal protection fight. Petitioners cast the remedial map as a racial gerrymander. Voting rights groups cast the same map as the cure for earlier dilution. The Supreme Court’s Monday order does not resolve which side is right on the merits. It restarts the analysis under the Callais lens.
On remand, the Ninth Circuit will have to measure the remedial map process against the standards Callais set for Section 2. Investigators of the legal record will need to determine how far race may guide a court-drawn cure before equal protection strict scrutiny attaches. They will also need to revisit standing questions the intervenors raised.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed, in the material available here, whether the 2024 remedial map remains in force for upcoming elections while the remand proceeds. No public results have been released in this package about any interim stay, modified lines, or new legislative action. The Legislature already declined once to enact a replacement map when the federal court ordered a redraw in 2023.
The procedural posture is therefore unsettled by design. A brief Supreme Court order vacated the judgments. It did not write a full merits opinion on Washington’s lines. The Ninth Circuit must now apply the weakened Section 2 framework described after Callais and decide what remains of the earlier remedial order.
Several public bodies made the choices that produced this remand. The redistricting commission drew the post-2020 maps that sparked the 2022 suit. The state conceded the Section 2 claims after first defending them. The Legislature refused to pass a new map when given the chance. The federal court then adopted the voting rights groups’ proposal in 2024. The Ninth Circuit later backed the result on the merits. The Supreme Court stayed out until Callais arrived, then vacated and remanded.
Each step narrowed political discretion and expanded judicial map-drawing. Trevino and Ybarra answered by casting the final lines as race-driven in violation of equal protection. Groups answered by defending the map as necessary under Section 2 as it then stood. Callais broke that stalemate by changing the statutory backdrop, which is why state officials themselves asked for the vacatur and remand.
The case now returns to the same circuit that rejected the intervenors last year, but under a different legal ceiling. How the Ninth Circuit weighs race as “a” motivation versus the “predominant factor” test will decide whether the 2024 remedial map survives, falls, or requires yet another redraw.
When courts redraw political districts, the Constitution still requires clear limits on the use of race. Monday’s order puts that demand back in front of the Ninth Circuit, where the next map fight will be won or lost under rules the justices have already begun to tighten.
