Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., and New York election official Peter Kosinski filed emergency requests at the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday seeking to block a state trial court order that would bar the use of the state's existing congressional map in the 2026 elections.
The filings ask the justices to intervene after a New York State Supreme Court justice ruled in January that the 11th Congressional District's boundaries diluted Black and Latino votes, a decision that Malliotakis, Kosinski and the Trump administration all argue amounts to an unconstitutional demand for racial gerrymandering.
The dispute centers on whether the state should be forced to redraw a congressional district — the only one in New York City held by a Republican — based on a legal standard that the applicants say was never argued by either side in the case.
In October 2025, a group of voters filed suit in state court challenging the boundaries of the 11th Congressional District, which covers Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn. They argued the district's lines violated the New York constitution by failing to give Black and Latino residents — who now comprise approximately 30% of Staten Island's population — an equal opportunity to elect a preferred representative.
On Jan. 21, 2026, Justice Jeffrey Pearlman of the New York State Supreme Court sided with the challengers. He ruled the current map diluted minority votes, prohibited its use in upcoming elections and ordered the state's independent redistricting commission to draw a new map by Feb. 6, SCOTUSblog reports.
Malliotakis, who had joined the lawsuit to defend the existing map, and Kosinski sought emergency relief from two different state appellate courts. The New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled it lacked jurisdiction. The intermediate appellate court has not yet acted on their request.
Under state law, the appeal automatically stayed the portion of Pearlman's order directing the redistricting commission to produce a new map. But the prohibition on using the current map remained in effect, creating what Kosinski described as an approaching crisis for the state's election calendar.
Kosinski told the justices that Pearlman had strayed far beyond what either party actually argued in the case. In his filing, he wrote that the trial court had:
"adopted an entirely new standard for vote dilution claims" that had been advanced in a "friend of the court" brief rather than by the litigants. "As a matter of due process," "the trial court cannot reject the only standard litigated by the parties" and "adopt something wholly new": a "novel three-prong standard."
That standard, according to Kosinski, would compel map makers to draw in enough minority voters from neighboring areas to guarantee those voters control primary elections, typically win general elections and play the decisive role in candidate selection. A judge inventing a legal test from an amicus brief — rather than the arguments the parties actually presented — raises serious due process concerns that the Supreme Court is well-positioned to address.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed a friend-of-the-court brief backing the emergency requests. He drew a sharp distinction between this case and other redistricting fights currently working through the federal courts. Sauer wrote that, unlike disputes from California and Texas involving:
"thorny questions about the relationship between partisan and racial gerrymandering … as States race to redraw their electoral maps before the 2026 midterms," this case presents "an open and unabashed racial gerrymander," thereby violating the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
That language from the nation's top appellate advocate carries considerable weight. When the solicitor general characterizes a lower court ruling as an "open and unabashed" constitutional violation, it signals the executive branch views this not as a close call but as a clear error demanding correction.
The practical stakes are immediate. Kosinski warned the justices that if the court does not act "by February 23, 2026, New York's congressional elections will be thrown into chaos and uncertainty." He noted that petitioning for congressional candidates is set to begin Feb. 24, making it, in his words, "impossible for the IRC to propose a new map, and for the Legislature to adopt any such map" before that deadline.
The Supreme Court has directed the voters who originally challenged the map to file their response by Thursday, Feb. 19, at 4 p.m. EST. That tight briefing schedule suggests the justices understand the urgency, even if they have not yet tipped their hand on the merits.
What remains clear is that a single trial court judge ordered a congressional district redrawn using a legal theory no party asked for, on a timeline no election system could meet, to achieve a result that sorts voters by race. The Supreme Court now has days — not months — to decide whether that stands.
