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Healey meets with Texas Democrats who fled their state amid battle over redistricting

“This is an attempt to grab power, to change the rules, to determine a certain outcome,” Healey, flanked by Texas lawmakers, told reporters Tuesday.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, flanked by Texas Democrats, addresses reporters Tuesday. Ben Pennington for the Boston Globe

By Molly Farrar

August 5, 2025

3 minutes to read

Gov. Maura Healey is the latest state leader to welcome Democratic lawmakers who have fled Texas as they fight against a redrawn congressional map there that would likely add five Republican seats to Congress.

Healey and Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin met with 10 of the absconded Texas Democrats in Boston Tuesday afternoon. The Texas lawmakers left the state to temporarily block a vote on a new congressional map sought by President Donald Trump.

“This is an attempt to grab power, to change the rules, to determine a certain outcome,” Healey told reporters. “It is antithetical to American democracy and is antithetical to the functioning of American government – local, state and federal – that we have known since the very beginning.”

Since leaving, the 150-seat Texas House, with 88 Republicans and 62 Democrats, has been unable to establish a 100-person quorum to hold session. The House reconvened but failed to reach a quorum for the second day in a row Tuesday.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has threatened to arrest those absent, which Democrats called a “smoke and mirrors” tactic. Some House members will face $500 daily fines for staying out of the state.

“We are literally holding the line on democracy, not just for Texas, but for our nation,” said Carol Alvarado, a Texas state senator. “Today, President Trump said that he was entitled to five more seats in Texas, five more Republican seats, and we’re here to say nobody is entitled.”

Alvarado and other state senators and representatives flanked Healey in the Governor’s Ceremonial Office, where she said the redrawn map targets districts that are “majority-minority districts” represented by people of color.

“This is a splintering of communities and neighborhoods,” Galvin said, also noting the map would affect the midterm elections early next year. “They’re not simply saying, ‘well, let’s just change a few towns.’ We’ve got some details from our guests about how they’re splintering communities of color. They are absolutely shattering them. They’re diminishing their ability to be effective in getting representation in Congress.”

Other Texas Democrats traveled to Chicago to meet with Gov. J.B. Pritzker and to meet Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York . The Texans in Boston will likely attend the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual legislative summit, which ends Tuesday, per the Texas Tribune.

When speaking to reporters Tuesday, Healey emphasized that “what’s happening in Texas matters to the people of Massachusetts.”

“And it matters to people all over this country,” Healey continued. “If we don’t have a fair election system in this country that impacts, that hurts all Americans.”

Will Healey retaliate and gerrymander Massachusetts?

In New York, Hochul has threatened to gerrymander her state to favor Democrats to fight the proposed Texas map. When asked if she would do the same, Healey said that “isn’t it a sad state of affairs that that’s where we’re at? Donald Trump, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, have left us no choice. That’s the reality.”

But she ended by saying the state is “going to follow the rules.”

“We just did that,” she said, referring to the congressional map redrawn in 2021. “We just went through a customary and orderly process just a few years ago.”

Galvin and Healey both said that the Massachusetts congressional districts, signed by Gov. Charlie Baker, are fair and geographically balanced.

When pressed about the Republicans in the southern part of the state, Galvin said that New Bedford and Fall River are in the same congressional district “so if that was an argument once upon a time, it no longer is.”

In 2021, the map was redrawn to unify Fall River, but the two South Coast cities are actually not in the same congressional district. At the time, some advocates and elected officials decried a missed “once-in-a-decade opportunity” to create a district anchored by the two cities that could build political power for lower-income residents in a region that advocates say often feels ignored by Beacon Hill power centers.

Clustered around Fall River is one of the state’s Republican strongholds, according to voting data from the 2024 presidential election. New Bedford, however, voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.

But, Galvin went on to say that while “most states are pretty evenly balanced,” the redrawning of the Texas map to add five seats to favor Trump “is not a partisan consideration.”

“They don’t want this spreading to other states. Neither do we do in this state of Massachusetts, but we have to call it out now,” Galvin said. “That’s the only way to stop it.”