The Court Just Tried to Erase a Generation of Latino Leadership. Here’s What Comes Next.

On the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the Black civil rights leaders we owe, and the work in front of us.

I want to start by recognizing a debt.

Every Latino member of Congress sworn in this decade. Every Latina state legislator in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Every Latino school board member elected from a single-member district in California’s Central Valley. Every Spanish-language ballot printed in Miami-Dade, Bexar County, and the Bronx. Every one of those facts of American political life rests on a foundation that Latinos did not build alone. We built part of it. We fought for part of it. But the load-bearing structure underneath all of it was built by Black Americans who marched, organized, sued, were beaten, were jailed, and in too many cases were killed so that this country could become, for the first time in its history, a real multiracial democracy.

I want to name that debt directly, because the Supreme Court’s ruling this week in Louisiana v. Callais is, more than anything else, an attack on what they built. And the Latino community cannot understand what we just lost, or fight back effectively, without first understanding whose shoulders we have been standing on.

So let me start there.

The Foundation That Black America Built

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not given to this country. It was won.

It was won in Selma, where John Lewis had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was won in Mississippi, where Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten so badly in a county jail that she walked with pain for the rest of her life. It was won by the four little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. It was won by Medgar Evers, shot in his own driveway. It was won by the three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, murdered and buried in an earthen dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi, because they were registering Black voters.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, he was signing a law written in that blood.

I am the CEO of the oldest Latino civil rights organization in this country. LULAC was founded in 1929, 36 years before the VRA. Our founders fought their own battles in those decades: against segregated schools in Texas, against literacy tests aimed at Mexican American voters, against signs that read “No Dogs, Negroes, Mexicans” in restaurant windows from San Antonio to Los Angeles. Hernandez v. Texas, decided two weeks before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, established that Mexican Americans were a protected class under the 14th Amendment. The lawyers who argued that case, Gus García and Carlos Cadena, were turned away from the “whites only” bathrooms in the Supreme Court building on the day they argued before the justices.

So yes, we have our own civil rights tradition. We have our own martyrs and our own architects. Willie Velasquez. Dr. Hector P. Garcia. Cesar Chávez and Dolores Huerta. The activists who marched from Rio Grande City to Austin in 1966.

But I will not let this moment pass without saying clearly what every honest Latino civil rights leader knows in their bones: the Voting Rights Act was a gift to our community that Black Americans paid for with their lives. When Congress extended the VRA to “language minorities” in 1975, explicitly including Hispanic Americans, we were welcomed into a structure that the Black freedom movement had already built, fought for, and bled for. Section 2 of the VRA, the section the Supreme Court just gutted, has been used by Latinos to win school board elections in California, congressional districts in Texas, and city council seats in Florida. Every one of those victories carries a debt to the Black activists who made the law possible in the first place.

We owe them. And right now, this week, with their core legal protection under attack, the Latino community has to show up for them, and for ourselves, in a way we have not been called to show up for a very long time.

What the Court Actually Did

Let me be precise about the ruling, because there is a lot of imprecision in the coverage.

The Supreme Court did not formally strike Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act from the books. Six justices, appointed by a single political party, three of them by President Trump, did something more clever and more cynical. They reinterpreted Section 2 in a way that requires plaintiffs challenging discriminatory maps to prove intentional, present-day racial discrimination. They abandoned the “results test” that Congress wrote into the law in 1982, a test Congress wrote precisely because intent is nearly impossible to prove. The majority kept the law on the books. They just made it functionally unenforceable.

Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, was clear about what happened. She wrote that the decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter” in the vast majority of cases.

She is right. And I will say something sharper than that: This was not constitutional interpretation. This was partisan engineering wearing a robe. Six justices, appointed by a single political party, three by President Trump, conspired to rig the next decade of American elections in favor of one political party and to disenfranchise voters of color. That is what happened. We should say it plainly.

This ruling sits at the end of a 12-year campaign by this Court to dismantle the Voting Rights Act piece by piece. Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 took out the preclearance system, the prevention mechanism. Brnovich v. DNC in 2021 made it harder to challenge voter suppression laws. Callais now removes the last remedy. To put it plainly: Shelby took away the burglar alarm. Callais took away the right to call the police after the burglary.

That is the legal architecture we are now living under.

What This Means for Latino Voters

There are 36.2 million Latino eligible voters in the United States today. We are 14.7% of the American electorate, the largest share in our history. We are the fastest-growing voter bloc in the country. And we are, right now, the demographic that this ruling is most strategically positioned to suppress over the next decade.

Here’s why.

Texas is the canary in the coal mine. Latinos drove 95% of Texas’s population growth after the 2020 Census. The state earned two new congressional seats because of that growth. Texas lawmakers responded by reducing the number of Latino-majority congressional districts from eight to seven and eliminating the state’s only Black-majority district. LULAC and our partners sued under Section 2 to challenge that map. That lawsuit was the legal foundation we were standing on. After Callais, that foundation is gone. Texas lawmakers can now further fragment the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, and Houston-area Latino communities into Anglo-dominated districts for partisan gain, with little fear of meaningful federal court review.

Florida, where I was born and raised, is the state to watch next. The Puerto Rican community in Central Florida, every single one of them American citizens by birth, citizens of the same country whose Court just ruled against them, has been systematically fragmented across districts to dilute their political voice. Florida’s “Fair Districts” amendment, written into the state constitution in 2010, was designed to be a backstop. Callais now invites federal court challenges to those state-level protections. The state-law firewall is itself now exposed to attack.

Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico are all states where Latino voters have built durable political power over the last 20 years. Arizona is a swing state today in significant part because Latino voters made it one. Callais gives the Arizona legislature a path to undo that without meaningful federal court review.

California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey — states that lean Democratic, also lose a critical layer of protection. State voting rights laws in California and other states remain important, but they too may now face federal court challenges arguing that any race-conscious districting is impermissible.

The bottom line: 36 million Latino voters had federal legal protection on Monday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, that protection was effectively gone.

What This Means for Latino Elected Officials

This is the part of the story I have been saying loudly all week, because almost no one else in the news cycle is saying it: the most durable damage from this ruling is not measured in a single election. It is measured in a generation of Latino leadership that never gets the chance to be elected.

The Center for American Progress projects that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus could lose roughly 11% of its members through aggressive gerrymandering of Latino-opportunity districts. The Congressional Black Caucus could lose up to 30%. Across the country, as many as 19 minority-held congressional seats are at risk of being eliminated.

But the congressional numbers, devastating as they are, are not where the deepest damage lies. Two-thirds of historic Section 2 cases were brought at the local level, city councils, county commissions, and school boards. That is where the Latino political pipeline begins.

Think about how Latino political power actually gets built in this country. Hilda Solis began her career on the Rio Hondo Community College Board of Trustees in Southern California in 1985, a local seat in a heavily Latino district that existed in the form it did because of Section 2 enforcement. From that community college board, she ran for the California State Assembly. From the Assembly, the State Senate. From the State Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives. From Congress, she was confirmed as President Obama’s Secretary of Labor, the first Latina to serve in a presidential cabinet. From the Cabinet, she was elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she serves today. That pipeline, built brick by brick, lawsuit by lawsuit, over six decades, is exactly what Callais puts at risk. When cities and counties revert to at-large schemes that dilute Latino votes, you don’t just lose one local seat. You eliminate the bench from which the next Hilda Solis would have come.

This is why I keep saying this ruling is not about one election. It is about a generation.

The school board members who would have become state legislators. The state legislators who would have become members of Congress. The members of Congress who would have become governors and senators and cabinet secretaries. That pipeline has just been condemned, not formally, not all at once, but quietly, court by court, district by district, over the next decade.

This is exactly the kind of damage that does not show up in next year’s headlines. It shows up in the leadership that this country never gets to have.

What Comes Next: The Work Ahead

I want to be honest with you. The work ahead of us is harder than the work behind us.

For 60 years, Latino civil rights organizations had a federal statute we could rely on. We could file a Section 2 case and have a reasonable expectation that, if the facts supported us, a federal judge would order a discriminatory map to be redrawn. That backstop is gone. What replaces it is going to require more organizing, more litigation, more legislation, and more voter mobilization than any of us have done in our careers. But LULAC was built for this. We were founded in 1929, before the VRA, before Brown v. Board, before Hernandez v. Texas. Our founders did this work without a Voting Rights Act. We can do it again.

Here is the five-track plan I am taking to our 400+ LULAC councils and 575,000 members nationwide:

Federal legislation. Congress must pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. We know the political environment. We know the votes are not there today. But the bills must be live, on the floor, and forcing every member of Congress on the record. That is itself a mobilization tool, and the political environment will not stay the same forever.

State Voting Rights Acts. Eight states already have their own voting rights acts that go further than the federal VRA. We need them in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and every state with a meaningful Latino population. LULAC is mobilizing our councils to push for State Voting Rights Acts state by state. This is the work of the next 24 months.

State courts and state constitutions. Callais gutted the federal pathway. State constitutions and state supreme courts remain. Florida’s Fair Districts amendment, California’s Voting Rights Act, the New Mexico and Arizona state-level protections, these are now the front lines. We will litigate aggressively in state court, and we will defend state-level protections from federal court challenges that are coming.

Voter mobilization. This is where LULAC lives, and this is the work that matters most right now. We will accelerate our voter registration program. We will train Spanish-language poll workers and election observers. We are building the largest Latino voter protection infrastructure the country has ever seen to challenge in real time the suppression measures that will follow this ruling. Callais makes our turnout work more important, not less. The single most powerful response any Latino voter can give to this Court is to register, to vote, and to bring three others with them. We turned out in record numbers in 2020 and 2024. We will turn out in record numbers again.

Coalition. This week’s media briefing, convened by the National Urban League — featuring LDF, the NAACP, UnidosUS, AAJC, the Lawyers’ Committee, the National Action Network, the Leadership Conference, and other organizing partners, is the model. What you saw on that call was a multiracial civil rights coalition refusing to be divided. That coalition is the answer. The attack from this Court is on multiracial democracy itself, and the response has to come from a coalition that reflects what multiracial democracy actually looks like.

A Closing Word

I started this post with a debt. I want to close it with one too.

When the Supreme Court issued this ruling, the people I thought of first were not the politicians or the pundits. I thought of the elders. The 80-year-old woman in McAllen who voted for the first time in 1966 because LULAC and a Black-led civil rights coalition went door to door explaining the new law. The 90-year-old man in Selma who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and is still alive to see what this Court just did to the law his friends died for. The mothers and fathers and grandparents who marched and organized and risked everything because they believed this country could one day live up to its promise.

This Court told them, this week, that their life’s work was a constitutional mistake.

I do not accept that. LULAC does not accept that. The civil rights movement does not accept that. And 36 million Latino voters, joined with the Black, Native, Asian American, and white allies who built this democracy alongside us, do not accept that either.

Six justices made a choice this week. Now 36 million Latino voters get to make ours. And we will make it, in every state, every county, every precinct, with the full weight of a movement that has been doing this work for nearly a century, and with full gratitude to the Black freedom movement that made our work possible.

The Voting Rights Act was the answer that 1965 America gave to the question of whether this country could be a multiracial democracy. Callais is the answer this Supreme Court is trying to give to the same question.

But this Court does not get the last word. We do.

We always have.