Tempers have flared at the Texas Capitol during the first in a series of public hearings to address a controversial plan to redraw the Lone Star State’s congressional map, with one candidate being forcibly removed from the State House chambers and arrested last week.

Isaiah Martin, a current candidate for the state congress for District 18 in the Houston metro area, was pulled away from the podium after refusing to yield after the allotted two minutes during the public hearing on Thursday.

“You should have shame. You need to have shame. History will not remember you for what you have done. It is a shame,” he said as security pulled him away. He was then arrested by troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety and charged with criminal trespassing, resisting arrest, and disrupting an official meeting, according to CBS Austin.

The fracas capped off a contentious five-hour hearing hosted by the Texas House Redistricting Committee. Among the dozens of public speakers at the dais, not one testified in favor of redrawing maps just four years after the previous redistricting.

Governor Abbott has justified the mid-cycle redistricting as a response to constitutional issues identified by the U.S. Department of Justice, specifically regarding four majority-minority districts under Democratic control. 

Texas Republicans have been publicly encouraged by President Donald Trump to create five additional GOP-favorable districts in preparation for the 2026 midterm elections. The state presently holds 38 congressional districts, with Republicans controlling 25 of them.

Numerous witnesses testified against this rationale.

“We deserve representation,” said Gabriel Rosales, Texas director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “It is your responsibility to allow for diversity to be a part of the representation that we have going to Congress.”

Civil rights leaders warned against further breaking up communities of color, noting that these populations—which represented virtually all of Texas’s growth over the last ten years—would face discriminatory and destabilizing effects.

“If this proposal goes through,” Texas NAACP president Gary Bledsoe said during the hearing, “that means 84% of congressional seats would be controlled by white voters. If Trump gets five more seats, it becomes 87%.”

Conservative activists also spoke out against the plan.

“Please don’t forget that as Texans, we do not — we do not — bend the knee to anyone in Washington,” Alicia Perez-Hodge, co-founder of the Hispanic Advocates and Business Leaders of Austin, said.

Republican members of the committee reportedly appeared disengaged during the testimonies, with lawmakers brazenly checking their phones or talking among themselves, prompting their Democratic colleagues to call them out for their behavior.

“I guess we’ll see at the end of this process whether the people sitting around these dioses are listening to this or whether it’s a kangaroo court,” said Rep. Jolanda Jones of Houston.