Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier from Fort Worth returned to the Texas Capitol on Monday but says she remains locked inside the Capitol because she wouldn’t sign a permission slip to be under escort by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The escorts for all House Democrats who left the state of Texas last month — preventing a vote on a GOP-led redistricting effort — are meant as a guarantee that they will return to the House by 10 a.m. Wednesday for the next special session.
CBS News Texas spoke with Collier via Zoom on Monday, and she said the situation is wrong — just like the new Congressional maps she and other Democrats have tried to block from being passed. She also said that, according to DPS, she must stay in the House chambers or inside her office at the Capitol.
CBS News Texas has reached out to DPS for comment.
In a statement, the Texas House Democratic Caucus said the police escorts were the “latest Republican tactic to monitor and control Democratic lawmakers following their successful quorum break.”
Collier and dozens of other House Democrats who returned to the Capitol on Monday received a Texas-sized welcome from their supporters as they walked from the rotunda into the House chamber minutes before the House session began around noon.
The Democrats had fled to blue states earlier this month after President Trump suggested the state should redraw its U.S. House district maps to secure more Republican seats. The Democrats had remained out of the state to deny Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott a quorum, temporarily derailing a special legislative session that the governor called to reshape the state’s congressional maps.
The GOP-led redistricting effort would create five more Republican-leaning House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. Republicans currently have a narrow majority in the House.
Because the Democrats broke quorum for two weeks, there weren’t enough House members to hold the special session. On Monday, there were 120 members present on the floor, but 30 were still absent.
Rep. Gene Wu, the House Democratic Caucus chair, said their efforts to block the potential five Republican-leaning seats have now moved into their second phase, the legal phase.
Now that a quorum is again present in the House, the House redistricting committee will meet to consider the new maps. They are expected to approve them along party lines and send them to the full House as early as Wednesday.
The Texas Senate redistricting committee approved the maps on Sunday, and the full Senate will take them up sometime this week.
More from CBS News