Texas's 16th congressional district | |
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![]() Texas's 16th congressional district since January 3, 2023 | |
Representative | |
Distribution |
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Population (2022) | 773,386[2] |
Median household income | $53,477[2] |
Ethnicity |
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Cook PVI | D+17[3] |
Texas's 16th congressional district of the United States House of Representatives includes almost all of El Paso and most of its suburbs in the state of Texas. The current Representative is Democrat Veronica Escobar.
The district was initially created in 1903. For most of the next six decades, it stretched across 42,000 square miles (110,000 km2), from El Paso in the west to the Permian Basin (Midland and Odessa) in the east. However, after Texas' original 1960 district map was thrown out as a result of Wesberry v. Sanders, the 16th was shrunk down to the city of El Paso (except a sliver in the east) and most of its surrounding suburban communities.
Since the 1990s, the 16th has been the only Democratic bastion in heavily Republican West Texas. While it has been a majority-Hispanic district since the 1970s, only two Hispanics have ever represented it, Silvestre Reyes and Escobar.