Gonzales has served as Bexar County’s top prosecutor since 2019.
SAN ANTONIO — Bexar County’s top prosecutor won’t be seeking reelection in 2026.
Criminal District Attorney Joe Gonzales, a Democrat, announced the decision Thursday afternoon. The west-San Antonio native been in office since January 2019, having most recently defeated Republican Marc LaHood in the November 2022 election to win another four-year term.
His decision stemmed from wanting to spend more time with family, saying they’ve been “unbelievably supportive of my public service.” Gonzales said he made his decision this early to help facilitate a 2026 race with the strongest possible candidates.
“It has been the privilege of my lifetime to serve as your district attorney,” he said. “No job could be more rewarding than keeping our community safe.”
Gonzales said he expects his legacy will be that he made the district attorney’s office “more efficient,” pointing to initiatives leading to paperless case-filing and the creation of the Civil Rights Division in 2020.
Those efforts, he said, were pursued even as “the rule of law is under attack across our country.”
“Those who need protection most have had the system weaponized against them,” Gonzales said. “Here in Bexar County, we’ve fought to keep our system of justice strong.”
Asked what’s next as he begins to wind down his time in office, Gonzales said he’s continue several ongoing missions including working to decrease the case load backlog and secure more funding. He said the office is “about 30 prosecutors down,” which makes it difficult to process cases efficiently.
He was first elected to the office of district attorney when he defeated Republican Tylden Shaeffer in the 2018 election, a contest in which Gonzales won 58.5% of the vote.
About Joe Gonzales
Bexar County’s DA has worked to prosecute some of the San Antonio area’s biggest criminal cases, and was one of many big-city DAs in Texas to say in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s overturning that he wouldn’t pursue charges against most women who seek an abortion.
He graduated from St. Mary’s University School of Law in 1988 and went on to start his career in family law as a trial prosecutor in Bexar County. Gonzales continued his legal career while briefly in Houston in the ’90s, where he was “promoted to court chief prosecutor” in a Harris County juvenile court.
He later opened his own law office after returning to the Alamo City, from which he worked as a criminal defense attorney for more than two decades.
Gonzales has been a proponent of destroying guns used in crimes and created a policy of releasing nonviolent offenders without bail as an equitable way of battling limited space in the Bexar County jail.
But he’s also butted heads with both local and state officials. Gonzales was at odds with San Antonio Police Chief McManus over bonds assigned to suspected criminals during a spate of police-involved shootings in 2023, and last month Gonzales and other big-city DAs sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over new reporting mandates that Gonzales argued were unlawful.