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.
Gonzales 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.
Gonzales’ announcement now paves the way for an open race to succeed him as Bexar County’s district attorney.
This is a developing story.