Elsa Alcala, former judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (Courtesy photo)

Former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Elsa Alcala, a longtime Republican, typically avoids politics on social media but broke that practice on Monday to denounce President Donald Trump, “for my own conscience,” she wrote on Facebook.

Trump “is the worst president in the history of this country,” said her Facebook post. The president has an ideology of racism, the judge wrote, adding she couldn't say anything positive that would absolve Trump of his “rotten core.”

“I have been thinking about this for years and I hoped things would get better but they never did,” Alcala told Texas Lawyer. “I did not want an 'R' next to my name anymore.”

In Texas, judicial races are partisan, meaning that judges campaign as Republicans or Democrats. Repeated efforts over many years to reform the judicial election system and do away with partisanship have failed.

Alcala's Facebook post comes in the wake of Trump's tweets this week that said a group of Democratic lawmakers—all women of color—should go back where they came from. Trump alleged they hated America. Tuesday evening, the U.S. House plans to vote on a resolution to condemn the president's tweets as “racist language.”

“I did not want an 'R' next to my name anymore.” —Elsa Alcala

In her post, Alcala urged readers not to “tell me to go back where I came from,” because she was born in the United States, and her family has resided in Texas since before it became part of the Union.

“I spent 29 years in government service to help the people of our country and I love our country and its people,” Alcala wrote. “I have given more to this country than the vast majority of people. What I know for sure is that we, as a country, are better than this.”

Alcala became the first Hispanic female judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2011 when then-Gov. Rick Perry appointed her to fill a vacancy on the high court. She told Texas Lawyer at the time that she believed it was important to have highly qualified minority jurists serving on the bench at all levels of the Texas judiciary.

She wrote on Facebook that she supported past Republican administrations because they wanted an inclusive party, but because the current Republican party supports the president, she plans to vote in the Democratic primary for the first time in 20 years.

“I hope Democrats rise to the occasion and put forth some very qualified candidates and that every polling station will be overwhelmed with voters,” Alcala wrote.

Alcala has worked in the government nearly her whole legal career. Just after earning her law degree from the University of Texas School of Law in 1989, she worked as a prosecutor for nine years in the Harris County District Attorney's Office in Houston. Alcala then served as the judge of Harris County's 338th District Court from 1999 to 2002. Next, she became an appellate justice on Houston's First Court of Appeals, where she worked for nine years. In 2011, then-Gov. Rick Perry appointed her to a vacant seat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, where she served until she chose not to seek reelection in 2018.

When she left the high court, from January to May, she was the policy director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit founded by death penalty attorneys that works to improve legal representation for death penalty defendants and to highlight and solve “systemic flaws plaguing the Texas death penalty,” the service's website said. Alcala is now a solo practitioner practicing public interest law in Austin.

She has already experienced some blowback from her Facebook post, noting in an update to the post that she had to delete comments that were name-calling, and she blocked some former relatives who commented with “hurtful and incorrect information.”

“I knew this would be a hot-button topic, so I delayed saying it publicly for quite some time. I needed to get the 'R' off of my name, so I had to say this publicly,” she explained.

Read Alcala's Facebook post: