PANELIST
Maria Jose Vallejo Manzur
Director, Bi-National Project of Family Violence at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid
Maria Jose Vallejo Manzur is an attorney licensed in Mexico and Texas who has been an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid’s (TRLA) since 2010. A 2008 high honors graduate of the University of Monterrey law school, Ms. Vallejo devoted much of her law school career to human rights causes, including working closely with the indigenous communities of the Sierra Tarahumara on projects addressing family violence and community organizing. During her tenure at TRLA, Ms. Vallejo continued her human rights activism, serving as the Training Coordinator of the End Trafficking Today Project, a U.S. State Department funded project that focused on building the capacity of non-profit organizations and outreach presentations for at risk populations in northeastern Mexico to address the scourge of human trafficking in that region.
Ms. Vallejo has been an integral part of TRLA’s Bi-National Project on Family Violence, representing low-income victims of domestic violence whose children have been abducted by their violent fathers from one country to another or who themselves have fled with their children to Texas. Since 2014, Ms. Vallejo has represented domestic violence survivors whose children had been abducted from the U.S. before Mexican courts. After a number of successful rulings, she managed to retrieve and reunite the children in Texas with their parents.
In 2018, Ms. Vallejo graduated with an LL.M. from The University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and became licensed to practice in Texas. Since then, Ms. Vallejo began representing domestic violence survivors on both sides of the border and has been the program director since December 2020.