United States

Mayra Peters-Quintero

Program Officer New York

Mayra Peters-Quintero works on migrant and immigrant rights. Her grant making supports national, state and local organizations that advance sound policy for immigrants. Mayra joined the Ford Foundation in 2008.

Over the course of her career, Mayra has worked on immigrant rights issues in the public, academic and nonprofit sectors. As director of the Bureau of Immigrant Workers' Rights at the New York State Department of Labor, she led a statewide initiative to protect and advance the rights of immigrants in New York and to develop and reform government agency policies affecting immigrants.

Prior to that, she taught at New York University (NYU) School of Law, co-directing its Immigrant Rights Clinic. Her work there focused on low-wage and immigrant worker representation and providing legal aid to community-based organizations. She also developed the first immigrant rights project at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a national civil rights organization, where she served as a Skadden Fellow and associate counsel. Earlier, she completed a clerkship with U.S. District Court Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. in the Eastern District of New York.

Mayra earned a joint degree in law from NYU, where she was a Root-Tilden-Snow Scholar, and in international development from Princeton University, where she was a Ford Foundation fellow. She completed her bachelor's degree in political economy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is originally from Panama.