Jorge Vela

Jorge Vela is an Austin criminal defense attorney who built his practice on a simple advantage: he spent seven years as a prosecutor before he ever defended anyone, so he knows exactly how the government builds a case. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 2006 and made the Dean's List, he went on to the University of Texas School of Law, graduating in 2011 and entering practice that same year. Rather than head straight to a defense firm, he chose the prosecution side, where he would spend nearly a decade learning the system from the inside.

His prosecutorial career took him across Texas and into federal court. He began as a felony prosecutor in the 49th District Court of Webb County in Laredo, handling violent crimes that ranged from aggravated robbery and aggravated assault to intoxicated manslaughter, kidnapping, and murder. He then served as an Assistant United States Attorney with the Department of Justice in the Southern District of Texas, spending close to three years on the U.S.-Mexico border investigating large-scale drug trafficking organizations tied to violent Mexican cartels. Working alongside agents from Homeland Security, the FBI, the State Department, and ICE on hundreds of federal cases, he helped secure major jury verdicts, including a life sentence for the head of a Laredo trafficking organization, and won convictions in cases involving alien smuggling, firearms trafficking, child exploitation offenses, and visa fraud.

In 2017, Jorge moved to Austin and joined the Travis County District Attorney's Office, where he again prosecuted violent felonies and helped obtain guilty verdicts in cases of aggravated assault, robbery, kidnapping, murder, and capital murder. By then he had handled hundreds of DWI cases and thousands of drug cases, accumulating the kind of trial experience that few defense attorneys can match. In 2018, he crossed to the other side of the courtroom and opened the Law Office of Jorge Vela, PLLC, determined to put his insider knowledge to work for the accused.

Today Jorge defends clients throughout Austin and Central Texas against both state and federal charges, including DWI, assault, domestic violence, drug possession, sexual assault, violent felonies, and federal crimes, and he also handles immigration matters such as removal defense and immigration bonds. A member of the State Bar of Texas and the Austin Bar Association, he has been named to the Super Lawyers Rising Stars list for multiple years, a recognition reserved for a small share of attorneys. He practices alongside his law partner, Miguel Aguilera, and the firm is known for being bilingual, accessible around the clock, and especially attentive to immigrants and non-citizens facing the overlap of criminal and immigration consequences.