A Colorado Lawmaker’s Paid Internship Requires Applicants to Be Muslim or Middle Eastern

If you are a college student in Colorado with a 3.5 GPA and an interest in how laws get made, there is a paid internship at the state Capitol this winter with your name on it. Unless you are the wrong religion. Or from the wrong part of the world.

Democratic state Sen. Iman Jodeh posted a flyer this week for a “Legislative Intern Program” run by the MENASA & Muslim Joint Legislative Caucus, the group she founded in 2024 with Democratic state Rep. Yara Zokaie. MENASA stands for Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. The intern would work in both lawmakers’ offices during the 2027 session, from early January to mid-May, and would be paid a $1,000 stipend.

The first line under “Qualifications” is the one that set off a firestorm. Applicants must “Identify as a Muslim and/or as Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian.”

The rest of the list is what you would expect for a Capitol internship. Applicants must be current undergraduates with at least a 3.5 GPA, have an “interest in policy, social change/justice, and the legislative process,” be able to work in a “dynamic, fast-paced environment” and show up in person part-time for the session. Applications go to an email address on the legislature’s own government domain, and they are due Nov. 30.

The flyer went up on Jodeh’s social media accounts, and by Wednesday it was everywhere. The Libs of TikTok post sharing it had been seen more than 700,000 times.

Not the first time

This isn’t new for Jodeh. Back in November 2023, when she was still in the state House, she posted on 𝕏 that applications were open for “the second annual Arab or Muslim Legislative Internship” for the 2024 session, the Daily Wire reported. So by her own count, some version of this program has been running since at least the 2023 session.

Jodeh was the first Muslim elected to the Colorado legislature, winning a House seat in 2020 before moving to the state Senate. When she and Zokaie launched the caucus after the 2024 election, Jodeh said it would make sure the community’s “representation and presence is elevated,” and she said its members “face anti-Arab and anti-Brown hate crimes, xenophobia, and discrimination.” In that same statement, she pointed to “an impending Trump administration” as part of the reason the caucus was needed.

Nobody is arguing that a caucus can’t focus on the issues its members care about. The question is whether a taxpayer-run office can tell a Catholic kid from Pueblo or a Jewish student from Boulder that they need not apply.

What the law says

Colorado’s own civil rights law is about as clear as these things get. Under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, it is an unfair employment practice for an employer to refuse to hire someone “because of” their “religion,” “national origin, or ancestry,” along with a long list of other traits. The same section separately bans denying anyone a spot in “an on-the-job training program, or any other occupational instruction, training, or retraining program” for those same reasons. A legislative internship looks a lot like that second category.

Federal law points the same way. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to refuse to hire someone because of religion or national origin, or to “limit, segregate, or classify” applicants in ways that shut them out of a job for those reasons. Lawyers can argue over whether a part-time intern with a stipend counts as an employee, and federal law does carve out the personal staff of elected officials. But the Colorado statute’s training-program language doesn’t depend on that fight. And because the internship runs out of state lawmakers’ offices, critics also point to the Constitution’s promise of equal protection, which binds the government itself.

Townhall’s Amy Curtis put it bluntly in her write-up: “That’s against the law.”

Plenty of programs try to reach particular communities without breaking the law by asking for an “interest in” or “commitment to” a group’s issues. This flyer doesn’t do that. It lists religion and heritage first, as a requirement.

Who is pushing back

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck called the program “blatantly illegal” and said he hopes a qualified applicant who doesn’t fit the religious and ethnic test applies anyway and sues.

Civil rights lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, who said she handled exactly these kinds of cases in private practice, laid out how that would work.

That is the simplest path here. Someone who meets every other qualification, the GPA, the student status, the interest in policy, applies before Nov. 30. If that person is turned away, the flyer itself becomes the evidence.

Others online made the obvious comparison. Imagine a Republican state senator posting a paid internship for Christians only, or for applicants of Northern European descent. It would have been national news within the hour, and the lawmaker would likely be facing calls to resign by dinner.

A double standard on display

That double standard is the real story. Colorado Democrats have spent years writing some of the toughest anti-discrimination rules in the country, and the state has taken a Christian baker all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet two of the legislature’s own members are advertising, with applications going to a government email address, a public position that screens people by faith and family origin.

Equal treatment under the law is supposed to cut both ways. The fix is easy. Jodeh and Zokaie can strike the first line of the flyer and open the program to every qualified Colorado student who cares about the issues their caucus works on.

Until they do, the clock is running. Applications close Nov. 30, and the session starts in January.