The Immigrant Vanguard: Melat Kiros and Denver's New Coalition

Southern Black Organizers · Post-Election Series · The Sunbelt Spear, Part 2 of 4

Melat Kiros came to Denver from Ethiopia at 11 months old. On Tuesday, at 29, she was elected to Congress from Colorado's 1st District, the first Black woman Colorado has ever sent to Congress. The Associated Press called the race about 20 minutes after the first results were posted.

Her win carries the Sunbelt story west. It is not the story of Southern Black churches and county parties. It is the story of a first-generation immigrant daughter, a labor and tenant coalition, and young voters who wanted someone who would fight.

From Barista to the House

Kiros, an attorney and former barista, had never run for office. In June she unseated Rep. Diana DeGette, who had held the seat since 1997, four months before Kiros was born. She will be only the third person in nearly fifty years to represent Denver in the House.

She grew up in Aurora, graduated from Eaglecrest High School, earned her bachelor's degree at Washington College in 2018 and her law degree at the University of Notre Dame in 2022, and was pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs when she entered the race. She is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, the faith of the Ethiopian Orthodox churches at the heart of Denver's diaspora.

The June primary was the real upset: Kiros took 53.2 percent to DeGette's 39.8 percent, with Wanda James at 7.0 percent. She ran on four pillars: Medicare for All; "Housing First," treating homelessness as a public-health issue and federally subsidizing 30 percent of new housing; universal childcare as essential infrastructure; and an arms embargo on Israel. She also called for abolishing ICE, the immigration enforcement agency.

![Melat Kiros for Congress campaign graphic](/api/public/media/library/kiros-campaign-banner.jpg | "It's time for a new generation of leadership": the Kiros campaign's message. Image: Melat Kiros for Congress.) For a candidate whose own family crossed an ocean to build a life in Denver, the immigration fight was personal.

Who Built the Win

The organizing came from the ground. The Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has grown over a decade and already elected members to the City Council and the state legislature, made her race its top priority. Justice Democrats backed her nationally. Sunrise Movement Denver, Immigrants Belong, Peace Action and Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed her, according to Ballotpedia's endorsement record. Labor organizers filled her watch party. "I'm a labor organizer and I believe in bringing power to our communities, and Melat has the vision to do that," Len Harris told the Denver Gazette on election night.

Young voters were the engine. A 2025 poll found two-thirds of Denver residents under 35 view socialism favorably. Kiros spoke to them about rent, wages and health care, not party loyalty.

The Diaspora in the Mile High City

Denver's East African community, Ethiopian and Eritrean families who built businesses along East Colfax Avenue and in Aurora, sees itself in her rise. It is one of the largest in the country. Community leaders estimate that 30,000 to 40,000 Ethiopians live in the Denver metro area, which they describe as the second-largest foreign-born community in Colorado. As early as 2013, The Denver Post counted about 30,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans in the region. Census data have shown more than 3,200 Ethiopian-born residents in Aurora alone, second only to Mexican-born residents there. Official counts run lower than community estimates because U.S.-born children like Kiros, who arrived as an infant, are not counted as foreign-born, and the Census does not publish a separate figure for Eritreans in most places.

The migration began in the 1970s, as Ethiopians fled the military junta and the Red Terror, and it has kept growing. Between 2000 and 2019, Colorado's Black immigrant population grew by more than 400 percent, the fastest growth in the nation. Churches such as St. Mary's Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Aurora, coffee houses, restaurants and the yearly Taste of Ethiopia festival hold the community together, and candidates of both parties have courted its voters for years.

Kiros is part of a wider pattern this year: Black immigrants and the children of immigrants are moving from organizing neighborhoods to holding office. Her story connects the Sunbelt coalition to the global Black world HistorianSpeaks covers, from Addis Ababa to Denver.

For East African families, immigration enforcement is not an abstract issue. In November 2026, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that ICE's own internal reviews found deficient medical care in 23 of 29 deaths in detention from January 2025 to January 2026. One of the dead was Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, a 46-year-old Eritrean man held in Pennsylvania, who waited six days for care that never came.

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The Criticism and the Test

Her rise has not been smooth. Some members of Colorado's Jewish community objected to remarks she made about Israel and the Gaza war, and several Democrats withheld their support. Her campaign said it worked to address those concerns. An unaffiliated candidate, Shimon Blau, entered the race to challenge her and drew about 6 percent.

The voters' answer was clear. The harder test begins in January: turning a movement campaign into results for working families in a Congress where Democrats now hold the majority.

The West Joins the Spear

Kiros did not win the way Bottoms won Georgia or Hinojosa won Texas. But the core is the same. Organizers who stay in their neighborhoods between elections beat money and incumbency. Denver is now part of the map.