The Lottery Winner's Daughter: Melat Kiros and the Long Odds to Congress

Immigrant Trailblazers is a series profiling immigrants who have left a lasting mark on the United States.

Every year, the U.S. State Department runs a lottery. Millions of people from countries that send few immigrants to America enter the Diversity Visa program, and a computer picks a small fraction of them at random. In 1997, one of the names it drew belonged to a man in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A few weeks earlier, his wife had given birth to a daughter.

The family could have gone almost anywhere in the United States. They chose Denver. On Tuesday night, that daughter, Melat Kiros, now 29, explained why in her victory statement. Her parents, she said, picked the city because they believed the family would be welcome there. “Tonight, Denver proved them right.”

The Associated Press called the race for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District about 20 minutes after the first results posted. Kiros was taking roughly 78 percent of the vote against a Republican and an independent who had entered the race specifically to stop her. When she is sworn in on January 3, she will be the first Black woman to represent Colorado in Congress, and she is widely reported to be the first woman from Generation Z elected to the House.

Eighteen months ago, she was a barista with a law degree and a lot of student debt.

From Addis Ababa to Aurora

Kiros’s family is of Tigrayan origin, from Ethiopia’s northernmost region. They arrived in Colorado when she was an infant, and she grew up in Aurora, the diverse suburb east of Denver, graduating from Eaglecrest High School. She went east for college, earning degrees in political science and economics at Washington College in Maryland in 2018, then a law degree at Notre Dame in 2022.

It was the kind of path immigrant parents hope for. In September 2022 she joined Sidley Austin, one of the largest law firms in the world, as an associate in its New York office, working on securities regulation and enforcement.

The post she wouldn’t take down

In late 2023, as campus protests over the war in Gaza spread and major law firms warned that they might not hire students who took part, Kiros wrote a post on Medium. She defended the protesters and criticized the firms, including her own. The post went viral. Sidley asked her to take it down. She refused, and the firm fired her.

She came home to Colorado, took a job as a barista to pay down her student loans, and enrolled in a PhD program in public affairs at the University of Colorado Denver, where she studies reparations, universal basic income and regulatory reform. She has described the firing as the moment that set her on the road to running. She has also drawn a link between Gaza and the war in Tigray, the conflict her family’s homeland endured from 2020 to 2022.

Taking on a 15-term incumbent

In July 2025, Kiros announced she would challenge Rep. Diana DeGette, who had held the Denver seat since 1997, roughly as long as Kiros had been alive. The district had been represented by only two people in more than half a century, Pat Schroeder and DeGette.

Kiros ran as a democratic socialist on generational change and money in politics. She refused corporate PAC money and attacked DeGette for the more than $5 million she had taken from corporate PACs over her career, including from pharmaceutical and fossil fuel interests. Her platform included Medicare for All, federal rent control, a Green New Deal, a 10 percent cut to the Pentagon budget, and, on immigration, abolishing ICE, releasing detainees without criminal records, and hiring more immigration judges. She won the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America.

The sharpest dividing line was Israel. Kiros supports an arms embargo, calls Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide, and has said Israel should no longer be a Jewish state. Three super PACs spent about $1.3 million attacking her in the final two months of the primary. On June 30, 2026, she beat DeGette by more than 20,000 votes. DeGette became only the second sitting Colorado member of the House in 50 years to lose a primary.

The questions that followed her

The candidate who lost her job over what she said spent much of 2026 defending what she said.

Days before the primary, a television interviewer asked whether the June 2025 firebombing of a Boulder rally for Israeli hostages, which killed one woman and injured about a dozen people, was antisemitic. Kiros did not say yes. She told the interviewer, “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator.” The answer drew criticism even from progressive allies, including a state lawmaker who had endorsed her. Kiros later said there was no question the attack was a hate crime and an act of terrorism, acknowledged antisemitism could have been part of the motive, and said protecting Jewish people was non-negotiable. Jewish community leaders in Denver said they were alarmed by her rise, and some kept pressing her on the issue through the summer.

In August, she tried a different tone. In a PBS interview she said progressives needed a position on the conflict that clearly rejected antisemitism, and she said she had reached out to Denver’s Zionist Jewish community. Some on the left attacked her for it, and within a day she wrote that she had fumbled her remarks and restated her opposition to Israel’s policies. The day after the primary, Shimon Blau, a Denver physician, entered the general election as an independent, citing her comments on Gaza and Boulder. He finished with about 6 percent.

To her supporters, Kiros is a young immigrant who paid a real price for her convictions and will not trade them away for comfort. To her critics, including many in Denver’s Jewish community, she has repeatedly failed to recognize hatred aimed at her own constituents. Both groups now share a representative. Before the election she said in a Denver7 interview that her job would not be simply to make noise but to get things done.

Long odds

The Diversity Visa lottery is famous for its odds. In a typical year, well under one in a hundred entrants is selected. A family’s whole future can turn on a computer’s random choice.

Melat Kiros’s seat in Congress was not decided by chance. It took a firing, a coffee counter, a primary nobody expected her to win, and a summer of hard questions she did not always answer well. But it began with that drawing in 1997, with a father in Addis Ababa learning that his name had been picked and a newborn daughter who would grow up in Aurora. In January, she will take an oath in the Capitol as the representative of the city her parents chose because they thought it would welcome them.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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