A pair of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump this week has prompted the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Colorado to withdraw from a federal judge’s longstanding internship program for law students of diverse backgrounds.

Retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Kristen L. Mix started the Diversity Internship Program in 2014 to place University of Colorado and University of Denver law students with various nonprofit and public sector employers, including federal agencies, state offices and judges. With an average of 50 interns per year, the program focuses on students whose backgrounds were traditionally under-represented in the legal profession.

However, after Mix emailed prior participants on Jan. 21 to inquire how many interns each office would accommodate for the fall semester, the U.S. Attorney’s Office responded on Wednesday that it would be taking none.

“We will not be participating in the program this year in accord with two Executive Orders that govern our office,” responded J. Bishop Grewell, who will be Colorado’s acting U.S. attorney beginning next week.

He cited two orders issued by Trump upon taking office, terminating all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the executive branch. Trump claimed the programming amounted to “illegal and immoral discrimination” and that ending such efforts would further the nation’s civil rights laws.

Mix rejected that characterization.

“I understand the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s need to follow executive orders, but cannot disagree more strongly with both the letter and the spirit of these new pronouncements,” said Mix, who served on Colorado’s federal trial court from 2007 until her 2023 retirement. “Promoting diversity in the public sector is not illegal; it is necessary and just.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office had no further comment on its decision.

‘In addition to’ existing opportunities

Trump’s flurry of executive orders has included the repeal of a Lyndon B. Johnson directive from 1965 that prohibited discrimination in government contracting and the establishment of a new executive branch policy that does not recognize the existence of various gender identities.

In the case of diversity initiatives, “American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing,” Trump wrote.

Far from it, countered attorney Philip Nickerson.

“Particularly on that point, ‘illegal and immoral discrimination,’ it’s quite the opposite. It levels the playing field,” said Nickerson, an Austin, Texas-based litigator who went through Mix’s internship program in 2015. “This program is in addition to, not at the expense of, preexisting internship programs that these offices offer.”

Nickerson was a DU student and the first in his family to go to law school. In his first semester in 2014, he said he did not have a clear idea of what being an attorney entailed or what kind of lawyer he wanted to be. His grades were also not stellar.

Then Nickerson applied for an internship through Mix’s program and was placed with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

“I was able to work on cases and get my hands on cases in a way that I had never done in law school before,” he said. “That Colorado AG opportunity on my resume literally was a talking point and had been a talking point for many of the positions that I got afterward.

“But quite frankly,” Nickerson continued, “what it did for me in confirming that hey, I can do this. There’s an area of the law that I really enjoy and I have a natural ability to excel in. … I had no opportunities that semester but for Judge Mix’s program.”

The leadership of the program includes Mix, representatives of CU and DU, and U.S. District Court Judge S. Kato Crews, a Joe Biden appointee. Crews declined to comment and the schools’ representatives did not immediately respond to emails.

Diversity efforts and pushback

On the state level, Colorado’s judiciary has attempted to diversify the ranks of judges.

Lawmakers established a position for an outreach coordinator in 2019 whose work focused on recruitment and diversity, and there are multiple coaching and mentoring programs for aspiring judges. In an appearance before the legislature earlier this month, Chief Justice Monica M. Márquez stated that female judges are approaching parity with men, and there has been an increase in the percentage of Black and Hispanic judges compared to 2018.

Colorado’s two Democratic U.S. senators also told Colorado Politics last year they intentionally focused on sending the Biden administration diverse nominees for the state’s U.S. District Court.

Still, Project 2025, a conservative policy proposal authored in anticipation of a second Trump term, includes as goals the dismantling of federal diversity efforts and using the U.S. Department of Justice to target similar initiatives in states and the private sector.

Last year, the federal appeals court based in Denver issued an opinion in which a three-judge panel likened some DEI programs to racism and decried “objectively and subjectively harassing messaging.” The lone Democratic appointee on the panel declined to endorse such characterizations of diversity programming.

Mix, in responding to Trump’s critiques of DEI efforts, defended her internship program as a means of enabling students from all backgrounds to serve Colorado or the federal government.

“Making these opportunities available to diverse students doesn’t deprive anyone else of opportunities,” she said.

Nickerson worried Trump’s executive orders could trigger a “domino effect,” with fewer attorneys of color appearing in courtrooms in the future and litigants having less faith in the justice system if they do not see people who come from their communities.

“For this particular program to be viewed as immoral discrimination is a horrible mischaracterization and misunderstanding of what it does and how it operates,” he said.