In a direct rebuke to the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign to eradicate DEI policies, former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar delivered a full-throated argument that diversity, equity and inclusion make America great at a reception in Denver on March 23 thrown by Colorado’s two U.S. senators.

Freshly returned from a nearly four-year stint as Joe Biden’s ambassador to Mexico — the latest political feather in the Democrat’s trademark cowboy hat — Salazar told an audience of more than 500 friends, compatriots and family members that Colorado stands as a beacon amid what he characterized as Donald Trump’s attempt to turn back decades of progress.

Speaking before a crowd at the Denver Art Museum that boasted dozens of current and former elected officials, including U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper — the event’s hosts — and Gov. Jared Polis and his predecessors, former Govs. Bill Ritter and Roy Romer, Salazar said he was reminded of words spoken by Romer some 40 years ago in Lamar, at a gathering mostly filled with conservative ranchers.

Romer, Salazar said, was reflecting on Camp Amache and the segregated cemeteries near the site of the World War II-era internment camp in Prowers County, where more than 7,000 Japanese Americans — most of them U.S. citizens — were imprisoned during the war.

“And what he said then, that is so true today, is that we must not just tolerate our diversity, we must celebrate it,” Salazar said.

The 70-year-old Salazar returned to the theme throughout his address, which he framed as being about a journey undertaken by those in the room and their forebears.

“Today, we gather here to celebrate the joyful journey and the dream we have shared together as Coloradans and Americans,” Salazar said.

“We’re gathered here to underscore that the journey and our dream is really the cause for a more inclusive America, one that, over our history, has made diversity, equity and inclusion an imperative part of a great America,” he said. “We hear each and every one of you — White, Black, Brown, man, woman, whoever you love. We are here because of the legacy of a civil rights journey together, and that journey underscores our march towards a more perfect union, knowing that we still have a long ways to go.”

Salazar, a son of the San Luis Valley in Southern Colorado, recognized his late parents, Emma and Henry Salazar, and sketched out his family’s more than 400-year history in the American Southwest, as the land changed names from New Spain to Mexico and then, after the creation of the southern border, the United States.

His parents served in World War II, his father a soldier and his mother working at the Pentagon, he said.

“Both fought against the tyranny and dominance that threatened humanity and democracy across the globe during that era,” Salazar said. “The fight for an inclusive America had only just begun. The fight for equal educational and economic opportunity, for respect and dignity or all, for an end to racial segregation, for inclusion of all in the American dream would unfold over the following decades — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly — toward a more perfect union.”

Introducing Salazar, Hickenlooper and Bennet — who was appointed to finish Salazar’s term in the U.S. Senate when Barack Obama tapped Salazar to run the Department of Interior — nodded toward the journey that began with Salazar growing up near Manassa in Conejos County, one of eight children on the Los Rincones ranch, which didn’t have electricity until 1982, after Salazar had left the Valley for Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

From there, Salazar went on to get a law degree from the University of Michigan and was later named Romer’s chief legal counsel before his appointment as director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. There followed a steady ascent in elective politics, with Salazar winning two terms as state attorney general in 1998 and 2002 followed by election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, at the same time his brother, John Salazar, won a seat in the U.S. House.

For eight years, from the late 1990s until the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, Salazar was the only Democrat holding statewide office in Colorado, making for a virtual mirror image of the state’s current political landscape, with Democrats occupying every statewide elected position since 2021.

During his years in the Senate, Salazar said he and his brother “kind of caucused bicameral together” and didn’t forget their roots.

“We tried to raise a voice for rural America, for farmers and ranchers, for those who make a living off the land,” Salazar said. “And on our desk, there were signs that said, ‘No farms, no food.'”

After four years in Obama’s cabinet, Salazar returned to Colorado to practice law before being nominated by Biden as ambassador to Mexico, a posting that ended with Trump’s election.

Some 40 years after Romer’s words to the ranchers in Lamar, Salazar said, “diversity and inclusion in America are under attack led by none other than the president of the United States, who has never walked in our march or worked and sweated in our fields and factories, who is supposed to at least attempt to represent all Americans, but instead, this president and his billionaire friends have unleashed a determined and direct assault on our march towards a more perfect union and a more inclusive America.”

Starting when he was inaugurated in January, Trump has issued a stream of executive orders aimed at ending DEI programs and has directed the federal government to eradicate diversity initiatives while pressuring states, private institutions and businesses to follow suit.

The American people, Trump wrote, “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.”

In his remarks, Salazar maintained that Trump’s attacks on DEI policies “threaten the very basis of modern American democracy, our hard-won national security and economic vitality.”

Salazar noted that many of his political allies have told him they’re stunned by the pace and extent of Trump’s changes.

“We don’t have all the answers,” he conceded. “I don’t have the answers. But I do believe that we’ve faced more difficult times in the past, and that we, together, led by the people here in Colorado and the great leadership of this state, will not allow this president and his team to turn the clock on progress back.”

Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet's gubernatorial trial balloon could scramble 2026 field | TRAIL MIX

Mountain West voters overwhelmingly oppose federal public lands funding cuts, poll finds | TRAIL MIX

Trump's energy secretary pick Chris Wright set to join ranks of Colorado's cabinet members | TRAIL MIX