Employers hiring employees in Colorado beware! You may inadvertently commit a hate crime without even knowing it. 

The Colorado legislature ended the 2026 regular session by passing a law that makes it a hate crime for an employer, or that employer’s agent, to “demand, confiscate, retain, or otherwise require an individual who is an employee or an applicant for employment or who is performing work or seeking to perform work for the employer in any capacity . . . to surrender the individual’s government-issued identification.”

As most U.S. employers know well, federal law imposes an affirmative obligation on employers to verify an applicant’s eligibility to work in the United States when you hire someone. Colorado’s new law doesn’t prevent you from completing such verification, but it does now impose an obligation that you “retain an individual’s government-issued identification only for as long as necessary to verify the individual’s employment eligibility and make a copy of the card.” The law also says that holding onto this identification for “more than ten hours” is always too long. 

For most employers, especially those who use E-Verify, compliance with this new requirement isn’t going to be an issue. However, every employer hiring someone in Colorado, including those who never “retain” anyone’s government-issued identification, still needs to take action to ensure compliance with this new law. Specifically, in addition to making sure you don’t “demand, confiscate, retain or otherwise require” someone to “surrender” their government-issued identification, employers must provide notice of this new “hate crime” when verifying employment eligibility. 

The notice must be: 1) in writing, 2) in English, and 3) if the employer knows that English isn’t the individual’s primary language, in that individual’s primary language as well. And sending the notice isn’t enough – you also need to get an acknowledgement from each individual you send the notice to confirming it was sent. You then need to keep a copy of both the notice and the acknowledgement in the person’s personnel file.

Colorado-based companies – or any who consider applicants from this state – are well advised to immediately implement appropriate mechanisms to ensure compliance with Colorado’s newest requirement. Failure to comply is a class 2 misdemeanor and this law has a private cause of action, meaning any individual who believes they have been harmed by a failure to comply can bring a lawsuit against the employer or the employer’s agent to recover damages and/or a court order that the identification be returned.