Give Job access to Protected Variables?

Give Job access to Protected Variables

I am using the Gitlab Terraform to deploy to AWS.

I have some Variables defined in the CI/CD settings. When I enable Protected on the variables, the Job can no longer read the variables in question.

How to I grant the job access to the protected variable/environment? I can only assign users to the protected environments.

I am using the $CI_JOB_TOKEN in the gitlab-ci to run the pipeline.