At a ceremony honoring first responders and victims’ families yesterday, Trump offered an elaborate account of where he was in the hours and days after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. “I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they had no hesitation; everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw—nobody had seen anything like it, ever.”

The story presents significant problems in terms of its relationship to reality. Listeners could be forgiven for interpreting Trump’s remarks as a reference to his whereabouts on the day of the attack itself. (The president clarified that timeline last night: “I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.) It is true that two days after the attack, on September 13, Trump was interviewed by reporters while walking in Lower Manhattan. The president has previously made variations of the same claim—that he and the employees he sent downtown helped clear rubble in the days following the attack. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble—and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit” was his version of it on the 2016 campaign trail. But supporting evidence is scant, and the whole account is likely an exaggeration. Richard Alles, a retired New York City Fire Department deputy chief who had a supervisory role in the efforts, said in 2019 not only that he never witnessed Trump at the site, but that the account doesn’t add up: “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.” And, Alles added, if Trump had indeed sent workers, as he has claimed, there would be a record of it: “Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”

Nevertheless, Trump pressed on, veering into territory even further detached from verifiable fact. The U.S. Steel Building—a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan known today as One Liberty Plaza—was “really creaking,” Trump said at yesterday’s ceremony. “I’ll never forget: two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen—big, strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arms, said, ‘Gotta get outta here.’ And they literally lifted me up—this is not easy to do; I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down: U.S. Steel.”

There was, in fact, public concern in the days following the attack that the building at One Liberty Plaza could collapse. But the notion that Trump was inside the building and rushed out by firefighters has not been corroborated by any evidence. The president has offered versions of the same account before, though in less colorful form. In 2016, he told a story about being evacuated by firefighters—but in that rendition, it took place “a couple of days” after the collapse, and the U.S. Steel building was “not so far from us” when the two “massive guys” grabbed him. “I never knew I could run that fast,” he said then. In 2021, Trump likewise recalled two firemen grabbing him after hearing “creaks.”

Trump’s whereabouts on September 11 are no mystery. They are fairly well documented by his own prior statements about watching the attacks unfold from his home in Trump Tower, about four miles north of the Twin Towers. For those who have reason to doubt Trump’s statements, his whereabouts are also documented on video. “I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion,” he said in a phone interview with a New Jersey news channel on 9/11. “For years, I’ve looked right directly at the building—I’d see the Empire State Building in the foreground and the World Trade Center in the background—and now I’m looking at absolutely nothing. It’s just gone, and it’s just hard to believe.”

Trump’s view may have been clear, but his recollection of September 11 has been murky, as reporters have tracked for more than a decade.

Sometimes, in his accounts, he watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from his apartment in Trump Tower; when he called into the live broadcast that day, he did not mention having witnessed the second jet. Sometimes, he claims to have personally seen people jumping from the Twin Towers. “I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center,” he said in 2015 on the campaign trail, “and I watched as people jumped.” In his TV interview the day of the attack, he didn’t see those scenes himself but talked to someone who had. “I have somebody that was down there who witnessed at least 10 people jumping out of the building from 70 and 80 stories up in the air,” Trump said.

The president has also embellished what he saw in news coverage on that day, most notoriously claiming to have seen widespread celebrations by Muslim residents in New Jersey. “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down,” he said in a 2015 stump speech. “And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” That claim has been thoroughly disproved. A professor who spent months combing through news reels and video archives from that day found one possible instance that could slightly resemble those events—a few Arab American teenagers who briefly gathered in front of a library in South Paterson in a way that could be seen as celebratory.

Even the live phone interview Trump participated in on the day of the attack contains inaccuracies. On the call, Trump said that one of his buildings was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan: “Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan,” he said when asked whether his property had been damaged. “When they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” But as The Washington Post documented, using data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, neither claim was true. Forty Wall Street was the tallest building for only about two years and that was in the 1930s, before Trump was born.

At the center of yesterday’s ceremony was an important honor—one that Trump had promised to bestow months prior. Welles Crowther, who was first identified as “the man in the red bandana” in a 2002 New York Times story, rescued more than a dozen people from the South Tower before being killed when the building collapsed. His parents, who had given him a red bandana as a boy and knew that he always carried it with him, were able to recognize him by that detail and confirmed through the survivors that their son had helped them. Crowther was an equities trader and a volunteer firefighter, and he was 24 years old when he died. While awarding a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Crowther, Trump drew the focus to himself, comparing his own fame to that of the fallen hero: “The Man in the Red Bandana, he’s become more famous than me—I don’t like it. Very unhappy. But he’s become much more famous than me.”

When the president has brought up 9/11 lately, the remark has usually been severed from the attack, its victims, or its perpetrators. This year, Trump has tended to mention the day in the context of lambasting political opponents. He’s invoked it on several recent occasions—alongside World War I, World War II, and Pearl Harbor—when arguing that the attack and all three of those historical calamities are dwarfed by the danger communism poses to America today.

Critics have noted that other presidents, both Republican and Democrat, might have faced months of blowback—if not the end of their political careers—were they caught exaggerating or outright inventing aspects of their experience on one of the most catastrophic days in American history. But Trump has rarely if ever paid a real political price for misleading statements. In a second term marked by his fixation on his legacy, Trump’s relationship with history has often involved “taking bits and pieces from a grab bag and turning it into a story that’s useful to him—either politically useful, as in the case of his fabrication about Muslims celebrating 9/11, or making himself the center of a story that obviously he was not the center of 25 years ago,” Tim Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me. The fabrications are unlikely to stop, he said, especially as the president ages. “It doesn’t happen the same to all men in their 80s, but we may see more of this: new recollections about the past that we’ve never heard before, because they never happened,” Naftali said. The White House did not address my specific questions about the president’s most recent claims, but Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that the president “was relaying his experience of a city reeling” from the attacks.

September 11 continues to be a point of tension about what the government owed, and continues to owe, those who were most affected. The mayor’s office released more than 170,000 pages of city records this week showing that city officials misled New Yorkers about air quality following the attacks. And the health toll continues to grow; the number of 9/11 survivors receiving assistance for cancer treatment roughly tripled over the past five years, according to a Washington Post analysis of reports by the World Trade Center Health Program, which funds health care for responders and survivors. Twenty-five years later, Americans everywhere will pause to remember what the nation lost that day—both those who suffered directly and those who lived through it by watching the tragedy unfold from the safety of their homes, much as Trump did.

This article originally stated that Welles Crowther was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor. In fact, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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They cleaned up ground zero. Now many are hiding from ICE

Jasmine GarsdSeptember 11, 20265:00 AM ET

NEW YORK — Once a week, in a Queens office building, a group of immigrants in their 50s and 60s gathers. They've all known each other for some 25 years: they met when they were cleaning up ground zero together. They are among the thousands of cleanup crews who rushed to the destruction in lower Manhattan following the attacks of 9/11. Many of those workers were immigrants and as many as 6,000 of them were undocumented. They were all exposed to toxic debris, and psychological trauma. And as the Trump administration pursues its aggressive immigration agenda, many are living in enhanced fear of immigration enforcement.

"We would have lunch in the rubble, in the dust"

"Every morning I would stand on Roosevelt Avenue and 82nd," says a woman in the group named Lucelly. She asked NPR to withhold her last name — like many here, she's undocumented. She came to the U.S. from Colombia in 2000, and would wait on the avenue to get picked up for cleaning gigs.

On the morning of September 12th, 2001, the day after the attacks, a van pulled up. "Come on, let's go!" she recalls the driver yelling. They offered her $8.50 an hour to clean the wreckage.

"If the driver had told us: 'We're going to a danger zone,' people would not have rushed in," she says.

A photo provided by a member of a Sept. 11 cleanup crew support group in Queens, New York, shows a group of workers at the ground zero site in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

A photo provided by a member of a Sept. 11 cleanup crew support group in Queens, New York, shows a group of workers at the ground zero site in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But she says it felt like just another job, and a duty to the city that had welcomed her. Like a lot of people who went to clean up at ground zero, she went armed only with her house-cleaning gear: a paper mask and rubber gloves.

The hours were long. "We would have lunch in the rubble, in the dust," she recalls. "Then we'd go home wearing the same clothing we'd been working in."

Since then, Lucelly has battled breast cancer and respiratory disease. She is among the tens of thousands whose health was severely compromised by exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic debris the tower's collapse released into the air. According to the World Trade Center health program, there have been over 57,000 cancer cases, and a myriad other health conditions. Officials knew within weeks but called it safe.

What we know about the undocumented workers at ground zero

It's not known how many undocumented workers were involved in the 9/11 cleanup, but advocates say it's somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 people.

"There was this rush to clean everything up quickly," says social worker Rosa Bramble Caballero, who runs the clean up crew support group in Queens. "The city hired multiple contractors for the clean up. In turn these contractors subcontracted, and those subcontractors subcontracted, and hired day laborers who were standing in street corners in Queens. Mind you, these were companies who had received millions of dollars from the city. Many women who did housekeeping were taken there. And then they got there and realized they were actually at ground zero, which, by the way, sometimes they were not told that that's where they were going."

A nearly decade-old legislative push to give undocumented ground zero workers a path to citizenship has failed to gain traction. The 9/11 Immigrant Worker Freedom Act was first introduced in 2017, then again in 2021. It was reintroduced in 2025 by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. No Republicans have signed on to the bill, each version of which has remained stalled in the House Judiciary Committee. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Representative Ocasio-Cortez told NPR she believes "this legislation genuinely should be bipartisan and non-controversial. These heroes, many of whom sacrificed their lives, are people who are absolutely deserving of citizenship." But with immigration reform remaining a highly divisive topic, it is unlikely the bill would advance.

NPR reached out to the White House for comment, and received no response.

"I was blindfolded": the psychological toll of 9/11 cleanup

A woman named Rosa, from Guatemala, says she arrived at the site the days after the attack. She asked that NPR withhold her last name: although she is legally in the U.S., she is nervous about increased immigration enforcement operations here in Queens.

Back then she worked in demolition, and unlike most in the group, she arrived at ground zero with union training on how to handle asbestos and other toxic materials, and the proper equipment. She says when she got to the scene, she was shocked. "It was mostly Ecuadorians, Colombians, Peruvians, Mexicans. There were so many people doing the same work as me … but wearing little paper masks."

Rosa, who asked NPR to withhold her last name, is in the country legally but still fears increased immigration enforcement operations in Queens. She was part of a Sept. 11 cleanup crew along with immigrants from Mexico, Paraguay and Poland. She was also a Red Cross volunteer at the time.

Rosa, who asked NPR to withhold her last name, is in the country legally but still fears increased immigration enforcement operations in Queens. She was part of a Sept. 11 cleanup crew along with immigrants from Mexico, Paraguay and Poland. She was also a Red Cross volunteer at the time.

Nate Langston Palmer for NPR

Rosa has acid reflux related to exposure, for which she has received worker's compensation. But she is one of the only people in the group who did not go on to develop a debilitating disease.

The emotional scarring, however, runs deep.

"You might not have noticed this," she says, "but I'm sitting in this chair because I need to see the exit. If I don't see a door at all times, I get a panic attack."

Soon after starting at the site, she made a gruesome discovery. "An arm. I… I can't forget it. I will never get over it. I touched it. We had been trained to lift a little yellow flag when we found a body part, and I did. The police came, and we put it in a bin, we covered it, and we took it to the Trinity Church."

A few days after arriving, she says she was blindfolded with a sleeping mask by her supervisors, and escorted to another area. "When we got there, they were sifting in the dirt. They were sifting for body parts. They assigned me to go through found objects. Jewelry. Wallets. ID's. Those little name plates people put on their offices. I would put them in separate bags."

She believes she was blindfolded because of the amount of looting and attempted stealing. She says there were five people doing that job- herself and immigrants from Mexico, Paraguay and Poland. She says they worked in silence, and were closely monitored. Eventually, she was moved to an underground area with a vault. She and her coworkers worked alongside law enforcement. She believes it was the massive vault system underneath The World Trade Center, where hundreds of thousands of tons of precious metals were recovered.

In those days, Rosa also says she joined as a Red Cross volunteer, tasked with helping any of the cleanup and first responders who got injured. She beams, "they gave me a certificate of honor, responsibility and honesty. It makes me proud. I've told some people back home, but I almost never talk about it, because I consider it something personal. It is mine to remember."

9/11: For immigrant workers, a different kind of legacy

These days, Rosa is more concerned about the reality of immigration raids in Queens. Although she has legal status, she says she is afraid of being targeted, and is hypervigilant for her friends in the retiree cleanup group who are undocumented.

Undocumented workers are entitled to worker's compensation, and many have received it for their work in 9/11, as well as assistance through the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. But Bramble Caballero says to this day she meets people who are too scared to apply.

For those who have received compensation, she says, it's typically around $80,000. Bramble Caballero says that money only goes so far. "Because they are undocumented and their health has been compromised, they really can no longer work. So although they may have received awards, those awards dry out," she says.

Rosa has acid reflux related to exposure to chemicals, for which she has received workers' compensation. She is one of the only people in the workers support group who did not develop a debilitating disease.

Rosa has acid reflux related to exposure to chemicals, for which she has received workers' compensation. She is one of the only people in the workers support group who did not develop a debilitating disease.

Nate Langston Palmer for NPR

The fear of being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as operations spike in Queens and nationwide, has added to the PTSD which most in the group suffer.

"I am scared. We are all scared", says Lucelly, the woman who took her lunch breaks in the rubble of ground zero. "My daughter lives in New Jersey, and I don't even go visit her, because I am scared of immigration. It is a new pain on top of an old one."

She says returning home to Colombia is not an option: she worries she would not have access to the same quality care for her health problems. It's a sense of limbo shared by many in this group: to return to their towns and villages might mean not being able to access quality care. The alternative is to live in the U.S., with the constant fear of being picked up, but access to medical treatment.

Lucelly says her bitterness grows as the anniversary of the attacks approaches.

"We gave it all. When we got to ground zero we felt so much fear. Oh the fear we felt! No one ever asked to check out immigration status. Oh no, they treated us like we were real important back then. It was: 'Go in Lucelly. Go Lucelly. Get in there.'"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5902854&forum_id=2,#50130621)