On 9/11's 25th Anniversary, NYC Releases 170,000 Pages on Ground Zero Air as Aging Cleanup Workers Face ICE

Twenty-five years after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, ceremonies today in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania marked the anniversary of an attack that killed 2,977 people. Two long-simmering controversies resurfaced in the same week: a records release questioning official 2001 air-quality claims, and renewed fear among the aging, undocumented workers who cleaned up the wreckage.

The Ceremony

At the Pentagon, President Trump vowed "we will never ever forget" and tied the anniversary to ongoing military operations against what he called "the menace of radical Islam," according to WUSF Public Media. In New York, relatives read victims' names as cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed, while four living former presidents, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, sat with their spouses alongside Vice President Vance, per WUSF and Epoch Times.

Political rivals shared a bench. Mamdani and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani sat together, according to WUSF. Former Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio also attended, per Epoch Times.

Terry Strada, whose husband Tom died in the towers, used her turn at the microphone to demand accountability from Saudi Arabia and pressed Vance directly. "For 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families," Strada said, according to WUSF. Epoch Times reported the crowd cheered when she asked, "How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder."

A nephew of victim Lisa Marie Terry went further, telling Trump directly to "release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia," per Epoch Times. Families have pursued a case under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, a 2016 law letting terrorism victims sue foreign sponsors, but Epoch Times reports the litigation has remained elusive for years. The Saudi government and the White House have not publicly responded to Strada's specific allegation, and the underlying JASTA claims remain contested and unresolved in court.

The Document Dump

Days ahead of the anniversary, Mamdani's office released roughly 170,000 pages of records, including material found in 68 boxes at the city's Department of Environmental Protection in 2025, according to Fox News. The documents challenge the 2001 assurance from then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman that air near the World Trade Center was safe to breathe.

"People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air," Mamdani said at the announcement, per Fox News, where comedian Jon Stewart also appeared.

The records show asbestos was detected ten months after the attacks on a rooftop less than a mile from the site, with levels at some locations below applicable cleanup benchmarks and at others above them, Fox News reported. Health authorities maintain there is no known safe level of asbestos exposure. A February 2002 memo from a Bloomberg administration policy adviser summarized then-Rep. Jerrold Nadler's concern that the EPA had handed indoor air monitoring to the city without oversight, and that the Health Department had told residents to clean with wet mops and rags.

Fox News's own reporting shows the record isn't uniform proof of a deliberate cover-up at every location. It's a mix of readings, some concerning, some not, filtered through a 25-year-old bureaucratic paper trail. Mamdani's framing that leaders "lied" is his characterization. The documents themselves show a more layered, incomplete picture of oversight failures and inconsistent monitoring, not a single smoking-gun admission.

The Workers ICE Won't Forget

Separately, NPR and its member stations reported that as many as 6,000 of the workers who rushed to clean Ground Zero in the days after the attacks were undocumented immigrants, according to advocates. A woman named Lucelly, who withheld her last name from NPR, described waiting on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens for a van that offered her $8.50 an hour to clean the wreckage with only a paper mask and rubber gloves. She has since battled breast cancer and respiratory disease. The World Trade Center Health Program has documented more than 57,000 cancer cases tied to Ground Zero exposure, NPR reported.

Social worker Rosa Bramble Caballero, who runs a Queens support group for these workers, told NPR the city hired contractors who subcontracted repeatedly down to day laborers standing on street corners, some of whom weren't told where they were being taken. A decade-old push, the 9/11 Immigrant Worker Freedom Act, has never passed Congress, per NPR reporting carried by WLRN and Iowa Public Radio.

Advocates argue these workers earned some form of protected status through service that made them sick. But no such legal pathway exists today, the bill has failed for years, and their legal status remains undocumented regardless of what they did in 2001. Under the current administration's enforcement posture, that status carries real deportation risk. NPR reports the group's members are now avoiding public services out of fear.

No agency named in this reporting has announced any new enforcement action, exemption, or policy specifically targeting or protecting Ground Zero cleanup workers. Whether Congress revisits the stalled legislation, or whether ICE draws any distinction for this population, remains an open question as the anniversary passes.