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On September 11, 2001 I was working in the united 
states senate so i was working in Washington DC  

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and I will never forget that day. It was a 
beautiful fall day in DC crystal clear blue sky  

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and I was working for Senator Kennedy. I 
was his judiciary committee chief counsel  

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and he had a hearing that morning with the 
first lady with first lady Laura Bush and I  

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walked to his personal office from my office to 
take his briefing book and I remember walking in  

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and colleagues said wow a plane has hit the world 
trade center and we speculated whether the pilot  

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had had a heart attack or what may have happened. 
I got back to my building and I remember as the  

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doors on the elevator were closing I overheard two 
capitol police officers talking and I distinctly  

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remember hearing the word terrorism. My closest 
friend was working in Soho at that time and I saw  

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the second plane hit and I called her and I was 
lucky enough to get through and I remember she  

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was crying and she had seen that happen and I 
talked to her for a minute and she said she was  

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going to try and make her way home and I hung up 
and I looked at my staff and I said we're getting  

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out of here. We were overhearing things on radios 
we felt like we heard or felt the ground shake  

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and one of my colleagues who lived on capitol 
hill invited us to go to her house and we sat  

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there we watched the television for the rest of 
the day. and finally that night I made my way  

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home I lived in northern Virginia so I had to go 
past the pentagon the after effect for those of us  

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working on Capitol Hill was the strong sense that 
the United States government had to show that it  

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wasn't going to be shaken that we were a strong 
country that we would continue to do our work  

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that we would get to the bottom of what had 
happened and that we would protect the nation and  

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our people and that meant that the next morning 
I was making my way across the 14th street bridge  

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again passing a burning and smoldering Pentagon 
to go to work that sense of intense focus on  

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issues of security, homeland security, immigration 
kind of a shift in the way that people perceived  

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immigration it wasn't just an economic debate 
anymore. It ramped up considerably and it has  

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stayed at a heightened level we as a country have 
never returned to a pre-9/11 period. The debate  

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now and the issues and the concerns almost seem 
like they're part of the DNA of the country.